Site design and deployment best practices for on time project delivery

Shanghai Posts & Telecommunications Designing Consulting Institute (SPTDI) is one of China’s major players, designing over 10,000 sites in the country on top of their international portfolio. With over ten years of experience, SPTDI leverages the best of locally sourced materials while adopting international standards and service concepts to help its customers optimise spend, maintain quality, and ensure project success. As it evolves to become a full-service provider, SPTDI remains anchored through its experience in integrating different international requirements with Chinese solutions and resources.

TowerXchange: Can you please introduce your company?

Shanghai Posts & Telecommunications Designing Consulting Institute, SPTDI, is a wholly owned subsidiary of China Comservice, one of the leading service providers for telecommunications infrastructure. China Comservice is listed on the HK stock market and revenue for 2015 was US$11,802mn. SPTDI was established in Shanghai in 1964 offering contracting, consulting, survey, and design services. SPTDI employs more than 1,000 employees and 80% of them are technicians.

TowerXchange: Can you tell us a little about your international work?

For the past ten years, we have designed or supplied different telecom towers in 32 countries across Asia, Middle East, Africa and South America. We follow international standards (TIA-222-G, AU/NZS, Eurocode) and use Chinese steel materials to save on costs. We’ve done work in Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Brazil and many more.

A few years back between 2007 and 2009 CMPAK in Pakistan was investing in about 6,000 sites around the country. We were the biggest contractor and did more than 1,600 sites, with the scope of work to do network planning, site acquisition, soil test, survey and design, and network optimisation. During this project, nearly 100 engineers were sent to Pakistan and more employees hired locally.

Beginning in March 2012, we provided turnkey service for a new operator in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and that was for site acquisition to commissioning. We delivered 64 sites within ten months. There we used our patented product New Triangular Tower, with 5-15% weight reduction to save costs.

Most recently we are the provider of monopoles and lattice towers to the projects of Vodafone New Zealand and Fiji. Those are just some select examples on the work we’ve done globally.

TowerXchange: Can you describe some of the work you do in China? 

As we are a joint venture of all three major operators, and the preferred supplier of China Tower Corporation (CTC), the new established consolidated operator of telecom sites, we are designing over 10,000 sites each year in China over ten provinces.

We also did tower rentals in Shanghai as a pilot project before CTC was founded. We built 180+ shared towers and then rented to the operators. We rented not only the towers, but also the site equipment and shelters.

Meanwhile we also built some iconic landmark towers such as the Yangshan Harbour Telecom Complex Tower, Expo Park Scenery Towers, and the East Sea Bridge Complex Tower.

TowerXchange: What has been your experience of the challenges of site acquisition and permitting within your target markets? 

The challenges are different from country to country.

In China, the biggest challenge is widespread radiophobia amongst the public. The neighborhoods are sometimes very sensitive when a telecom tower is being constructed in sight. We must be quick and low-profile during construction, and sometimes we must disguise the tower as some other non-related light pole or billboard.

In some developing countries, a stable power supply would be the primary concern. Negotiations with the landlords can also be exhausting, in which case a local agency can help greatly.

In New Zealand, the local councils are very detailed with site appearances, such as shape, colour, environment visibility, construction method, and its impact to the surroundings. Our presented documents need to be comprehensive in addressing each and every single one of their concerns.

TowerXchange: How do you ensure quality and safety standards within a field workforce which, by it’s nature, tends to be characterised by a level of staff turnover and use of contractors?

Subcontractors are not always negative factors in a project, especially for our projects that require targeted expertise. The key is to have the supervisors as the tie between the sub-contractors and the management team.

A well-trained and locally connected supervisor team is essential. They must be highly trusted and authorised to handle all on-site issues. And on the basis of trust, the management team would back them on different difficult situations. A clear and balanced reward and fine system aligned with the supervisors’ personal interests has also proved to be quite effective.

TowerXchange: What are the critical success factors in minimising Mean Time To Response (MTTR) within widely distributed cell sites or sites in markets with poor transport infrastructure?

We have some experiences in western China, where the transportation is still quite poor. And by its nature, the projects in the lower-developed regions are budget-driven.

Localisation is the critical factor, which means including local sub-contractors and local supervisors as our employees. We may only hold several highly experienced and locally connected supervisors for a provincial region, but a wide network of resources and knowledge could be accessed through this small team.

TowerXchange: What has been your experience of designing and deploying small cells and ‘street furniture’?

Shanghai is a crowded city with so many underground structures so most of the new build sites are small cells or street furniture. The major concerns of this site type are uniform series design and quick deployment technology.

As the sites are numerous, the configurations are varied, and under a very compacted deployment schedule, uniform series design helps to ease both the fabrication and assembly since it will have similar interface and inherited and exchangeable parts. Combined with some fast deploying technologies, like pressed pre-cast pile, steel tubular pile, container cabinet, and commercial concrete module, we can minimise the deployment process and traffic interference.

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

It depends on the site, as each has its own character.

For the sites where camouflage is the major concern, like one of our projects in Disneyland, we cooperated with the leading architecture design firm at a very early stage to integrate our telecom site requirements into the complete architecture modeling. This meant the final results were barely noticeable to the public.

For sites in residential blocks, as I mentioned before, to ease the neighborhood’s radiophobia, camouflage is also important. So we must have some compromise in the cost. It would be better to build something than nothing at all. Or if the conditions permitted, we would shift from a normal self-supported tower to small cell sites.

TowerXchange: What do you feel differentiates your solutions from your competitors’? What do you feel SPTDI do really well? 

We are backed by a strong comprehensive group that covers the complete chain from the very beginning part of financial arrangement to the final stage of post-delivery monitoring and maintenance. Our solutions are more practicable, more flexible, and more reliable.

We are also located in Shanghai, one of the most open and internationalised cities in China. This means that compared to other competitors in China, we have adopted more of the mainstream international technology standards and service concepts. We were a design and consulting institute before and now we are transitioning to be a turnkey supplier. Compared to other providers such as tower plant or construction firms, our distinguished advantage remain in technical and advisory services.