With a footprint in eleven countries and a client base including Africa’s four major towercos, NETIS has established itself as a leading service provider for the continent’s tower industry. TowerXchange speak to Frank Bailleul to find out why NETIS treats quality and innovation as crucial areas of the service provider businesses and how NETIS’s teams and management face their daily challenges and keep one step ahead.
TowerXchange: Please can you re-introduce NETIS to TowerXchange readers; what services does the company offer, for how long has it been operating, in which markets do you have a footprint and who are some of your key clients?
Frank Bailleul, R&D Officer, NETIS Group:
NETIS is the preferred partner for maintenance services, infrastructure and smart power solutions for several operators and towercos in different countries in Africa. NETIS Group was established in 2009 with headquarters in Côte d’Ivoire. NETIS Group currently operates in eleven countries.
We have most recently entered Rwanda, alongside our other subsidiaries: Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Bénin, Gabon, Kenya, Morocco, Togo, Tanzania and Uganda, with more than 1,100 permanent personnel. Our target is now to have a footprint in at least 15 African countries by the end of 2020.
NETIS Group currently maintains over 5,500 sites for IHS Towers, Eaton Towers, Helios Towers and American Tower Corporation. We maintain both passive and active network management in five countries for all major African towercos. NETIS is a major contractor for large telecom infrastructure projects such as site build and power optimisation projects. Since 2016, NETIS also provides full FTTH fibre optic networks (FTTX, Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Networks and Digital Cities) in five countries and major capitals.
With a high level of quality and expertise our fibre optic teams cover any stage of such projects. From market qualification, design, rollout, 24/7 maintenance and final customer installation. We have overpassed 2000km of fibre optic cable over the past two years and we expect to double this before the end of 2020. We can state without any fear that we are the African specialist for FTTH aerial networks. With more than 200 personnel fully dedicated to fibre optic, NETIS can promise relevant results, high quality and quick deployment.
We are a proud partner to several vendors specialised in power solutions, RMS, RDUs, COWs and other telecommunications solutions and as explained below we now propose bespoke solutions and products to our customers – from drone survey, super-capacitor backup and even Ka Band VSAT services.
Even with such a large scope and business lines, NETIS group will not stay limited to this market. In order to maintain services quality in our core businesses, minimise our environmental and social footprint and to expand our market place, it’s mandatory to investigate new areas too.
TowerXchange: For a group like NETIS that is today focussed on African market, diversification is an important goal, how do you manage this evolution?
Frank Bailleul, R&D Officer, NETIS Group:
We have a dedicated Research & Development department with regional links to collect experiences and to spot areas of African dynamism to explore. We have put in place an internal process to link our technical teams with strategic technical partners across Africa. We always have our eyes wide open to new opportunities.
In addition to energy-related services and product lines for our existing customers such as towercos and MNOs, we have set up a 100% renewable energy-focused department. Solar, of course, occupies a large part of our time and the research conducted by our green energy section. In particular, we are working on two main tracks to go beyond the hybrid and smart management solutions we already offer.
On the one hand we are exploring solutions that are low-cost and dedicated to supply the ultra-rural telecom sites, as well as working on small generation and storage units for localised needs in isolated areas. In particular, we hope to enable rural electrification programmes for government services, clinics and schools. Bringing light into these shadows goes beyond a simple economic objective, it is, in our view, the moral and social responsibility of NETIS Group to enable greater electrification of rural Africa.
In parallel, another route to electrify Africa is through turnkey solutions for solar farms. Designing, installing and commissioning is one area of work, but we also work upstream on agile maintenance solutions such as drone infra-red surveys and cleaning robots that minimise water consumption and optimise yields.
Another innovation in the field of renewable energies we are working on are wind solutions integrated into telecom pylons. With partners, we have already deployed four prototypes of wind turbine pylons in East Africa that are closely monitored by all our customers as a future solution for several areas of the continent.
Beyond producing power, energy storage is a major challenge. This is one of the critical points that handicaps solar power in particular. Batteries are complex to manage, expensive and can have their own negative environmental impact. In this context, we now propose alternative solutions using a new advanced technology, super-capacitors. With a comparable cost, we find super-capacitors to be a more reliable storage medium with a longer lifecycle of 1,000,000 charge / discharge cycles.
TowerXchange: Can you tell use more about your use of drones and how they are being deployed to help maintain telecoms sites?
Frank Bailleul, R&D Officer, NETIS Group:
Of course. First of all, drones are not only boys’ toys. For towercos and operators, getting close to their assets and monitoring investments is a key point. Traditional manual audits are always time and cash consuming and can generate inaccurate results as a result of human error.
For the last 18 month, the DRONE by NETIS department has managed more than 1,000 missions on towers. We provide end-to-end solution from site acquisition reports, microwave line of sight to quality audit on both radio and structural sides. Drones gives us agility and enable us to visit up to six sites a day, save time and prevent hazardous climbing exposure. With more than ten drones and internally trained pilots (formally riggers) we can deploy our drones anywhere you need them with strict safety management.
We also provide high grade products as 2D and 3D mapping, photogrammetry and land surveys that we can propose to telecom, or any other industry like mining, forestry, Oil & Gas and so on.
TowerXchange: How has NETIS evolved as an organisation in order to offer these new services and innovations?
Frank Bailleul, R&D Officer, NETIS Group:
NETIS has taken several steps to ensure continuous improvement in cell site management. At NETIS we have a strong belief in quality processes and procedures and put great emphasis on operational efficiency. One of our key strengths is our use of a quality management system to improve our internal processes. All our processes are ISO 9001:2015 /14001:2015 /18001:2017 certified and we ensure continuous improvement by conducting regular internal and external audits. NETIS boasts a SHERQ (Safety Health Environment Risk and Quality) Team that plays a key role in maintaining quality processes and having ISO certification for every NETIS operation.
Selecting highly qualified managers and directors for all business aspects to ensure that service offered to the clients is of the highest quality is key, NETIS has a continuous training programme for all its staff along with a continuous performance review programme. This programme is aimed at developing teams to meet company standards and customer targets.
We do also focus on work conditions and social environment. With new activities such as fibre optic and increasing tower build in all our markets, we face new challenges regarding work conditions. We believe in employee empowerment and motivation and all our teams are well equipped with the necessary tools and facilities to carry out their various tasks. Teams are also well remunerated and well trained to manage daily and complex tasks.
We have to be proactive and thoughtful because our work can be dangerous: it involves work at height, complex procedures, live electrical systems, plus work in public areas for aerial fibre deployments. Providing the best quality services requires skilled people that will work with the proper tools and processes. For this reason we are planning to put in place two training centres for both NETIS staff and external customers.
Why do we do all of this? We believe that knowledge and knowhow transfer and reinforcement are keys for NETIS development and for our beautiful continent. We want to move our teams, our partners and every African on the continent to the forefront of new technology, whether that is Fibre Optic Networks, Drones, GIS, Tower Rigging and Safety at Height or investment in renewables, and 5G deployment and active maintenance.
Allow me to leave you with one more example. We are embracing innovation from across Africa, this is why we are also building strong relationships with innovators on the green side of the industry. Our maintenance teams are now using a water-hyacinth oil-absorbing product collected in Benin to clean and prevent oil spillages. Taking inspiration from this, any NETIS subsidiary has to be ready (if they aren’t already already) by the end of this year with proper storage and recycling solutions. We are not here speaking about greenwashing, but a real and controlled process to minimise our footprint and to make our teams sensitive to environment.
As I have said above, we must show the way, not follow another’s path.
