From Wall Outlet to RRH: Choosing a DC Plant for Your Nokia AZQC Site

May 22, 2026/Josh Lambert

From Wall Outlet to RRH: Choosing a DC Plant for Your Nokia AZQC Site

The Nokia AZQC 3-Sector CBRS Site Kit ships with everything you need on the RF side: radios, antennas, jumpers, mounts, and the consulting time to get the RAN online and integrated with Rapid5GS. What it deliberately doesn't ship with is the DC power plant.

And the most common question I get from customers, after they've unboxed the AZQCs, is some version of: "OK, so what do I actually plug these into?"

It's a fair question, and the answer matters more than people realize. The wrong call here is genuinely expensive. Either dollars wasted on overkill hardware for a small POC site, or worse, late-night outages caused by undersized power on a real production network. So here's what I'd actually recommend, with two real options at very different price points, a worked example you can sanity-check against your own site, and the handful of things people miss until those things bite them.

What a DC Plant Actually Does

If you've never built a real tower site, the term "DC plant" sounds fancier than the actual job. At its core a DC plant does three things:

  1. Converts AC mains coming in from the utility into stable -48VDC for your radios.
  2. Stores energy in a battery bank so the site stays up when the power flickers, or stays out for hours.
  3. Distributes that DC power, with overcurrent protection, to every load on your site.

That's it. Three jobs. The reason this matters is that the AZQC is not a Ubiquiti dish. It doesn't sip a polite, stable 12 watts and run for years off a Mikrotik PoE injector. Nokia gear behaves like the carrier-grade telecom hardware it actually is, which means dynamic current swings, sustained high RF output, and a real expectation that your power architecture knows what it's doing.

Also: the AZQC is not PoE-powered. Do not plan around a Mikrotik injector, Ubiquiti PoE brick, or passive PoE plant. The radios are powered over their supplied Nokia OCTIS DC power connectors, fed from a properly protected -48VDC plant.

When that expectation isn't met, you get exactly what big WISPs have learned the hard way: sectors rebooting at 3am during a thunderstorm, CBRS SAS registrations falling out, basebands locking up, and angry phone calls from customers who can't load Netflix.

The Example Site

Let me make this concrete. Here's the deployment we're going to design around, a typical rural Alabama tower build of the kind I see every week:

  • 3 × Nokia AZQC RRHs (from our site kit)
  • 1 × Nokia AirScale Baseband Unit (also from the kit)
  • 2 × Aviat WTM 4000 microwave backhauls (or your equivalent)
  • 4 × Ubiquiti LTU Rocket APs, the typical 5GHz PtMP sectors that pre-date your LTE upgrade
  • 1 × outdoor weather camera
  • 1 × MikroTik CRS switch for site aggregation
  • 1 × router (CCR2004 or similar)
  • Tower: ~200ft RAD center, with another ~35ft of cable routing up top and down to the cabinet

Now the power budget. From Nokia's own configuration guides and from what we've measured on real sites:

  • Each AZQC draws ~5.5A at -48V (~264W). Three sectors at full hammer comes in around 795W, with steady-state traffic more like 500 to 600W combined.
  • The AirScale BBU in our standard configuration needs to be budgeted for 10A at -48V (~480W).
  • The Aviats, LTU Rockets, switch, router, and camera add another ~200 to 300W combined depending on PoE load.

Total budget: ~1,500W at -48VDC on a hot day with full traffic. Round up and call it 1,800W to give yourself headroom for growth and the inevitable "while we're up there, we're also going to add…"

That number is what drives every decision below.

Option 1: The Budget Build (ALGcom)

For operators who want to get the site on the air without a $5K power bill before they've sold a single subscription, here's the lower-cost path. You're going to buy two pairs of ALGcom units:

Pair A (powers the three AZQC radios):

  • 1 × ALGcom FN-4800-25-SNMP, a 48V / 25A managed DC UPS that takes utility AC in and gives you stable -48VDC out, with batteries floating on the bus.
  • 1 × ALGcom 37030030001 Managed DC PDU, an 8-output, 10A-per-output managed PDU with per-output telemetry, SNMP, and a web UI for remote on/off.

