With all the buzz around the imminent merger between Indus Towers and Bharti Infratel, one might forget that India is one of the most advanced telecom markets in Asia and leading the way in terms of Smart City deployments and green initiatives. In this exclusive interview, Shankar Iyer, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer for Indus Towers, shared the recent efforts in terms of innovation, Smart City projects and the importance of collaboration between industry stakeholders and authorities.
TowerXchange: Can you please summarise your role and responsibilities at Indus Towers?
Shankar Iyer, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer, Indus Towers:
I am responsible for sales, marketing as well as new business initiatives for Indus Towers.
TowerXchange: India is at the forefront of Asia’s Smart Cities efforts. Could you share an update on what’s being done and the progresses in terms of Smart Cities’ “creation”?
Shankar Iyer, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer, Indus Towers:
Indus Towers is proactively involved in making India’s vision of Digital India and Smart City a reality across the country, to enable technology advancements for the benefits of citizen services in urban areas. The Government of India set a series of objectives and pillars for its Smart City campaign focused on sustainability, scalability and inclusivity.
In light of the above, we’ve been working to create a model that is not only unique and efficient but also sustainable and replicable across all of the chosen Smart Cities in India and beyond. Here is what the three pillars mean and how we are working to realise them:
Sustainability: the goal is to create a self-sustainable model at city levels, ensuring resources are effectively utilised thus generating enough cashflow;
Scalability: the scalable infrastructure should cater to the requirements of future developments such as IoT applications as well as allowing for more capacity to be available in the future;
Inclusivity: neutral host infrastructure should be the choice - thus allowing citizens to opt for the service providers of their choice to enhance fair competition and inclusivity.
The first RFP that Indus Towers got involved in – and won – is for the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), where Indus successfully deployed 55 smart multi-utility poles capable of hosting smart LED, surveillance cameras, environmental sensors, public Wi-Fi et cetera. Our innovative and intelligent poles are providing network for seamless connectivity and other services and are capable of serving authorities, utility companies as well as citizens across the NDMC area.
TowerXchange: What innovation in terms of smart sites and new site typologies is Indus working on?
Shankar Iyer, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer, Indus Towers:
In addition to the core mobile network which needs to function through them, smart poles provide a platform for public Wi-Fi, smart lighting and surveillance. Through these smart poles, we can enable many new applications such as emergency and traffic alerts. In line with our green efforts, smart poles track carbon emissions as well as the levels of pollution around them.
Additionally, these poles have also been experimented to provide scalable solutions, allowing more technology – such as 5G – as well as IoT products, variable messaging displays et cetera.
The project also includes the creation of a Control and Command Centre which allows the authority to monitor the efficacy and efficiency of the solutions and services provided.
We are also working towards an integrated innovative and connected pole, which provides one-stop solution for all future Government initiatives, encompassing 5G, Wi-Fi, IoT, digital advertisement, EV charging, security and surveillance, traffic control, environment sensors, public announcements and messaging among others.
Indus Towers aims at serving Smart City initiatives and supporting the Government to continue pursuing these opportunities. One way to ease the process is to change the underlying model. In fact, up until now such projects have been undertaken via an EPC model and Indus was the first to approach these initiatives with a PPP model. Needless to say, PPP should ease the capital requirement by the authorities and pave the way for more projects while ensuring partners are selected with a long-term approach in mind.
TowerXchange: Who are the key stakeholders in these initiatives, beyond towercos? Can you clarify how the “Smart City ecosystem” works to our readers?
Shankar Iyer, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer, Indus Towers:
Indus Towers’ mission is to serve Smart City efforts by creating a robust digital infrastructure as a backbone, thus enabling telecom service providers, various suppliers of smart infrastructures services, utility companies, new age digital service providers to offer their services to citizens.
As a towerco, we are investing into core elements of “space, power, tower and fibre.” System integrators help to bring all the stakeholders on a common platform to provide a holistic solution to the Government’s mission. It is therefore extremely important that innovators from across multiple industries join the efforts and bring their own expertise to create a new ecosystem of partnerships and collaborations.
TowerXchange: In terms of operational excellence, which green energy efforts are being developed?
Shankar Iyer, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer, Indus Towers:
Indus Towers has been and is actively involved in pioneering energy efficiency initiatives and creating innovative solutions to minimise carbon emissions. One of the first changes we’ve implemented across our portfolio is to reduce the use of indoor equipment which requires huge power consumption to maintain lower than ambient temperature standard. In fact, as of now, 80% of our portfolio relies on outdoor equipment able to handle high temperatures – a change that considerably reduces diesel consumption as well as our carbon footprint.
Indus has also pioneered and heavily invested into the adoption of Li-ion batteries, to create a sustainable power backup during the periodic disruption in electricity supply. This change has immensely helped to reduce our dependence on diesel for power backup and provided a path to enhance our reliance on greener options.
Indus is also investing into automation of sites, predictable and preventive operational maintenance, new age data analytics as well as weather monitoring, in order to boost our operational excellence and create adequately configured sites.
TowerXchange: Fibre deployment is critical to enable modern networks to function properly. Which players are involved in fibre deployment across India and how are those projects complementing the efforts of leading towercos?
Shankar Iyer, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer, Indus Towers:
We are all witnessing operators network transforming to data-centric systems from voice-oriented network. In that context, it is imperative for the telecom domain to focus on creating a ubiquitous network providing seamless speed, in line with 4G requirements.
The proximity of 5G is also making it imperative for all network infrastructure to evolve from microwave-based networks to fibre-based ones. These aspirations have also been enunciated in the Government’s National Digital Communications Policy (NDCP) that pushes for a drastic improvement of the levels of tower fiberisation, which should go from the current 25% to 68% by 2023.
Over the years, Indian operators and the Government have put a huge effort in connecting cities with fibre and, up until now, they’ve been the major players involved in fibre deployment across India. Now, the next set of requirements is to penetrate every nook and corner of Indian major cities with fibre and connecting towers and homes.
In light of towercos’ existing connection with their towers as well as the surrounding environment, they are definitely well positioned to seize this opportunity. Towercos could further help by bringing in their proven sharing concept to a new era of fiberised towers and thus further support cost reduction for the telecom community and bring more value to the end customer.
Indus Towers is aggressively exploring these business models, with participation and investment in India’s Smart Cities Program, and so far, it has achieved a 100% success rate in fiberisation as well as Smart City deployments.
Our final goal is to become a one-stop shop for our customers, including MNOs, digital network companies, Wi-Fi providers and beyond and we understand that fibre is a critical component of our evolution towards becoming a fully operational Next-Gen infraco.
