Camusat: Whatever it takes to get it done

Since the 1940’s Camusat has been a leader in the turnkey implementation of telecommunication infrastructures, offering a complete range of services related to construction, installation, supply and maintenance of towers, masts, shelters, fibre and additional parts. Camusat is a natural partner for operators and towercos who are looking for a company with strong capabilities all over Africa, with unified company culture and high QHSE standards, providing a single point of commercial contact to optimize the supply chain and negotiations of multiple similar deals in several countries.

TowerXchange: Rolling out new cell sites swiftly is critical. Tell us about the logistics of getting a new tower from your factories to a remote installation site in Africa – take us through the import, warehousing and delivery logistics processes.

Logistics is probably the most important aspect of any telecoms infrastructure rollout programme. Camusat keeps tight control over logistics, so we minimise the use of subcontractors.

Our two tower manufacturing plants are in Europe so it’s essential that we have a good logistics department to deal with shipment of towers and accessories to Africa by air or by sea. This is the easy part! The difficult part is local transportation. Africa has few proper logistics companies, and the road infrastructure is poor. Camusat makes a difference because we take the attitude “whatever it takes, we’ll deliver what is needed to that site, when it’s needed.”

As soon as we open a subsidiary in a new country, we simultaneously will have offices and warehouse premises, so that we can have a stock of towers and accessories. We then can respond rapidly to customer requests. We keep this stock buffer available to face most of the urgent commercial request of our customers.

In order to accelerate deployments and meet challenging SLAs, especially in remote locations, we may not hesitate to invest in military-style logistics and vehicles to make sure goods are delivered onsite without any risk, respecting European standards of safety and environment. When we’ve been pushed to get new towers erected very quickly, we’ve shipped a special unit crane from the US to Africa that can raise 40m high, enabling tower erection quicker than any of our competitors.

In Madagascar, where there are no roads and many areas are impassable for normal vehicles during the rainy season we’ve invested in heavy duty pickups, as well as 6x6, and quads to ensure access, and we’ll use a chopper when we have to.

Camusat’s reputation for doing “whatever it takes” is appreciated by our customer base – it’s not just a slogan, it’s a reality for them!

TowerXchange: As tower sharing increases in Africa, we are starting to see consolidation of sites, so tell us about the logistics of relocating towers.

Relocating a tower is a measure of last resort, both because of the cost and because of the challenge of ensuring the service for tenants is not interrupted.

Relocating a base station requires erecting a new tower according to the new requirements, transferring equipment and using a change process to avoid service interruptions. Dismantling a tower is more time consuming than mounting a tower, primarily due to the foundations. In many cases it’s not economically reasonable to remove foundations, as it’s difficult to destroy three to five metre deep reinforced concrete. We might destroy the first few centimeters and re-cover with soil, but of course that’s not always acceptable for tower operators with exacting environmental protection standards.

TowerXchange: How do you reinforce a tower to add capacity for multiple tenants?

Compared to relocating a tower, refurbishment is a purely technical, relatively straightforward task. The challenge comes if we don’t have proper documentation about the existing tower, such as designs and calculation notes. It’s also a problem if we don’t have good information about a tower’s foundations and we can’t estimate how good the concrete is, or it’s conformity to QHSE standards. Reverse engineering a tower without documentation is costly and it takes time.

We have to inspect every section of the tower, verify and measure steel thickness, potential corrosion, bolts and nuts, concrete foundations and then evaluate from these measurements what the most cost-effective way is to re-inforce the tower. We may have to increase the size of the foundations, add re-inforcement legs, replace sections, add diagonals, etc.

Assuming you have proper documentation or have successfully reverse engineered a tower, re-enforcing a tower is easy – with the proper calculation notes, it’s a straightforward process to work out how to add capacity. Camusat have its own R&D and design people who do this exercise regularly without interrupting transmission and radio operations.

TowerXchange: How can tower operators minimise maintenance opex?