Pair B (powers the AirScale BBU and your ancillary site gear):

  • Another FN-4800-25-SNMP
  • Another 37030030001 PDU

Why two pairs? The 25A-per-UPS rating gives you enough current for the load on each branch, and splitting them means the AZQC RF side and the baseband-plus-aux side aren't competing for the same rectifier headroom. You also get a built-in redundancy story. If one UPS goes down, you still have most of the site online.

The ALGcom PDU is genuinely nice for a budget build. Per-output voltage / current / power telemetry, SNMP v2 that plays with Zabbix, Grafana, LibreNMS, or The Dude, scheduling, watchdog auto-reboot, and graceful undervoltage shutdown that drops less-critical loads before the batteries hit cliff voltage. For a WISP that's already running LibreNMS, it's a natural fit.

Where this stops being a great idea: the FN-4800 family is excellent for normal WISP gear, but it wasn't engineered around the dynamic current behavior of carrier RF hardware. AZQC radios aren't constant-load devices. Their draw swings with traffic, MIMO utilization, carrier aggregation, transmit power, and thermal state. A telecom rectifier handles those swings naturally because the batteries sit directly on the DC bus, acting like a giant capacitor reservoir. A DC UPS does it less gracefully. For a single-site proof of concept, the ALGcom path is fine. For a long-term, scaling, carrier-grade deployment, keep reading.

Option 2: The Carrier-Grade Build (ICT)

If you're building toward a real network with multiple sites, growing subscriber counts, and a plan to layer 5G or additional sectors later, the ICT rectifier system is what I'd actually run. It's also what most of the Tarana operators I talk to are using, and what the larger grant-funded WISP buildouts are standardizing on.

Here's the BOM I'd hand to my account manager at CTI Connect (this is a real quote we pulled for a recent Nokia build):

  • 1 × ICT-2U4, the intelligent 2U high-power shelf with dual-breaker Battery Management Module and three Load Distribution Modules, all -48V.
  • 4 × ICT700-48PM, 48VDC 700W hot-swap rectifier modules. Four modules gives you ~2,800W of rectified capacity, comfortably above the 1,800W example budget, and built so you can pull and replace any single module live without taking the site offline.
  • 5 × ICT-CB10, 10A / 60VDC hydraulic-mechanical breakers for AZQC and BBU branches.
  • 3 × ICT-CB5, 5A breakers for the lighter loads (cameras, switches, etc.).

That BOM lands around ~$4,900 with tax before batteries.

I get my ICT quotes from Jeff Broadwick at CTI Connect, and I genuinely can't recommend them highly enough. Jeff and his team understand the Nokia AZQC platform, they've helped multiple operators in our network spec power for these radios, and we endorse them without reservation for your ICT purchase. Tell Jeff The Edge Mile sent you. You're in good hands.

What you're actually paying for, beyond the hardware itself:

  • Batteries floating directly on the DC bus. No conversion stage, no inverter. When the AZQC asks for an extra three amps for a half-second on a heavy uplink, the batteries hand it over without the rectifier even blinking. UPS-style topologies don't do this nearly as cleanly.
  • Hot-swap rectifier modules. A module fails at 2am? You roll a truck during business hours, slide in a new one, and the site never went down. Once you've experienced that, you stop wanting to go back.
  • Centralized telecom-grade monitoring. Rectifier health, battery voltage, current draw, alarms, low-voltage disconnect, thermal, all in one place, all designed to be read by a tired human at 2am in bad weather. Stacking a UPS plus a PDU plus an external charger plus inline breakers creates a troubleshooting nightmare you only appreciate when you're standing in front of it.
  • Thermal headroom. Southern Alabama summers are not kind to lightly-spec'd power gear in non-climate-controlled cabinets. A proper rectifier plant is designed for continuous high-current operation in those conditions.
  • Future-proofing. Nobody I've ever talked to has regretted oversizing their telecom power plant. Plenty of people have regretted rebuilding their power architecture two years in because the UPS couldn't keep up with a second baseband.

