Next level communication: the growth of artificial intelligence in passive infrastructure

Huawei’s impressive global scope and position as market leader in the telecom and telecom power sectors has won them significant business in the African market to date. Their intelligent RMS system allows the NOC to monitor, diagnose and communicate the health of the network and infrastructure, combining site-level details with network-level visibility. Huawei see that a data explosion in Africa is imminent, and that towerco data management systems still need significant work in order to allow seamless and effective control of their growing networks. TowerXchange spoke to James Qiao, Vice President of Marketing & Sales Support at Huawei Telecom Energy about their exciting intelligent solution and plans for growth in Africa.

TowerXchange: What do Huawei foresee in the future development of the African communications market?

Smartphone penetration in Africa is quite low, about half of the global average: the global average is about 30%, in Africa it’s below 15% which means there’s significant potential in Africa for mobile broadband growth. Also I see all the major service providers in Africa have already defined their strategy on mobile broadband which will promote data services in the African market and lead to more network construction and site build up. This implies significant opportunities for both towercos and Huawei.

TowerXchange: What challenges are African towercos facing and how can Huawei help?

I see that towercos in Africa are facing significant challenges. Some challenges are on the financing side, also some long-term profitability concerns, and on how to improve the resource sharing rate.

I believe the financing issue will be solved eventually, that’s not the blocking issue. As long as we have a justified business case there’s no reason why towercos can’t get financing. But long-term profitability and long-term sustainability are more of an issue. Today the situation is not so satisfactory. I see a lot of issues, as an example, very high fuel costs. Lack of grid availability means many sites are powered by diesel generators which are old and don’t operate in an efficient way. Another example is tenancy ratio, today the tower tenancy ratio is about 1.2 in Africa but when we look at the leading towercos in some developed countries such as the US the tenancy ratio is around 2.5-2.7.

There are challenges on the management systems as well; some towercos run several management systems from several vendors which are silos with no interaction. Lack of unification costs more on OPEX and also creates a lot of trouble. When you look inside towercos’ existing sites, most of which were inherited from the MNOs, many of the configurations are very complicated and difficult to manage, systems from many different vendors which may not even exist any longer, obsolete and less reliable technologies, less energy efficient technology solutions…  In terms of building new sites, hard to reach places, difficult site acquisition and energy acquisition are the major challenges. Looking forward, towercos will also have to look at building and growing sites along a well-defined evolution path, evolving to support future higher user traffic, higher service demand, and support the future convergence of the IT and CT worlds in a much more effective and efficient manner. These challenges must be addressed and these are the things Huawei is good at and can contribute to, with its world leading platform it has established around all CT, IT, power electronics, renewable energy, chipset, software, and artificial intelligence technologies.

TowerXchange: What is Huawei’s vision for the future of cell site energy in Africa?

When people talk about cell site energy and power systems they think of legacy products or solutions which are bulky, less efficient, and not quite reliable and scalable. Besides, in the past power systems were also just dumb devices without much built-in intelligence, people had to schedule routine tasks and visit cell sites in person to undertake maintenance. Maintenance was labour intensive and required a large number of highly skilled technicians. Even worse, there were large amounts of unstable diesel gen-sets running on the networks of Africa, leading to high fuel consumption, high maintenance cost and telecom service outages.

We envision the future cell sites in Africa have to be more reliable, more energy efficient, more scalable, easier to be built up, and easier to be maintained and managed, including energy management.

In terms of cell site energy, Huawei proposes three level energy efficiency. At system level, Huawei provides the highest energy efficient power systems in the world. And with site level and network level energy efficiency implementation, we ensure the maximum overall network-wise energy efficiency. Huawei’s specially designed site and energy solutions also ensures the highest level of reliability, scalability and simplified operation, maintenance, site and energy management.

TowerXchange: Do you anticipate energy equipment remaining a capital purchase by towercos and MNOs in Africa, or do you anticipate OPEX sharing and ESCO business models playing an important role? Where does Huawei see its role within the ESCO proposition?

Actually we see both business models existing concurrently. Today some towercos are following the CAPEX purchasing model. The technology vendors provide the solution and equipment and the MNOs own the assets after installation. There are also some towercos that would prefer an OPEX model to pay from the future energy saving or maintenance cost reduction, due to the shortage of initial funding or due to their uncertainty about the value of new generation site and energy solutions, especially on the quantification of energy savings and the overall OPEX savings.

Some towercos may chose the OPEX model at the beginning, however, I believe after careful evaluation and after they see the results from real-world practices, most of them will eventually move on towards CAPEX model, because with OPEX model, it’s true they pay less to technology solution providers at the initial stage, however, over years the accumulated payments will most likely be much higher than the CAPEX model. The value of new technologies is there, and I believe MNOs and towercos will realise that through practices.

