With more than 9,000 owned and master-leased towers, Vertical Bridge is the largest private owner of towers in the country. But managing all those structures is time-intensive. Faced with tight carrier timelines and budgets, the tower company is automating its engineering processes through its long-term relationship with B+T Group.
B+T Group, too, has found an important partner in Vertical Bridge. As the tower company has grown over the last seven years, the engineering firm has grown as well, and developed its Site360 platform, which provides state-of-the-art asset documentation and measurement for tower site inspections.
Executive Vice President of Operations Bernard Borghei’s relationship with B+T Group goes back to the days when it was an engineering partner for Global Tower Partners. When Vertical Bridge was founded by Borghei, Executive Vice President of Leasing and Marketing Mike Belski and CEO Alex Gellman in 2004, the tower company maintained the relationship. Back then, drones were just beginning to be used to document cell tower appurtenances. Later, Chad Tuttle, founder and CEO of B+T Group, began collaborating with Borghei in the development of post analysis data capabilities based on the pictures taken by drones.
Every year since, B+T Group has listened to Vertical Bridge’s feedback and developed new features or enhanced features for Site360. Borghei said the analytical reports generated by Site360 are “solid, robust and efficient.” His engineering team used the reports to “decide what to do next.”
In the first phase, B+T Group provided Vertical Bridge with a SiteView and 3D model of each tower – these allowed digital analysis of the condition of the structure.
“We wanted to measure the thickness of the steel that we think may be beginning to corrode and find out how much thickness is left,” Borghei said. “We want to look at the condition of the bolts. Are they losing tension? Those things are much more readily available to us with the advances in artificial intelligence.”
The second phase involved automating engineering forms. B+T Group would write an algorithm. Once a tower is scanned by the drone, the resulting image data will be used to populate forms. Vertical Bridge now uses Site360 to perform annual site audits and site inspection reports.
“They have put our Site Inspection Forms in Site360, so when they fly the tower, my forms get automatically populated,” Borghei said. “That saves my team a lot of time to just get a report that’s already auto populated, along with the video and pictures, so they can look at it and say A, B, C and D need to be taken care of.”
At one point in time, the new master lease agreements (MLAs) began requiring tower companies to charge carriers based on wind loading per RAD center for each tenant. As a result, the tower company had to perform engineering calculations based on the numbers that the tenant entered into their co-location application concerning the quantity and dimensions of equipment.
The more recent phases of Site360 have addressed this need, using AI to calculate the wind loading of each carrier’s deployment on a tower. “For the sites that I fly with a drone, Site360 can easily take a look at all three sectors, and, with a push of the button, do the wind load calculation for me. It saves me half a day per engineer,” Borghei said.
Vertical Bridge visits its 9,000 towers on a regular basis, but only 40 percent have been scanned by a drone, so far, and have a set of data available. That number is increasing 10 percent every year, however, as the tower company adds more and more integrated drone information and programming to its operations.
“I’m hoping for a day where I no longer have to send field people on an eight-hour drive to a site in Montana in order to see what it looks like,” Borghei said. “I want to have drone pilots that are regionally based fly each tower once a year, so we’ll always have updated data on the structures.”
What’s next for Site360? Borghei said Vertical Bridge and B+T Group are beta testing a couple of new features, but that will have to wait for the next installment on their relationship and the progress of automated tower site engineering.
View more information about B+T Group here. View more information about Vertical Bridge here.
By J. Sharpe Smith Inside Towers Technology Editor
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