As far as possible, we need to practice preventative rather than corrective maintenance. Excellent monitoring tools feeding into an NOC with proper processes to detect and prevent corrective interventions drive preventative maintenance.

Achieving preventative maintenance requires that Camusat deploy specific tools to supervise passive infrastructure. The most important aspect is the power, which is where most maintenance headaches start. We work very hard to find alternative green and hybrid power solutions, customised for telecoms. There are plenty of solar and hybrid solutions on the market, but few suppliers who really understand the specific needs of telecom requirements. Camusat has sixty years of experience of specific African requirements dealing with unstable grid power. Off grid sites are actually easier to maintain.

Backup diesel generators are the most commonly used solutions at unreliable grid sites, but they can be very expensive in terms of daily operations and opex. You need to look at how to deal with power availability and filtration of the grid to reduce usage of backup generators. Camusat’s R&D teams have developed customised line conditioners for the harsh environment and specific needs of Africa so that we get the most of the grid whenever it’s present but unstable.

The key to organising your team for preventative maintenance is telemetry and statistics. Telemetry and statistics enable you to build a knowledge database, based on which you can build a profile of operations on each site to establish preventative maintenance schedules. For example when dealing with unreliable grid sites, we can build patterns of grid behavior which means we can design and install the proper equipment to maximise energy efficiency and avoid equipment damage.

Another element of preventative maintenance is to have regional maintenance agencies located at an optimum distance from each site as defined by the tower operator’s SLA, with maintenance agencies based as close as possible to top priority sites.

The final and most important component of preventative maintenance is human resources. Camusat don’t use subcontractors so we can ensure quality and control through good supervisors who train and motivate the team, supported by incentive programmes to ensure they do this repetitive job properly.

There will still be some instances where you need corrective maintenance, such as in cases of theft, vandalism or lightning strikes. Unless you want to build a defensive bunker, it’s difficult to eliminate the theft and vandalism issue, so we try to find cost effective solutions. We’ll make local improvements to security, looking at the fuel tank and connection between the fuel tank and the generator, or improving access control, choosing most cost-effective solution for that particular site. Of course lightning strikes are also difficult to predict! We’ll install surge protectors, but sometimes you just have to use corrective maintenance to repair and replace burnt out elements.

TowerXchange: What’s the balance of Camusat’s business between MNOs and towercos? Is the transfer of assets from operator-captive to independent towercos good news for  Camusat?

We sell initially to MNOs, but when assets are transferred to a towerco we become a supplier to the towerco.

It’s too soon to say whether tower transactions are a good business development opportunity for us. When our clients France Telecom transfer towers to a towerco, it means a jump into a new area and we need to build new relationship with the towerco. So tower transactions are potential risk, but they’re also an opportunity to secure business from other co-locating operators.

We maintain a dialogue with all the towercos. They all put pressure on subcontractors’ prices, and of course you can only push prices so far before it may decrease quality.

TowerXchange: How do Camusat differentiate herself from competition?

Camusat has a good control of all the supply and delivery chain. We don’t use subcontractors. Manufacturing, delivery, logistics and maintenance are all provided by Camusat’s own team. So we have no real direct competition on this end-to-end service.

Thanks to our expertise in designing towers since more than forty years, we have integrated towers with common basis and sections thus allowing us to adapt our production very quickly to the customer changes of specification, without replacing every section of the tower.

We’re also unique because of our extensive network of local subsidiaries. Many of our competitors leave the country after completing an installation project.

Our competition comes less from tower manufacturers, and more from original equipment manufacturers who bundle a suite of managed services with active equipment sales. Outsourcing managed services contracts to companies like Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei was a growing trend two years ago, but MNOs are now realising they need maintain direct relationships with their tower manufacture and installation companies to minimise opex. Today the new trend is outsourcing to towercos, and most of the towercos subcontract everything, both to local subcontractors and to pan-African partners like Camusat.