Compatible Batteries for ICT and ALGcom

The rectifier shelf or DC UPS is only half the power system. The battery bank is still a separate line item, and it needs to match the voltage, charging profile, discharge current, cabinet environment, monitoring expectations, and runtime target for the site.

For this class of Nokia AZQC deployment, the two 48V 100Ah LiFePO4 battery modules we recommend are:

Leoch and Cyclone are both trusted, respectable brands we have tested, and we know these exact SKUs work for this application. They are good fits behind the ICT rectifier plant described above. They can also be used with the ALGcom path, provided the ALGcom unit is running the current software/firmware that supports lithium batteries and the lithium charging parameters are configured correctly for the battery you install.

As a rough sanity check, a 48V 100Ah LiFePO4 module is about a 4.8 to 5.1kWh nameplate battery. Do not design runtime from nameplate alone. Derate for depth of discharge, temperature, aging, discharge rate, and the reserve margin you want before low-voltage disconnect. On the 1,800W example site, one 100Ah module is not an all-night backup plan. It is a short ride-through battery. Multiple modules, properly paralleled and protected, are how you get meaningful outage runtime.

If you are mixing battery brands, adding supplemental batteries later, or integrating a separate remote battery chain, stop and have the supplier validate the design. Battery chemistry, BMS behavior, breaker sizing, cable length, and charge settings all matter.

So Which Should You Buy?

Here's the honest framework I use when somebody asks me this on the phone.

Go with the ALGcom (budget) path if:

  • This is your first AZQC site and you want to prove the deployment before committing more capital.
  • You're a small WISP with one or two sites and aren't planning explosive growth.
  • Your operations team already runs LibreNMS or Zabbix and knows how to babysit a UPS.
  • Your tower is in a relatively benign environment (climate-controlled cabinet, stable utility power, mild weather).

Go with the ICT (carrier-grade) path if:

  • You're planning to build more than one Nokia site, or you fully intend to grow this one.
  • You operate in a place with rough utility power, frequent storms, or generator transitions.
  • You don't want to be the on-call engineer babysitting a UPS through a thunderstorm.
  • You're chasing carrier-grade uptime numbers for SLA reasons or enterprise customers.
  • You're going to expand to additional sectors, additional basebands, or layer in 5G in the future.

My honest take: if you're building one site, the ALGcom path will probably work. If you're building a network, the ICT path is the right answer and the extra $3K-ish you're paying up front will look very cheap the first time it saves you a 2am truck roll.

The Cable Gauge Question

Once you've picked a power plant, the next question is the wire. Big disclaimer up top: cable sizing depends on your specific run length, voltage, current, and a half-dozen other variables. Please hire a real consultant before you finalize a build that's going on a tower. I'm giving you rules of thumb, not engineering.

For the example site above (~200ft RAD with ~35ft additional cable routing), here's what we typically run:

  • AZQC RRHs: 12 AWG is fine for typical runs. 10 AWG if you have unusually long runs or you're running a lower-voltage system.
  • AirScale Baseband: 8 AWG from the rectifier.
  • ALGcom PDU feed: 6 AWG from the source.

If you're running anything that pushes the edge (long cable, lower bus voltage, unusual ambient temperatures), run the actual math. Don't trust ChatGPT, and please don't trust your gut.

Mixing -48V and +48V Equipment

One last gotcha that bites WISPs new to telecom power: most carrier-grade telecom gear is negative 48V (positive ground), while a lot of WISP and IT gear is positive 48V (negative ground). Some of your existing gear may not tolerate -48V at all.

The fix is an isolated DC-DC converter that takes your -48V telecom bus and produces +48V (or +12V, +24V, whatever the equipment actually wants) for the gear that can't run on -48V. We've done this on multiple sites for MikroTik routers, cameras, certain switches, and Ubiquiti gear that expects negative-ground 48V. Spec the converter comfortably above the load it's feeding, mount it cleanly, and you'll never think about it again.

