TowerXchange spoke to Dick Hayter, Managing Director for the Middle East and Africa at Kentrox, a leading intelligent site monitoring, management, and control solutions provider with over a million products successfully deployed in carrier and enterprise networks worldwide. Their primary focus in Africa is on tower operators and service providers and they have a considerable number of Tier 1 customers throughout the region.
TowerXchange: Why should tower operators invest in Intelligent Site Monitoring?
Dick Hayter, Managing Director MEA, Kentrox:
Tower companies are focused on reducing operating expenses (opex) at every cell site and, with a large number of sites in Africa still reliant on diesel, one of the best cost savings is in fuel and energy consumption.
Kentrox recently deployed a system with a Tier 1 tower operator to enable remote tenant energy metering, providing the capability to bill each tenant at a site separately for power consumption. With one meter per tenant, they’re able to reduce truck rolls through automated remote reading, with correlation and bill generation.
Intelligent site management in this instance provides three capabilities: fuel management, security and reduced environmental impact.
The fuel and energy management capability, can, amongst other things enable tower operators to closely monitor the state of fuel; how much is delivered, if there is abnormal consumption (pilferage), and can also monitor the runtime and fuel consumption of the generation plant. This allows the tower operator to generate an auditable output and reconcile this against invoices from the subcontractors who deliver fuel, therefore only paying for fuel that’s actually delivered and consumed.
The tower operator also gains visibility of the performance of the diesel generator (DG) and an opportunity to move away from scheduled maintenance, which is expensive especially for remote sites. The tower owner can identify issues in the power plant, batteries and rectifiers from the field and NOC, determine that a maintenance crew needs to be sent, and provide directions to maintenance crews as to what they should do when they get there.
ISM also measures temperature and humidity and can instrument parameters from each piece of equipment, enabling tower owners to remotely shut down air conditioning and run fans when it makes sense to do so. This minimises the substantial load and energy consumption air conditioning can represent. And of course ISM tracks when maintenance is needed.
Intelligent site monitoring also gives the NOC control over hybrid power sites and optimises the selection between mains, renewables and batteries to minimise DG runtime.
One of the biggest challenges we encounter in Africa is the state of batteries. On paper they look great – by investing more capital in better batteries you can reduce generator runtime to just a couple of hours a day. Yet many batteries are poor quality, poorly maintained, and the amount of charge they’re able to hold in practice is significantly less than in theory, so DG runtime doesn’t reduce as much as it should. Monitoring the state of batteries is critical.
TowerXchange: How do site monitoring systems help mitigate against fuel theft?
Dick Hayter, Managing Director MEA, Kentrox:
We have fuel management systems in all three markets in which we’re active, and all of them have assisted tower operators and service providers in identifying pilferage.
We place sensors in the fuel tank, the most commonly being a pressure sensor that measures the quantity of fuel within 2% accuracy. That’s hooked into a black box that transmits data back to a central monitoring point, so we can detect refuelling events or abnormal reductions. We use another sensor to detect water in the fuel – it’s a common ploy to cut fuel with water. Tampering with or disabling sensors generates alarms. The tricky part is collecting data from 1,000 or more cell sites correlating it and presenting it in a way that’s meaningful to management. You can’t apprehend a thief and take them to court of law based on our systems alone, but the provider can follow up.
Tower operators and service providers are becoming more interested in having a holistic view of what’s happening at their sites
TowerXchange: How big is the market for intelligent site management systems – are they in widespread use in Africa?
Dick Hayter, Managing Director MEA, Kentrox:
In our opinion, the ISM market in Africa is pretty immature. We’ve encountered many point solutions implemented to solve one specific problem such as access control or just looking at fuel. Customer expectations haven’t always been properly managed, and there is customer dissatisfaction with low cost point solutions. Tower operators and service providers are becoming more interested in having a holistic view of what’s happening at their sites and are looking for carrier-grade, robust solutions, that retain data at a site in the event that the backhaul network temporarily fails. Strategic departments in tower operators and service providers are driving the requirements for intelligent site management.
