Digitizing tower assets can be extremely helpful to a tower owner in terms of revenue recovery, acceleration of sales, and the efficient and proactive management of those assets, according to Pointivo, a software provider bringing AI-driven digital twins and data analysis to a variety of verticals, including telecom. Pointivo says its patented tower analytics software revolutionizes the way companies collect and manage their physical asset data, improving business decisions through accuracy, automation, and AI.
Meeting the Challenge
Tower companies are in the business of maximizing revenue that can be generated through new and existing leases. They must ensure they are getting compensated for all of the equipment their tenants place on the tower and confirm compliance with the lease.
“To achieve both of these goals, the tower company really has to have a complete and accurate inventory of what is on their tower and precisely where it is located,” said Pat Lien, Vice President, Sales and Marketing at Pointivo. “If a carrier installs a RAD center three feet higher than what was leased and it encroaches on the RAD center above it, that inhibits the tower owner from selling that space.”
Managing an inventory portfolio spread far and wide can be a challenge because the data comes in from the field in a piecemeal fashion. Acquisitions may lead to undocumented modifications.
“Tower owners may not have a handle on the precise location and total amount of their inventory,” Lien said. “We’ve encountered tower owners that didn’t even know whose equipment was on their towers. How can you charge rent when you don’t know who to send the bill to?”
Often, this is because it is time consuming and expensive to do a full inventory analysis. Sending climbers out to every tower over a wide geographic footprint to collect that data and document all of the related details in one location can be an arduous task.
“What we can do at Pointivo is quickly, through drone data capture, digitize the towers,” Lien said. “All of that data can be assembled and located in a single location at the fingertips of the tower owners.”
Anytime there is a modification, or in case of a weather event that potentially changes the condition of that tower, owners can send a drone, digitize the tower, and update the digital twin. It is also far less expensive and 100 percent safer than sending technicians to climb the tower, according to Lien. “It augments the inventory of every tenant on the tower in near real-time inventory.”
Visibility
After the site is flown by the drone, Pointivo generates a complete digital twin and provides it to the tower owner. That digital twin pinpoints every metric on that tower, including the manufacturer and model of every piece of equipment, which is then assembled into a single dashboard. With three clicks of a mouse, a tower owner can take a visual site walk with Pointivo’s virtual navigation tool SmartNavTM.
“A tower owner can, at a glance, see his entire portfolio across the country, or the world,” Lien said. “You can zoom into any region, any state, or metro area and select an individual tower. Instantly they have the data at their fingertips for everything that is on a tower with hundreds of images that we’ve created for virtual navigation.”
The tower owner can also authorize any contractor or vendor the same access. This accelerates applications for new leases and enables tower owners to track installations.
“In those two revenue streams alone — new and existing leases — we have examples of tower companies that have made back tremendous amounts of money,” Lien said. “Even from an internal standpoint, we have one case where a tower owner saved over a million dollars a year just in proactive operations and management because all of their internal staff had access to this data.”
“The typical lease application process is very manual,” says Lien. “It can lead to a considerable amount of back and forth between the carrier, the site acquisition firm, and the tower owner. Pointivo eliminates unnecessary steps, streamlining the process for a carrier to qualify, or disqualify a site.”
“With Pointivo, the carrier instantly knows, by looking at the site on our platform, if it is an acceptable site from a physical and an RF standpoint, as well as a physical equipment location sampling,” Lien said.
“In the case of a tower acquisition, the 30- to 60-day period of due diligence after an offer has been negotiated may not allow for the inspection of all the structures and their tenants. This may reduce the offer. Access to a complete repository of data on the towers and their tenants can make bidders more confident and potentially, increase bids,” says Lien.
“It benefits both sides, the current tower owner that is selling, and the acquiring company,” Lien said. “Both have a much better basis upon which to make the transaction.”
Conclusion
Pointivo combines AI and advanced analytics into a powerful digital twin software platform that drives a precise understanding of tower assets. The data enhances every part of the tower ecosystem. It not only applies to the efficiency of the tower owner, but when the data is made available to the carriers and their contractors, engineers, and even site acquisition professionals, it allows each of them time to do their jobs more quickly and accurately, says Pointivo.
For more information, contact Pointivo at [email protected] or visit pointivo.com.
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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