France has seen multiple tower transactions and tower investments, and rumor suggests further portfolios of assets are coming to market. This article uses France as a pertinent example to illustrate how crowdsourced business intelligence can rapidly enhance prospective investors’ understanding of the tenancy lease-up potential of sites in France – or any other country.
TowerXchange: Please reintroduce M2Catalyst and Crowd SiteIntel for any readers not yet familiar with your unique capabilities.
Mike Brough, CEO, M2Catalyst:
The Crowd SiteIntel Business Intelligence Dashboard (CSI-BID), automates the process of benchmarking the network performance of all MNOs in the market, around any site, whether it is a macro tower, monopole, rooftop, alternative site, small cell or indoor DAS system.
Traditional drive and walk testing for analyzing the Tenancy Lease-Up (co-location) potential of cell sites can be very time consuming and expensive. CSI-BID automates the process of analyzing the co-location potential for non-tenants on each site, offering critical insights to investors, buyers and sellers of tower and small cell portfolios. Comprehensive reports covering portfolios of tens of thousands of towers can be delivered just a few in days.
Crowd SiteIntel is a mobile business intelligence platform driven by contributions from millions of mobile phone enthusiasts. The crowdsourced contributions abide by strict privacy laws. CSI-BID has trillions of data points instantly available across 200 countries.
TowerXchange: What can you tell us about the towers, rooftops and other points of service used by MNOs in France?
Mike Brough, CEO, M2Catalyst:
In France, there is a publicly available database called ANFR, to which all investors have access, which is a primary source of information when considering investing in sites.
Where M2Catalyst excels is in the use of algorithms, AI and data science to layer additional insights on top of this publicly available data. Leveraging billions of recent network performance measurement readings in France, M2Catalyst benchmarks the performance of over 50,000 sites, enabling the speedy analysis of target investment sites in relation to neighboring/competing sites. The ANFR database also identifies site types, finding 22,400 self-supporting macro sites, 5,400 monopoles, 10,100 rooftop sites and a variety of alternative sites. The analysis from M2 is adjusted based on the site type because the coverage area of a macro site is very different from that of a small cell, rooftop, or other type of sites.
Figure one: Using France as an example in this screen shot, you see that with billions of readings, there is complete network performance benchmarking data across the entire country
Figure two: Crowd SiteIntel screen shot of Marseille has several hundred sites of all kinds, with over 15 million readings used to perform the analysis
TowerXchange: With more sites coming to market in France, how can prospective bidders determine the value of those sites?
Mike Brough, CEO, M2Catalyst:
The value of sites has been calculated in the same way for years, using traditional metrics such as the fiber access, height of the tower, the term of the land lease, distance to the nearest competing tower, et cetera – essentially a standard brick and mortar analysis. Crowd SiteIntel adds layers of additional insights into the valuation equation by crunching massive amounts of data to determine the tenancy lease-up potential of each site.
In a four MNO market, what is the probability that a non-tenant will lease space on a given site? What is the amount of mobile usage on this site versus other sites? How much mobile data is being used? What is the network performance of each MNO within 100 meters, 250 meters, 500 meters, 1KM, 2KM or other ranges from the site? How is the site performing for current tenants at all these ranges? Figure three shows the benchmarking of readings within 100 meters of each rooftop site in this Marseille neighborhood. The one site circled in blue has three MNOs with poor performance within range, thus has high Tenancy Lease-Up Potential.
Figure three: Three MNOs in Marseille have poor performance, and therefore high Tenancy Lease-Up Potential, within range of a site.
TowerXchange: What is the ANFR database, and what insights can you add beyond that?
Mike Brough, CEO, M2Catalyst:
In France, each time a new tower, rooftop, small cell or any other type of site is deployed, the details of that deployment must be entered into the ANFR (L’Agence nationale des fréquences) database, which is publicly available. There are over 400,000 entries and more than 50,000 locations in the database, with details such as the mobile network operator, whether the antenna is 2G/3G/LTE, the band channel, site type, and more. In the Crowd SiteIntel database for France, there are 2,689,695 unique Cell ID’s across 2G, 3G, and 4G-LTE.