TowerXchange: Can intelligent site management help reduce maintenance costs to the extent of enabling just-in-time maintenance for African cell sites?
Dick Hayter, Managing Director MEA, Kentrox:
It may take some time before we get to just-in-time maintenance, but that’s definitely the target.
Achieving just-in-time requires excellent visibility of every site, with effective dashboards and alarms, but more importantly we also need tower operators and service providers to revise existing processes.
When they acquire assets, tower companies often inherit an old subcontractor network, with established but inefficient mechanisms for fuel delivery and a lot of “interested parties”. There are all kinds of local cultural challenges and deep routed interest groups to win over.
Implementing just-in-time requires substantial change management
Subcontractors need to be re-organised. As things stand today, a local person who lives near the tower may have the capability to maintain air conditioning. Now with ISM, all the power elements are integrated, so the maintenance person needs to understand all of the elements at the site: air conditioning, batteries, diesel and renewable energy plants, rectifiers, aircraft warning lights, security fences and locks et cetera. Field maintenance staff who had been managing themselves for many years can now be directed from the NOC, telling them where to go and what to do. Implementing just-in-time requires substantial change management and means stretching many O&M subcontractors beyond their capabilities.
Senior management may be disappointed with the results of installing ISM if they don’t address these change management issues, which can be particularly challenging in the many cases where O&M is an outsourced managed service.
Unfortunately this may dissuade some tower operators and service providers from implementing ISM, when I would suggest that the first thing they need to do is implement ISM to see what’s really going on at their sites.
TowerXchange: What is the typical capital outlay per site to install your remote site monitoring systems?
Dick Hayter, Managing Director MEA, Kentrox:
For a network of 200+ towers, budget on around $5,000 per site for a full system inclusive of fuel sensors and a central O&M server installed at the NOC.
An IP remote camera would be another $700-1,200 on top, depending on functionality, but you don’t need those on every site.
Around half of that cost is services to install the system, but I would recommend that operators do not take a shortcut on this aspect. The installation and tune-up of ISM requires a site visit, and proper quality control when installing sensors. We recommend that operators engage a well-qualified, pan-African services company with bona fide project management skills.
TowerXchange: Thanks for sharing your expertise and experience Dick. Could you wrap up the interview by summing up the benefits of intelligent site management?
Dick Hayter, Managing Director MEA, Kentrox:
Investing in a robust ISM solution enables tower operators and service providers to save opex by reducing energy consumption through the simple ability to turn off a generator remotely. ISM enables the more efficient use of battery capacity, renewable energy, and air conditioning.
ISM provides visibility into maintenance requirements, reducing truck rolls and extending the lifespan of equipment. This gives tower operators and service providers an opportunity to maximise the use of highly competent O&M resources to direct less experienced resources in the field. Uptime can be improved as we move toward just-in-time maintenance, improving Quality of Service and boosting subscriber loyalty.
ISM helps reduce pilferage by making it more auditable.
It’s not just about gathering data; it’s about integrating data and turning it into actionable intelligence. Intelligent site management is not just about fuel monitoring, it improves holistic management and control of network availability over the whole lifecycle of a tower and its equipment.
Applying Just-in-Time maintenance to telecoms infrastructure
Historically maintenance visits to cells sites have been scheduled through regular planned maintenance regimes. Whilst this can be effective, it isn’t necessarily efficient. Not all truck rolls are necessary – and if your truck roll consists of a multi-day journal to a remote cell site in Sudan, that can incur a lot of unnecessary opex.
Just-in-time maintenance leverages ISM to track the actual usage of energy and other equipment at the site and can identify symptoms of potential problems before they result in downtime. ISM also enables the NOC to direct field maintenance teams to specific problems, which can be helpful in mitigating against skill shortages.
Just-in time maintenance has been used for some time in the automotive and manufacturing sectors, leveraging self diagnosis capabilities and usage monitoring to provide maintenance when it’s needed, resulting in significant reductions in operating costs.
