The “Ground Truth” Gap: How the Tower Industry is Leveraging AI and Digital Twins
In the tower business, what you don’t know can hurt you. That’s what this executive roundtable concurred. Hosted by Light Reading, Telecoms.com, and vHive, leaders from SBA Communications, Vertical Bridge, and NCS discussed the gap between what’s in the database and what’s actually hanging on the steel.
A 45% Reality Check
Moderator Scott Bicheno, Telecoms.com, set the stage with a sobering statistic: field data suggests nearly 45% of on-tower equipment is inconsistent with official records. For an industry pivoting toward AI and 5G, this isn’t just a clerical error; it’s a massive drain on efficiency, according to Bicheno.
“We’ve been flying blind,” noted Paul Jesemann, CTO for Telco+ at NCS. He emphasized that without a “digital handshake” between the physical tower and the digital record, efforts to implement AI-driven networks or automated planning are built on a foundation of sand.
Speed to Market: “Time Kills Deals”
The discussion moved quickly from theory to the “boots on the ground” reality of M&A. Ariel Rubin, VP of Integration at Vertical Bridge, shared how they integrated over 6,300 Verizon sites.
“Time kills deals,” Rubin warned. “By using vHive’s digitized site data, we knew exactly what was on the tower and on the ground.” Vertical Bridge was able to “minimize the time to get contracts in place with third party carriers and therefore begin billing quicker than we had historically.”
Hunting for “Found Revenue”
Perhaps the biggest eye-opener came from Richard Cane, EVP at SBA Communications. During a 7,000-site acquisition in Central America, SBA used autonomous site capture technologies to conduct due diligence that would have been “nearly impossible” via manual climbs.
Cane noted that the process uncovered revenue by identifying unbilled equipment that had been “flying under the radar” on existing leases. In this new paradigm, the tower company acts as a “natural broker,” using this data to bridge the gap between competing carriers and the physical reality of the site.
The central question for the C-suite today is: How do you grow the business without growing OPEX? Yariv Geller, Co-Founder and CEO of vHive, argues that the answer isn’t working harder, it’s working smarter through AI and automation. By swapping out slow, manual “truck rolls” for automated workflows, companies can finally break the linear cost curve, enabling teams to do far more with the same headcount.
“It’s either you adopt these technologies,” Geller warned, “or you’re not competitive and you’re falling behind.”
Watch the full executive roundtable discussion here to learn how the biggest players in the game are using AI to close the data gap and accelerate their ROI.