The invention relates to a radio communications system including a base station, a digital exchange, and a transmission system connecting the base station, and the digital exchange. The base station includes an antenna section, an RF receiver section for receiving an RF uplink signal from the antenna section, a mechanism for providing a digitised downconverted uplink signal from the received RF signal, and a mechanism for transferring the digitised down converted uplink signal to the digital exchange through the transmission system. The digital exchange includes a mechanism for receiving the digitised downconverted uplink signal and a mechanism for baseband processing of the digitised downconverted uplink signal.