The unit we have used at our sites for MikroTik and other +48V loads is the MEAN WELL RSD-500C-48. It is an isolated DC-DC converter: it accepts a 48V-class DC input from the telecom plant and creates a separate regulated +48V output rail for negative-ground equipment. In practical terms, the converter creates a new isolated output whose positive and negative terminals can be referenced the way your +48V gear expects, instead of tying that gear directly to the -48V positive-ground bus.

Do not just reverse the wires. A -48V telecom plant and a +48V WISP/IT power input are not the same thing with the leads swapped. The grounding reference is different. If you simply flip polarity, you can put the chassis, shield, Ethernet ground, surge protection, or other shared site wiring at the wrong potential and create a fault path. Best case, the equipment refuses to power up. Worst case, you let smoke out of radios, switches, converters, or protection gear. Use an isolated DC-DC converter and fuse it correctly.

Don't assume your existing gear runs on -48V just because the manual says "48V." Check the polarity. Spec the converter. Move on.

A Quick Note on BEAD/BABA

For operators using BEAD or other federal/state grant funding, Build America, Buy America requirements matter. ICT is widely used in grant-funded WISP buildouts. I see it on the BOM of nearly every Tarana operator I work with. But I can't make a blanket "this is BABA-compliant" claim for either ALGcom or ICT without verifying the specific SKUs against the current waiver and compliance lists.

If you're spending grant money, confirm BABA compliance with your supplier before you commit. This is one place where skipping a phone call costs you the entire project.

When You Want Somebody Else to Build It

A lot of WISPs read an article like this and the takeaway is: "I am absolutely not the right person to design and install this myself." That's a legitimate conclusion. Spec'ing a rectifier plant, sizing cable runs for a 200ft tower, grounding everything correctly, and integrating it into a working cabinet is not a weekend project for somebody who hasn't done it before.

If that's where you land, hire it out. Vertical Axis, led by Kelly Zacrep, runs full-service tower construction and site builds. They will install your Nokia AZQC and design your DC plant as one turnkey package, not as two disconnected jobs you have to project-manage between vendors. Kelly's team has built sites for Alabama Lightwave and is fluent in Nokia, Tarana, Ubiquiti, Cambium, and the rest of the WISP ecosystem. If you've bought our AZQC site kit and you don't have in-house experience standing up a tower site, this is the call to make. Kelly's crew will hand you back a working site instead of a pile of expensive mistakes.

A Note on Freight Shipping

Large batteries, rectifier shelves, breaker panels, and loaded cabinets are not normal parcel-shipping items. If you are buying through established domestic suppliers like ISP Supplies or CTI Connect, they will usually handle the right shipping path for you. If you are importing batteries, rectifiers, or other heavy telecom power gear directly from overseas suppliers, assume you are dealing with freight, documentation, hazmat/lithium battery handling requirements, liftgate delivery, and real receiving logistics.

This is exactly the kind of shipment where DNA Supply Chain is worth bringing in. DNA knows telecom, tower, and infrastructure freight extremely well, including the awkward stuff that does not fit neatly into a small-box carrier workflow. If you are moving batteries or rectifier gear and you are not buying through a supplier that already has the freight process handled, talk to DNA before the pallets are already sitting on a dock somewhere.

Wrap

DC power is one of those parts of WISP infrastructure that's invisible when it's working and catastrophic when it isn't. The AZQC isn't a UBNT dish, and the same shortcuts that worked when your network was four sectors of LTU Rockets are not going to scale you into a real CBRS operator.

You have two solid paths in front of you. The ALGcom build gets you on the air affordably and works fine for a small, well-managed deployment. The ICT build is what you actually want once you commit to building a network that scales. Either way, the goal is the same: when the storm comes through and the utility power flickers, your AZQC sectors stay up, your CBRS registrations stay current, and your customers never know anything happened.

If you're ready to build a Nokia AZQC site, our 3-Sector CBRS Site Kit ships with everything you need on the RF side, plus 8 hours of remote consulting to get your RAN online and integrated with Rapid5GS. Basic DC plant consulting is included in those 8 hours, so we can help you spec ALGcom or ICT against the load list of your specific site.

