The hands-dirty dozen

TowerXchange calls them the hands-dirty dozen. They are the pan-African managed service providers manning the front lines of the African tower industry.

In a region where engineering skills are a scarce resource, and in an era when MNOs and towercos alike are strongly inclined to outsource tower installation, upgrade and maintenance, there are a dozen or so managed services partners with broad, proven capabilities to support telecoms infrastructure rollouts and retrofits in multiple African markets.

Where once these companies specialised in expedited network rollouts for MNOs who were competing on coverage, as African markets mature and competition is increasingly on QoS and customer experience, the sale and leaseback of towers and the importance of towercos increases. Always adaptable, the hands-dirty dozen are now adapting to also service towercos’ needs to survey, strengthen and service acquired tower portfolios.

While MNO’s rollouts demand staffing-up for equipment import, warehousing, inland logistics, and civil works projects at hundreds of new cell sites, tower transactions unlock pent up maintenance and investments in structural capacity and energy efficiency, which create a similar upsurge in demand for managed service capabilities. Tower transactions can be a particularly exciting opportunity for the hands-dirty dozen in instances where transferred towers don’t all come with the original design drawings, requiring the towercos to undertake a substantial programme of reverse engineering.

Both MNO’s rollout and towercos’ retrofit assignments yield contracts of similarly finite duration and declining value, at least for managed service providers flexible enough to become genuine strategic partners. Towercos want to work together with managed service partners on a refurbishment programme, which may typically be 18-24 months in duration, aimed at increasing autonomy of cell sites through energy equipment upgrades and RMS, thus reducing site visits and ultimately reducing opex. As a result, contracts with towercos can feature a planned, phased reduction of contract value as a function of reduced maintenance headcount and reduced site visits as sites become more efficient.

You might think these declining-value contracts destroy value in the managed services business, but TowerXchange doesn’t think so. As new builds and refurbishments are completed and site visits reduce, managed service providers can unlock economies of scale by partnering with additional towerco and MNO clients in the same country. By corralling together denser concentrations of towers from multiple clients, local maintenance teams are able to concentrate their services on smaller areas, spending less time on the road and more time getting on the front foot of preventative maintenance.

The value added service proposition offered by the hands-dirty dozen can be deepened by the provision of supply chain management services – importing, warehousing, delivering and installing passive (and potentially active) equipment and spare parts, provided on-demand at a modest mark up. We’ve even seen fully-fledged Vendor Managed Inventory services starting to be requested by at least one towerco, and delivered by a couple of members of the hands-dirty dozen.

Provision of VMI services has the potential to deepen the commitment of the tower operator–managed service provider relationship, and may result in the managed service partner being entrusted with an ever-growing number of sites within the original, then neighbouring countries.

Provision of energy as a service may be the next opportunity for the hands-dirty dozen to deepen their relationships and add a new revenue stream to their business models.

Meanwhile, TowerXchange has noted the emergence of crack teams of nomadic turnkey infrastructure deployment and network upgrade specialists. These elite teams are dispatched from the hands-dirty dozen’s headquarters to use their premium engineering and project management skills to oversee the critical formative months of new managed services engagements, marshaling local resources who are upskilled and who are ultimately destined to take on the “long tail” of post-installation maintenance. As each project matures, these nomadic project leaders move from country to country, contract to contract, and it’s their reputation as proven strategic partners that means the hands-dirty dozen are trusted by MNOs and by towercos to move one challenging rollout or retrofit assignment to the next.

• Alkan

• Camusat

• EEC Group

• Leadcom

• Likusasa

• Mer Telecom

• Mobiserve

• NETIS

• Plessey

• QTE

• Reime Group

Yes, we know there are only eleven!

Here’s some potential additions, pending our research:

• Egypro

• HOI-MEA

• Lemcon Networks

• Linksoft

• Radio Network Solutions

If you work for an innovative managed service provider with a pan-African footprint that has deployed at least 1,000 sites, TowerXchange would be delighted to profile your company – email us at kosmotherly@towerxchange.com