When you combine the ANFR data with the Crowd SiteIntel data, the insights from the automated reports from M2 grow exponentially and can, in fact, be delivered in days. For example, a very common question regards the range of each cell tower. The Crowd SiteIntel dashboard answers this with its Cell ID coverage maps, which look at each Cell ID or Band Channel for each antenna separately. For each Cell ID, where does coverage break down or transition to another site? Crowd SiteIntel can answer these questions and many more.
TowerXchange: Can you share an example of what the tenancy lease-up potential report actually looks like, and the kinds of insights in can generate using an example city?
Mike Brough, CEO, M2Catalyst:
See Figure four. The Tenancy Lease-Up Potential (TLUP) reports provide automated benchmarking of all the sites in the target investment portfolio and the neighboring sites. In the case of France, we can provide reports in days across more than 50,000 sites. The reports will provide an executive summary for each site type and then the details of all the readings within multiple ranges of the site.
Figure four: A sample TLUP executive summary for selected sites in Marseille show the rooftop, monopole, and self-supported macro sites in different categories. Then the next XLS below shows a series of tabs across the bottom, each with a different set of ranges for each site type. These distance and dBm ranges are adjustable for the reports
TowerXchange: MNO Free will be a key driver of growth for towercos in France, because they need to acquire thousands of sites as their roaming agreement ends. How can you model the specific needs of Free?
Mike Brough, CEO, M2Catalyst:
The Crowd SiteIntel dashboard enables the isolation of single MNOs to quickly identify all the coverage gaps.
For example, there are over three million readings for Free in Marseille, with 42% of those readings being poor. Each tile on the map below represents the average reading in a transparency, so the darker red tiles reflect areas where Free has the greatest number of very poor network performance measurements while the dark green show where the Free network performance is very good. This process of identifying where Free has poor network performance within range of one of the 50,000+ sites in France can be automated through the TLUP reporting.
TowerXchange: Beyond the Tenancy Lease-Up Potential report, how can M2Catalyst help towercos understand opportunities to expand not just outdoor coverage, but indoor too?
Mike Brough, CEO, M2Catalyst:
The crowd SiteIntel dashboard has benchmarking tools to create polygons around any park, city street, and right down to smaller sections of buildings.
Figure six: The Aushopping Val de Fontenay, Fontenay-sous-Bois, location, where five buildings have very poor network performance while the street level network performance is excellent. The CSI-BID dashboard can be used to explore an urban area and find buildings that have poor indoor coverage
TowerXchange: If a client were able to provide you with the locations of metro fiber rings and last mile fiber in France, how would you be able to leverage that data to forecast demand for sites at specific locations along those routes?
Mike Brough, CEO, M2Catalyst:
For fiber ring and last mile analysis, we load hundreds or sometimes thousands of potential sites along the fiber, sometimes just 100 meters apart. Then each proposed site is automatically analyzed for Tenancy Lease-Up Potential Benchmarking for each MNO in the market. Sometimes a minor site adjustment of 100 meters can have a significant impact on MNO coverage. Then a TLUP report can be automatically generated to benchmark each potential site location along the fiber line, to identify how many multi-tenant locations can be placed, prior to building sites (or buying or building the fiber ring).
TowerXchange: Finally, we’ve used France as an example, but please sum up how M2Catalyst can be used to provide unique insights to inform any sale or investment in cell sites.
Mike Brough, CEO, M2Catalyst:
There are three ways in which M2 can help with a tower investment analysis:
- Quick standardized Tenancy Lease-Up Potential benchmarking reports can be delivered in days, across portfolios of 50,000 or more sites.
- Access to the Crowd SiteIntel dashboard can be provided within 24 hours. This enables more in-depth customized analysis, varying dBm ranges for Signal Strength, Quality and Signal to Noise ratio. Analyzing data consumption trends in proximity of each site, Cell ID and Band Channel mapping, indoor versus outdoor network performance, and more.
- In addition, M2 can provide consulting services if further acceleration of deeper site portfolio analysis is required. For more information, email: info@m2catalyst.com
