Sagemcom offers a vast number of critical services to African infrastructure providers, from RMS to power optimisation and from fibre to cell site construction. We spoke to their Managing Director of Systems and Networks, Paulo Dias Da Graca, about the future – their newest offerings, the growth of the African market and how technological developments like fibre roll-out and the Internet of Things will affect towercos in Africa.
TowerXchange: Please re-introduce Sagemcom for readers who are not familiar with your company.
Paulo Dias Da Graca, Managing Director, Systems & Networks Department, Sagemcom:
Sagemcom is a leading European group in the high added-value communicating terminals market (set top boxes, internet boxes, electricity meters, et cetera) and telecom/energy infrastructures based in France. Group turnover totals €1.3 billion, the headcount of 4,200 employees work in more than 40 countries, and the group has been profitable since it was created. Sagemcom designs, manufactures and ships more than 22 million terminals worldwide every year. Sagemcom has in house R&D and manufacturing capabilities in both terminals and the telecom/energy market.
TowerXchange: Could you describe which services and solutions you provide in the telecom and energy market?
Paulo Dias Da Graca, Managing Director, Systems & Networks Department, Sagemcom:
The subsidiary Sagemcom Energy & Telecom concentrates Sagemcom Group expertise, R&D and industrial capacities, in telecom and smart metering, enabling the supply of customised connected systems to utilities, telecom operators, tower companies and services operators worldwide.
The combination of these activities addresses the increasing needs of vertical markets and allows Sagemcom Energy & Telecom to propose efficient end-to-end turnkey solutions through its high value added equipment and platforms, easily making smart environments a reality.
In particular we offers solutions and services for smart sites including turnkey construction, tower reinforcement, hybrid and solar power generation, energy optimisation solutions and RMS.
We have built several thousand cell sites, including hybrid and solar power generation, in African countries. We have deployed our in-house RMS solution in several countries including Slovakia, Poland, France, Philippines, Madagascar, Tanzania, DRC and Morocco.
Our smart infrastructure solution includes intelligent traffic systems, optical fibre backbone, fibre to the home/building/curb and fibre to the antenna. We are currently rolling out several FFTH and FTTA networks in locations such as Sénégal, Mauritius and Mali as well as Fibre backbones in Madagascar and Senegal.
We have rolled out more than 30,000km of fibre networks in Africa on a turnkey basis in the last few years. This expertise is more and more useful for towercos and telcos as the cell sites are fiberised.
We have rolled out more than 30,000km of fibre networks in Africa on a turnkey basis in the last few years. This expertise is more and more useful for towercos and telcos as the cell sites are fiberised
TowerXchange: Tell us more about your history and presence in Africa.
Paulo Dias Da Graca, Managing Director, Systems & Networks Department, Sagemcom:
Sagemcom has been present in Africa for 40 years, with 18 established affiliates. In all these affiliates we have skilled technicians and engineers, both through the local team and in management. This has allowed us to support our main clients and to provide a flexible and effective range of services.
In particular we are currently providing managed services for the main African towercos and operator groups. We are also providing more and more energy optimisation audits and services.
TowerXchange: What differentiates Sagemcom from other energy/RMS equipment suppliers or site construction companies?
Paulo Dias Da Graca, Managing Director, Systems & Networks Department, Sagemcom:
Sagemcom is a global company, with in house R&D and high tech manufacturing, providing the whole scope (turnkey construction, energy equipment, fiber connection, cell site monitoring, managed services et cetera) and therefore able to bear the whole responsibility from manufacture to maintenance. Adding a strong and established African presence makes Sagemcom quite unique.
TowerXchange: Which kind of new valuable services or solutions are you planning to propose to the towercos in the near future?
Paulo Dias Da Graca, Managing Director, Systems & Networks Department, Sagemcom:
We are more and more involved in integrating digital terrestrial television system in Africa, as we have recently done in Ivory Coast.
Furthermore, as a founder member of the LoRa alliance, Sagemcom has developed a complete ”Internet of Things” offering compliant with the LoRa standard. We believe that this will pave the way to helping towercos both to address their internal needs and offer new services to their clients with a minimal initial investment.
TowerXchange: What are the main operational challenges you see towercos and MNOs facing in the African market at the moment? What is Sagemcom doing to address this?
Paulo Dias Da Graca, Managing Director, Systems & Networks Department, Sagemcom:
In the very near future half of the cell sites will be towerco owned or managed. Some of them, with a built to suit origin, have multi-tenant capacity from the start, but many others, acquired from MNOs, need to be upgraded from single tenant towards multi-tenant capacity. This results in significant tower structure audits, rehabilitation and upgrade challenges as well as energy upgrade and optimisation needs. These audits and upgrades works have to be made at an affordable cost, by skilled teams. Sagemcom, through its local presence in 18 African countries, with skilled local technicians and engineers, has the ability to provide such services quickly and efficiently. We find MNOs can have the same type of needs, even when they do not sell their sites to towercos but still want to share them with competitors.
The other obvious challenge remains energy costs and security. When mentioning it, we immediately have in mind fuel costs, due to grid unavailability or poor quality grid and due to fuel theft. Sagemcom provides a powerful RMS system which helps to analyse the fuel consumption of the sites and detect anomalies, thus allowing us to prevent faults, excess consumption, thefts et cetera.
We also couple this RMS system to battery cycling or smart ATS solutions which allow customers to decrease their fuel consumption. Even in countries where the grid is quite stable, and diesel is seldom burned, we can help MNOs to reduce their energy bill. Recently, we have installed our RMS solution in a few hundred sites of one of our Northern Africa customers. It allowed them to detect abnormal behaviors in the air conditioning and discrepancies between the power utility bills and the real consumption. This resulted in a 30% reduction of the sites’ energy consumption.
We also offer managed services to address those challenges.
TowerXchange: Tell us about your views on the growth of the African market? How will Africa grow? Which markets will be hottest and what kind of infrastructure upgrades will be needed to support this?
Paulo Dias Da Graca, Managing Director, Systems & Networks Department, Sagemcom:
All reports show that Africa will remain the fastest growing market for mobile communications in the next ten years. It is expected that the number of mobile subscribers will exceed 500mn in 2020 (growing by 50 % compared to 2014). It will overtake Europe and become the second largest mobile market after Asia Pacific.
There is a strong trend towards infrastructure sharing and therefore towards infrastructure upgrades. We should also mention the very special challenge of rural coverage expansion.
TowerXchange: How do your clients’ demands differ in rural versus urban regions?
Paulo Dias Da Graca, Managing Director, Systems & Networks Department, Sagemcom:
The rural related demand has a number of specific characteristics. Due to a lower ARPU and a lower density, the MNOs require low cost sites and solutions. They are ready to accept coverage or technical constraints in order to make it economically viable.
The issue of rural electrification is also very much connected to rural mobile communications. Today there are approximately 260mn mobile customers in emerging countries without access to the electricity grid. Due to charging difficulties, their phones are switched on only when absolutely necessary, thus resulting in loss of revenue for the MNOs. We have developed energy management solutions which allow us to provide the excess energy from cell sites to the local population, through a local plug cabinet (or even through a distribution network). The energy management system warrants that the priority is, at any time, given to the cell site. It allows us to guarantee the site availability, with only the excess energy being distributed.
Many institutions, such as the World Bank, are promoting this concept of rural cell sites being used as anchor points for a first rural electrification.