Huawei is flexible, today I think the majority of our revenue, 95% or more is still coming from the CAPEX model. However, in some cases, if the customer prefers, we can work with the the towercos and MNOs to find out solutions around the OPEX and ESCO model. The decision will be on project basis, case by case.

TowerXchange: Should remote monitoring capabilities be embedded into energy equipment, or should a third party RMS be used to integrate performance data from all equipment on a cell site?

For Huawei, we focus on both aspects of efficiency, energy efficiency and management efficiency. Management efficiency and OPEX reduction is critical for towercos business success, and RMS plays an important role there.

Let’s take a look at an example of the power system. We want to be able to remotely schedule how the power system works. If there’s an electricity tariff change between busy and non-busy hours, for example, if in the daytime electricity charge is higher than that of the night, do you want to be able to control the behaviour of the power systems to take advantage of the lower tariff at night, such as storing electricity power into the battery at night, while during the day when the tariff is higher, taking power from the battery to reduce the extra operating costs?

Huawei’s solution is we schedule the battery charging and discharging in a smart, automated, and remote way.

And for the batteries, do you want your staff to schedule routine site visits to understand if the battery is healthy or not? In the US if you send one person to visit a cell site, it will cost over $300, even if he finds nothing wrong. In this case, this site visit is purely unnecessary. Let’s imagine a network of 10,000 cell sites with one unnecessary site visit per site annually, the saving potential is huge. The labour cost of skilled technician in Africa is lower, but still accounts for a majority part of the OPEX and it’s worth taking a serious look into.

Huawei’s solution is to plant intelligence onto each individual battery cell, it will automatically perform a health check for each individual cell and will tell us how much capacity they have if they’re fully charged, how much electricity power they can provide, how long from now you need to change or replace the battery cell et cetera. It can report all the health check information, no matter if it’s about battery cells, diesel gen-sets, or other systems, to the centralised site monitor on the cell site, which can aggregate information and send it to a centralised management platform in the NOC. The team can then understand the situation of each of the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of battery cells in their network. They can then schedule visits for the sites which have problems so there are no wasted site visits. The engineer can combine trips and deal with all the problems at once.

These are just two little examples among many more.

Basically, Huawei’s remote site and energy management platform has multiple capabilities compared with the legacy platforms which typically just provide an alarm to alert you once something has gone wrong, meaning when engineers go to the site the damage is already done. So we don’t just provide the alarm, we provide performance monitoring, health check, intelligent analysis, proactive maintenance, end-to-end energy management, and reporting. We also offer mobile apps. Let’s take another example. Huawei’s energy management will monitor power consumption for all energy consuming devices, including each load or network equipment, the gen-sets fuel consumption, the energy consumed by air con et cetera. If we have 100 similar sites across a certain region, and ten of them are consuming 20% more electricity than the other sites, these kinds of issues would be visible on our platform, then you can quickly analyse whether the air con is set too low or if there is something wrong with the enclosure or network devices or other stuff, and take immediate action to correct the situation. By introducing artificial intelligence and proactive management into the traditional dumb infrastructure, we can ensure the highest level of overall site energy efficiency, and identify potential issues before they compromise site performance, reliability, or generate very high OPEX.

TowerXchange: Tell us about what sets Huawei apart from its competitors in the African market?

Today we have already reached the number one DC power market position in terms of annual shipments globally. Huawei’s market share is 24.7%; we lead the second place competitor by 6%. We have about 1.7mn power systems running day and night in the networks of 310 different MNOs across 170 countries. In almost every country you can find Huawei’s power systems. That means Huawei’s power systems are proven to be reliable in the field and we have a lot of field experience.

And in Africa, Huawei already serves all major MNOs, we understand the MNOs, we understand their networks, we understand the deployment scenarios, and we already have superior service capabilities in the region.

The power systems are different with telecom network equipment. Power systems are very diversified, they need to survive in all different environments, protecting, powering and cooling network equipment; mountains, coastal, city centre, rooftops, desert, stable-grid, unstable-grid, off-grid – its’ really tough to build the complete and profound portfolio which can support all those different scenarios well. Today, we have all these in place already, and we are still continuously making them better, by leveraging our technology leadership in digitalization, internetworking, and artificial intelligence in both the CT and the IT worlds. I believe, Huawei’s field experiences in the region, along with the global reach in almost every country both product-wise and service-wise will make Huawei an ideal partner for both international and regional towercos.