Ant colony optimisation is a relatively new meta-heuristic search technique for solving optimisation problems. To date, much research has concentrated on solving standard benchmark problems such as the travelling salesman problem, quadratic assignment problem and the job sequencing problem. In this paper, we investigate the application of ant colony optimisation to practical telecommunication design and synthesis problems having real-world constraints. We consider a modelling approach suitable for ant colony optimisation implementation and compare the results to the simulated annealing meta-heuristic.