But getting the rest of it right (the physical install, cable runs, grounding, cabinet integration, the actual build of the DC plant) goes well beyond 8 hours of remote consulting. If you don't have in-house experience standing up a tower site, bring in Vertical Axis to install your Nokia and design your DC. Kelly's crew does this for a living. That is the move.

Power your edge right the first time. The truck rolls you don't have to make are the cheapest ones you'll ever buy.

A living article. We're actively evaluating additional DC power options for Nokia AZQC sites and will update this page as new compatible products are identified and field-validated. If you've deployed something we should know about, drop us a line at hello@theedgemile.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a DC plant and why do I need one for a Nokia AZQC site?

A DC plant converts utility AC power into stable -48VDC, stores energy in batteries so the site can ride through outages, and distributes that power with overcurrent protection to all the gear on your site. Nokia AZQC radios are carrier-grade telecom hardware and expect a real telecom-style DC power source, not a Mikrotik PoE injector or a desktop UPS.

How much power does a typical 3-sector Nokia AZQC site draw?

Budget roughly 1,500W at -48VDC for a typical 3-sector AZQC site with one AirScale baseband, a couple of microwave backhauls, some legacy 5GHz PtMP sectors, a camera, and a switch/router. Round up to 1,800W to leave headroom for future growth.

Can I just power my AZQC with a Mikrotik or Ubiquiti PoE adapter?

No. The AZQC is not PoE-powered. It expects -48VDC through the supplied Nokia OCTIS DC connector, with up to ~5.5A per radio and a dynamic current draw that swings with traffic and RF load. Standard Mikrotik or Ubiquiti PoE injectors, passive PoE adapters, and normal WISP PSUs are not designed for that profile. Use a real DC plant and the supplied OCTIS DC power connectors.

What's the difference between -48V and +48V, and does it matter?

Yes, it matters. Telecom gear like Nokia AZQC runs on -48V (positive ground). A lot of WISP and IT gear runs on +48V (negative ground). If you're mixing the two on the same site, you'll need a DC-DC converter to feed your +48V gear from the -48V telecom bus.

Do the ALGcom or ICT systems come with batteries?

No. Neither BOM listed above includes batteries. You'll spec your battery bank separately based on your required runtime and the total load you're carrying. Both systems are designed to float-charge an external battery bank on the DC bus.

Which batteries do you recommend for this build?

For 48V 100Ah LiFePO4 battery modules, we recommend the Leoch LFeLi-48100T-SNMP and the Cyclone CYG-B48V-100A. Leoch and Cyclone are trusted, respectable brands we have tested, and we know these exact SKUs work in this application. They are compatible with the ICT build and with ALGcom systems that have the current lithium battery software/firmware support enabled and configured correctly.

Are these products BEAD or BABA compliant?

ICT is widely used in grant-funded WISP buildouts and is generally well-positioned for compliance. For ALGcom, compliance varies by SKU. If you're spending grant money, confirm BABA compliance with your supplier against the current waiver and compliance lists before purchasing. Don't assume.

Where should I buy the ICT equipment?

We get our ICT quotes from Jeff Broadwick at CTI Connect and recommend them without reservation. Jeff's team knows the Nokia AZQC platform and has helped multiple operators in our network spec power for these radios. Tell him The Edge Mile sent you.

Can The Edge Mile design and install the DC plant for me?

Basic DC consulting is included in the 8 hours of remote support that ships with the AZQC Site Kit, so we can help you spec the right plant against your site's specific load. What we don't do is the physical install: the tower work, cable runs, grounding, and cabinet integration. For the full hands-on build (Nokia install plus DC plant design and installation as one job), Vertical Axis under Kelly Zacrep is who we recommend. If you're inexperienced at this, that's the call to make.

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Josh Lambert

Josh Lambert is a wireless network engineer and software developer specializing in private 4G and 5G deployments. He is the creator of the open source Rapid5GS.com packet core and the founder of Alabama Lightwave, a WISP serving West and Central Alabama. Josh has designed, deployed, and optimized LTE/CBRS networks for both commercial residential applications, bridging deep technical expertise with practical field experience. At TheEdgeMile.com, he helps organizations adopt proven best practices in wireless infrastructure to deliver reliable, high-performance connectivity.

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