CommScope takes British tower builder Alifabs international

Richard Smith is infamous for his ability to identify the manufacturer and model of a tower or cabinet within seconds just by looking at a photo! With a degree in engineering and psychology (necessary to manage his team of “dysfunctional geniuses”) Richard joined Alifabs 20 years ago, starting on the telecom side of the business, ending up as Managing Director. Alifabs has manufactured and installed more UK towers than any other company and, having been acquired by CommScope, they are now leveraging the company’s international relationships to seek opportunities overseas.

TowerXchange: Please introduce Alifabs - where do you fit in the telecoms infrastructure ecosystem? How did you get started in this business?

Alifabs designs, manufactures and installs telecom towers and cabinets, offering an end to end service from building the base to testing and rigging the tower, all the way to the site being ready to ready integrate into the network.

Alifabs’ first foray into telecoms came after being approached by BT to design a 15m, fully transportable, rapid deployment microwave mast. This led to us making hundreds of microwave towers for 30Ghz transmission. Building microwave links for BT led to contracts to manufacture and install macro towers for BT Cellnet, and to our participation in the PSRCP (Public Safety Radio Communications Project) rollout for Airwave. After three years of the rollout, Airwave re-tendered everything except the towers because of the performance they got from Alifabs.

From the outset, Alifabs has offered superior price and performance; we’ve made it commercially easy to come to us.

Our turnover grew very quickly, and over the last ten years, Alifabs has become the default one stop shop for tower manufacture and installation in the UK market. Our customers value us for the advice, concealment, temporary towers, permanent macro towers and street work solutions we offer. For example, we’re doing a lot of street works for a UK network operator.

We’d build a brownfield or greenfield site, only to return six months later to find that the site was still not on air because they couldn’t get the equipment shelters they needed, so we started building cabinets too, which complements our tower business.

TowerXchange: How does Alifabs’ recent acquisition by CommScope enhance your business?

Alifabs is well-positioned with long-standing, deep relationships with all of the UK wireless operators. We will be leveraging CommScope’s PartnerPro network of local partners to bring Alifabs’ training, processes and capabilities to provide the same high quality of service internationally as we have in our domestic market.

Since CommScope’s acquisition of Alifabs in July 2014, many of those local partners come to us interested in what we can do for them. A global agency network is just what we need: we typically find that if we can get one of Alifabs’ products into play in a new market or with a new customer, then they discover the Alifabs performance difference, and the relationship snowballs to include our other products – all we need is a chance to prove what we can do and how we do it.

CommScope is focused on the RF path plus microwave antenna products. We manufacture a lot of the equipment on a telecom structure from feeder cables, different duplexing and combining solutions, to tower mounted amplifiers. Our largest segment is of course antenna systems, which are becoming more complex as markets evolve into new technologies, frequencies and network sharing. CommScope is also a leading player in the DAS and Metro Cell markets: we’ve developed high capacity, multi-beam antennas and DAS systems, one application of which is to enable towercos to get into neutral hosting in stadia and concert venues.

We saw Alifabs as complimentary to CommScope’s existing businesses. We’re talking to the same groups within the MNO and towerco community, so we’re seeking to expand Alifabs’ route to market across our sales channels across developed and developing markets.

TowerXchange: With the Rio Olympics coming up, and as an example of Alifabs’ capabilities, could you tell us a bit about your work on cell sites for the 2012 London Olympics?

We deployed temporary tower solutions at 14 sites in and around the Olympic parks to supplement capacity. Obviously timing was critical, and we got all the sites up and running on time and decommissioned them all within a few weeks of the games. A lot of people expected network congestion to become a problem during the London Olympics, but in the end there were no complaints about network capacity issues – just one of the many success stories from the London Olympics!

We also erected temporary structures on a rooftop in Southbank, London specifically for the Olympic Victory Parade. In Hyde Park, we erected the first ever Supercell, the biggest temporary site that had ever been deployed by any network, with 15 sectors and three base stations on a 30m temporary tower with a sailboat of feeders and 23 cabinets at the foot of the structure! This was an incredibly hard site to get built, but it only took Alifabs three days to get it ready.

At the parade alone, a massive 600 gigabytes of data was used and over 300,000 text and picture messages were sent as the parade made its way across London. The Supercell covered a crowd of up to 80,000 people, taking care of the huge mobile traffic. It all went off without a hitch!

TowerXchange: I’m not sure whether one should call network sharing joint ventures like MBNL and CTIL (Cornerstone) towercos, but how did the creation of those infrastructure sharing organisations affect Alifabs’ business in the UK?

The only difference for us was that there was someone else to negotiate with and get a PO from – we have the same interaction with MBNL and CTIL as with the networks.

The jury is still out on whether the independent towerco model will flourish in the UK. The MNOs are still commissioning the vast majority of the new sites – most orders are coming straight from MBNL and CTIL, not via the independent towercos.

TowerXchange: Has the creation of MBNL and CTIL led to a lot of decommissioning?

Alifabs has done some decommissioning for MBNL and CTIL but it’s not our core business and there’s not as much decommissioning of towers in the UK as many people seem to assume. Between the second half of 2015 and 2016 we anticipate a strong build in UK. We’re making and rigging a lot of towers to build our inventory. The acquisition by Three of O2 UK may impact the UK tower market temporarily – to separate RAN sharing will require deconstructing and reconstructing  agreements, so there are complicated times ahead for network strategists.

