How Huawei is helping Africa get ready for 5G

Huawei have a full suite of services for towercos and MNOs, from energy solutions to small cells, digital indoor solutions and managed services. Huawei is of course also a world-leading 5G innovator, accelerating development of next generation mobile networks. While Lesotho has a small active 5G network, development of 5G in larger African countries has been slower, but Huawei expects 5G rollout in South Africa, Morocco and Egypt by 2021, plus significantly more 5G deployments by 2023. This interview covers Huawei’s expectations for 5G in Africa and how towercos and MNOs must optimise power management to accommodate the extra load.

TowerXchange: Huawei is one of the world’s largest telecoms equipment providers, but can you please outline for our readers your company’s capabilities and services for towercos.

Huawei has been a pioneer in establishing a dedicated Solution and Sales organisation to serve the telecom tower industry. Huawei considers the spread and growth of towercos as a core strategic driver of growth for telecoms, for Huawei, and for reducing the digital divide.

Huawei can provide a suite of solutions to towercos, including;

- Innovative site typologies

- Efficient energy systems

- Digital Indoor Solutions (DIS)

- Antennae

- Fibre and microwave backhaul

- Data centres

- Managed services

- OSS/BSS, and much more

Huawei strives to help towercos transform into digital infrastructure companies, driving growth and reshaping their total cost of ownership (TCO) structure, by optimising capex and reducing their opex.

TowerXchange: Huawei has been active in Africa for a long time – can you share some of your experiences?

Huawei have worked for most MNOs and towercos in Africa, and we are proud to be helping them work towards the vision of connecting the unconnected.

Huawei is embedded in the telecommunications industry in Africa through its strong technological innovation capabilities and social responsibilities. For example Huawei has invested in improved rural coverage and micro-grid services at the community or village level. Huawei’s energy innovation has reduced the fuel consumption and the carbon emissions of cell sites, we have hybridised sites by removing diesel gensets and installed renewable energy applications, and we have reduced opex by enabling digital O&M.

TowerXchange: What can Huawei offer that other network energy equipment and service providers cannot?

From a technology point view, we want our solutions to do three things: be simple, be efficient, and be smart.

Simple: Huawei energy solutions have a modular design (including power capacity, cooling capacity, battery backup capacity et cetera) to protect investments and to enable scalability according to network demand and to optimise the whole system with simple interfaces for operations and maintenance.

Efficient: Huawei has already launched a rectifier with up to 98% efficiency, an uninterruptable power supply (UPS) module with efficiency of up to 97.5%, a solar inverter with efficiency of up to 99%; and all of these solutions are proven in field operations around the globe.

Smart: Our systems are connected, visible, controllable, manageable and intelligent to enable equipment and process management that improves O&M efficiency by 40%.

From a service capability point view, Huawei is the only company in the industry that provides end-to-end telecoms solutions. With a deep understanding of telecoms networks, Huawei provides energy products that are the most adaptable for various scenarios. Huawei’s energy products represent the optimal engineering application of electrical and electronic technologies to telecoms networks. And Huawei has a mature, global operational platform and organisation that ensures a high service level and excellent quality.

TowerXchange: How has Huawei been able to help towercos reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) by improving cell site autonomy and cutting O&M costs?

There are lots of products and services Huawei offer which improve total cost of ownership for towercos. Our integrated approach to system design includes digital and intelligent features such as smart, visible, controllable and manageable equipment, which improves the timeliness and precision of maintenance and operations.

We have several tools to ensure site reliability. Our Remote Preventive Maintenance and Remote Troubleshooting solution enables towercos to spot problems in advance and solve them, significantly improving cell site autonomy, improving performance against SLAs, and reducing opex. We enable improved capex thanks to our Evaluation and Scenario Modernisation plan that enables better power availability ratio management.

TowerXchange: When do you expect to see 5G deployed at scale in an African market? How do you think 5G networks in Africa will differ to those in developed markets?

We judge that the first wave of 5G will happened in South Africa, Egypt and Morocco by 2021 and that other countries will come one to two years later. 5G will enable thousands of businesses, and the first commercial business use cases for 5G in Africa will focus on to-the-home and to-the-business applications, which may be different to other regions. But that does not mean that Africa will take the lead in inclubating these new 5G-enabled businesses, because Africa is one to two years later than the leading wave of 5G markets.

TowerXchange: Do you think macro towers will continue to dominate in Africa as networks densify, or do you expect the mix of site typologies to change significantly?

I cannot disagree with the suggestion that macro towers will continue to represent the majority mainstay of Africa’s wireless networks, but Huawei believe that the future network will consist of three main layers of site typologies: a basic layer of macro sites in suburban areas, a middle layer of tube or pole sites in dense urban areas, and a layer of in-building systems for indoors.

TowerXchange: Regular power supply is already a challenge in much of Africa, how do you propose towercos meet the energy requirements of cell sites which move from 2G/3G/4G to 5G?

While the evolution of mobile networks will still increase energy requirements, the good news is that solar and lithium are becoming more and more affordable. They are already very competitively priced. For example, in Dubai, the lowest generation cost of an 800MW solar PV plant is only $0.03/kWh. This much lower than the cost of thermal power.

At sites with unreliable grid connections, or off grid, towercos should consider how to produce the lowest cost energy by exploring different combinations of generation and storage, always using modular solutions to accommodate increased sharing, and by refining how they design their power solutions. There are still many sites deployed with outdated power systems which are not cost-effective and which needlessly increase energy consumption and opex.

TowerXchange: It may be many years before 5G comes to some African sites, what are the key energy innovations African towercos can take advantage of to reduce energy costs?

As we mentioned before, we do not think 5G will come particularly late in Africa, and it’s time to consider the energy evolution to 5G now.

By the time Huawei attend the TowerXchange Meetup Africa 2019 we will have launched, on the 26th September in Amsterdam, a 5G energy target network that will demonstrate our solution for 5G energy, illustrating to the whole industry that an innovative new approach must be taken to architecting and designing power systems for 5G. The system will include a one site one cabinet design, dynamic voltage boost, lithium-ion backup, intelligent power usage staggering, intelligent peak shaving and high power density. In summary, site energy efficiency (SEE) can be increased by up to 17%, while our new intelligent management system improves O&M efficiency by 40%.

5G will not come to Africa as late as some people expect, so an earlier deployment of 5G Power will yield greater savings to towercos and MNOS over the ten-plus year lifecycle of the next stage of network evolution.