Plessey: Blue-chip turnkey infrastructure provider moves into managed services

Plessey has over fifty years experience of telecoms infrastructure solution provision, and have been trusted to roll out substantial new base station, fibre and wireless deployments all over Africa. Plessey has installed over 12,000 towers in Sub-Saharan Africa, and has broadened to provide a ‘whole life’ service by adding managed services to their turnkey infrastructure offering.

TowerXchange: Please tell us where Plessey fits in the telecoms infrastructure ecosystem?

Plessey offers turnkey base station site build services: planning permission, site acquisition, design, civil works, building the tower and containers, RF work, electrical engineering, fencing and generators. In short, we provide services for the whole base station site, from passive to active infrastructure.

Plessey has worked with MTN in South Africa and in new countries they have entered across Africa such as Nigeria. We’ve also worked with Vodacom in South Africa, helping them build microwave networks, installing transmission equipment and devices at customer premises. We also worked with Vodacom in Mozambique and Tanzania, and more recently have worked for the independent towercos such as American Towers and Helios.

Other key competencies and service areas for Plessey include turnkey fibre network build: wayleave acquisition, planning, civil work, duct installation, blowing of fibre and the installation of active equipment. We’ve built or maintained fibre networks for Dark Fibre Africa, KDN, Infacom and Airtel. We’re also into wireless build - predominantly the installation commission and maintenance of point to point and point to multi-point wireless links.

Plessey provides managed services in support of all those areas of the business. Our managed services group has about 100 people in South Africa, plus operations in Kenya, Uganda and Zambia. So we’re not just an infrastructure builder, but provide support services through the life of the asset, across all of Africa. We can scale up in most African countries even where we don’t currently have a physical presence.

TowerXchange: How would you differentiate Plessey from other turnkey infrastructure and managed service providers?

The backing of our owners Dimension Data, who in turn are owned by NTT, gives us financial support of a large multi-national and we have developed deep enterprise-level strategic knowledge.

I see Plessey as the ‘blue chip’ turnkey infrastructure provider. We’re not the cheapest, but we offer a high quality service. We deal with large projects, rolling out many thousands of sites. Plessey are a partner of choice when a major operator enters a new country - for example we were the first enterprise-scale turnkey infrastructure provider in Nigeria, having been engaged to rollout MTN’s network.

Our differentiation in managed services is that our capability spans all the equipment and facilities on a base station site: fibre backhaul, RF and passive infrastructure. Our technicians are cross-trained across multiple disciplines so they are capable of resolving a wider range of incidents.

We’re also spending a lot of time looking at proof of concepts for the replacement of diesel with solar and wind power. Grid power is reasonable in South Africa, but in rural areas and developing countries, green power will become increasingly important. Plessey won’t develop our own green power solutions, but will be seeking to integrate third party solutions that help differentiate our service offering.

TowerXchange: I understand that Plessey had previously been involved in a consortium with Convergence Partners and Macquarie to bid for towers - is there still an interest in getting into the towerco business?

We were looking at opportunities some years ago with Convergence Partners, but Plessey decided that it would not enter this space as we did not want to compete with our customers.

TowerXchange: Take us inside Plessey’s NOC - what are the KPIs that govern day to day management and the achievement of SLAs?

We use a number of management tools within the NOC. Our service desk takes calls, logs incidents, tracks faults and escalates appropriately using a platform called ServiceNow, which is supported within Dimension Data. ServiceNow enables us to align services and processes with customer SLAs, and gives us the ability to report performance from mean time to respond, time to raise a trouble ticket, to mean time to closure.

Our KPIs are mostly time-based metrics. MTTR targets vary from country to country due to the different quality of transport infrastructure in Africa, but for example in South Africa we will look to have a technician on the road within 15 minutes of an appropriate incident being reported, with a two hour mean time to respond, and a four hour mean time to repair.

Dashboards in the NOC give us the ability to proactively monitor infrastructure rather than waiting for someone to call. We’re integrated with most of the major RMS vendors such as Invendis, Kentrox and AIO Systems, so we’re monitoring power, warning lights, intruder alert systems et cetera. We also monitor fibre networks and have the capability to monitor transmission and active equipment, although no clients have asked us to provide that service yet.

We’re vendor-neutral so are able to maintain any active and passive equipment, which is especially important in the co-location business. This unlocks economies of scale in maintenance; if a single technician can support all the tenants and all the different vendors’ equipment, then they create more value for us and our customers receive a more cost effective service.

TowerXchange: Should towercos aspire to be broader ‘infracos’, getting into backhaul sharing and the last mile?

Definitely I think the towercos will need to diversify their business and differentiate their service. Towercos in SA already use FTTT (Fibre To The Tower) to provide backhaul.

The fibre market in South Africa is moving toward access fibre, FTT Premises, FTTH and FTTT. Although the wider African market tends to lag the South African market, once their long haul and metro fibre networks are in place, the focus will also move towards FTTx.

TowerXchange: Plessey have done a lot of work in South Africa and Nigeria - what’s your personal view on the potential for substantial tower transactions in those markets?

American Tower’s deal with Cell C was the first large transaction in South Africa. As the South African market matures, it’s becoming more and more difficult to build new towers, so the impetus is there for tower sharing.

Nigeria is a very different market, a market that is still evolving, but infrastructure sharing will undoubtedly become more prevalent there. There is also a huge opportunity in developing countries or rural areas for operators to share infrastructure, making it more commercially viable to provide services in these markets.

LTE drives the need for more towers. I don’t know the magnitude of the required cell site densification, but I suspect it could be as much as five to ten times. Even if some of that densification requirement is fulfilled using street furniture, there will still be a need for more and more sites.

TowerXchange: What’s your view on the potential for sharing small cells and DAS, or for towercos and other infracos providing urban ‘heterogeneous networks for hire’?

I agree that there’s a huge opportunity for towercos to get into street furniture and heterogeneous networks for hire, as you put it. The barriers to be overcome will be around provision of backhaul and power, even though LTE cells are low power.