You get a false picture of the amount of work going on in the UK if you focus on decommissioning and new site builds, because the volume of upgrade work on existing sites is phenomenal – the whole network configuration and topology is changing in the UK. The pressure to reduce the number of towers on the landscape may have initially driven on network sharing, but now it’s about extending the network to boost coverage, and building capacity in urban areas. If there’s a site with permission for antennas they’re certainly going to try to use it!

TowerXchange: How would you sum up the lessons learned from the deep infrastructure sharing partnerships created in the UK?

It might have been a slow start initially, but I think MBNL and CTIL got it spot on. The simple lesson for deep infrastructure sharing is to take time and plan it.  It can be made to work – there will inevitably be trials and tribulations but the networks didn’t collapse in the meantime and the goals of the UK’s asset sharing companies have eventually been met.

There are plenty of network sharing success stories. It’s working in Sweden with Net4Mobility, where Tele2 and Telenor have divided country in two, and remain effectively in competition as they pay the lowest common denominator, creating competition to keep the cost base per unit of capacity as low as possible.

TowerXchange: One last question before we move on from the UK market. Given that Alifabs has built a good proportion of the towers in the UK, do you know how many shareable structures there are in the country?

According to our estimates, there are about 52,000 sites in the UK.

TowerXchange: It seems that a lot of the new network design and deployment in Europe is focused on small cells, or what CommScope would call Metro Cells. What has been your experience deploying heterogeneous networks for LTE?

First you’ve got to define what a small cell is. CommScope uses the term Metro Cell. It’s not a picocell or femtocell – low capacity units hooked in via DSL backhaul. Analysts thought there was market for hundreds of millions of these things, but that hasn’t proved to be the case. When CommScope is talking about small cells, we’re talking about full capacity LTE radio, 5-10 W rather than 20-40 W systems, requiring a lower antenna height which tends to be below rooftop level.

Alifabs has the capability to design structures which urban planning officials are willing to permit deploying in the streetscape, rather than on macro and rooftop structures. Demand for Metro Cells can be met using smaller monopole structures with unobtrusive cabinet structures that fit into the street scape, leveraging street poles, bus stops and other urban structures. Deployability is ensured as these units are pre-integrated and pre-configured. We design the right types of antennas and structures to focus RF energy where it’s needed, and where it doesn’t interfere with the macro network.

One of our customers is installing “unsexed” cabinets at the base of their extensive network of wooden poles. So any network can jump in, and the sites can be “sexed up” with Three or Vodafone or whoever wants to use the location. We see this as a new type of RF coverage.

TowerXchange: What is CommScope’s appetite for heterogeneous network opportunities in the Middle East and Africa?

CommScope has furnished wireless network infrastructure in North Africa and the Middle East for decades. We’ve recently had discussions in Nigeria and South Africa, where there are good economies and dense urban environments with rising smartphone adoption, where operators are in need of additional capacity by either adding spectrum or by splitting cells. We think we’ll start to see those heterogeneous two layer networks being deployed in urban environments, with hotspot capacity put into Central Business Districts, within the next year or two, particularly in the top end economic markets.

In urban environments we can see the demand for the neutral host model and for the Metro Cells previously discussed – there are already some early stage trials. We are conscious of the exciting shift in the ecosystem: about 30% of towers in developing countries are now owned or operated by tower companies, yet it could be closer to 45% by the end of this year. We think that some of our low opex, energy efficient products recently developed and adopted by some MNOs can fit perfectly to their business model and enable them to increase capacity and uptime.

TowerXchange: When designing new sites, how do you balance the concerns of camouflage, cost and structural capacity?

It’s a balancing act. Telcos have to accept that some sites need to be camouflaged.

14 years ago we were doing some camouflage work – we looked at what material was on the front of different antenna and we tested a shroud that actually acts as a passive amplifier. So a network would come to us and say we have horrible-looking rooftop which requires camouflage, and we would often be able to use a shroud and paint on brickwork or whatever fit best with the surroundings. You’ve got to take each site individually and innovate to blend in, so if there’s a grain silo nearby, build it to look like a grain silo.

We have to be mindful of cost – camouflage can’t cost too much money otherwise it turns the operators away. Camouflage often need not cost more than 30% more than a standard site.

Shared sites just require a different way of innovating. You can’t always get all the tenants on one structure, so maybe you split them up to accommodate a third tenant on some street work nearby.

TowerXchange: Finally, please sum up how you would differentiate Alifabs from other equipment and service providers to MNOs and towercos.

The business of telecom towers is becoming more complex because of the number of bands and the evolution of technologies used, and because of the possibility of site sharing. Designing structures which MNOs and towercos can get planning permission to deploy is key to the success of this industry – working with Alifabs and CommScope makes those problems as easy as possible to resolve.

Our differential is the people who work for me – that’s what makes Alifabs great. They’re an eclectic bunch, but they are all genuine geniuses in their own right! And they want come to work every day – they love it – they’re motivated, driven and dysfunctional!