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Uptime – And its redefinition in Telecom Infrastructure

July 25, 2011, 4:08 am

Sairam Prasad,

Chief Technology officer, Bharti Infratel Limited

From the very early stages of development of Telecom Infrastructure in India – where an outage of a few hours of service (or even days) in the traditional fixed line telephony was acceptable, to the current phase of high-speed broadband ready 3G networks – not only have the services, but it is also the user expectation which has undergone a 360° change. The definition of Uptime has been reviewed, revised and revisited.

Downtime in today’s age is a ‘non-acceptable’ dirty word, as organizations and industry sectors look to embrace six sigma standards in internal processes and tools to enable high quality outcomes. Today’s Customer is more demanding and intolerant for any pauses or breaks in services, as mobile devices invariably become the most important communications device in business, entertainment and social connectivity. It is this new customer need that will define and probably drive how Infrastructure will be refurbished to fulfill that expectation.

For telecom networks, the single most important contributor to network uptime is availability of good quality power supply at telecom tower sites. While operators and other organizations have extensively debated use of alternate sources of energy to achieve energy efficiency and improved network uptime, Bharti Infratel was the First Telecom Tower Company to successfully implement Green Energy models on a wide scale having installed more than 3 MWT of solar capacity, generating about 5 Mn units of electricity every year. Aimed at reducing diesel usage, Improving uptime and resultant carbon footprint, Bharti Infratel’s Green Towers P7 initiative (http://www.bharti-infratel.com/web/gogreen.html), is an award winning pioneering programme, aimed at adopting cleaner technologies as efficient energy alternatives, to power its telecom towers. These new energy initiatives coupled with operational excellence have enabled Bharti Infratel to work on its core values of ‘Energy efficiency, highest uptime and Environmental friendliness’.  All this has been creditably achieved in spite of there being no subsidies on solar unit installations

While the above efforts have helped in establishing the credence of alternate energies, there are still a whole lot of challenges. There is however no doubt that a single solution fits all sites and needs, there is a good merit in combining various energy efficient technologies tailor made to suit different site combinations to achieve the best result. This combination of technology solutions coupled with good site engineering practices, site monitoring systems and site management practices will yield desired results. The journey is not easy, nor the targets unachievable. It will be the collective commitment and collaboration of the industry and its Partner Eco-system, passionate involvement of Leaders and astute planning and assessment, which will make this dream of 100% network uptime a reality.

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