Helios promises to double investment in co-location of masts and towers
…says government should put out carrot
Berwyn Roberts managing director of Helios Towers, a telecoms facility co-location service provider is as passionate about Nigeria as he is about the co-location business. He spoke with Bill OKONEDO.
Towers
The towers we are building in Nigeria can carry four GSM or CDMA operators plus two WiFi operators. WiFi operators requirement in terms of uploading and space is much lower.A lot of getting signals back to base is done by microwave. This works by line of sight - the higher the tower, the farther you can reach.
We've optimized our towers to be suitable for four operators. We could build slightly smaller towers or slightly bigger ones. You have to start with one model. We've put in everything that is required by the operators, apart from their technology. We provide everything apart from the BTS, apart from the proprietary technology equipment.
We use two generating sets in addition to the national grid on every site. If the national grid fails, the first gen will automatically start up. If that fails which is unlikely- the second gen will automatically start up. If the first gen does'nt start, we have alarms.
We monitor all our sites 24 hours a day, remotely and when we get signals that anything has gone wrong, we send engineers to fix the gen.
Facilities
We provide shelters, batteries and rectifiers for operators equipment. If in the unlikely event that both generators fail, we've got battery power for up to six hours. Part of our advantage is in knowing when there is a problem and being sufficiently organized to go out and fix it.
We've got over 100 sites and in over one year, we've never lost two or three minutes downtime.
Operators would expect a site to have hours or even days of downtime over a period. We at Helios do a lot better than that. That's world class service. Just because it is Nigeria does'nt mean you cant have world class service.
Spread
We started off in Ibadan and now we're fairly well spread in the South-South, South-East and South-West. We are just finishing a site in Tinapa and and already, we have three customers lined up for it. We have more sites in Abuja than anywhere else.
What Helios towers has done is to research the market in 2005. We worked out optimum product, size of tower, alarm systems requirements and so forth.
We started operations at the beginning of 2006. We have invested almost $50 million in Nigeria since the beginning of 2006. Quite a few of our towers already have four operators or tenants.
Co-location provides the opportunity to have 75 percent less towers than we would ordinarily have. We guaranty 24 hours power back-up seven days a week. We have a service level agreement that if we were ever to fail, we would pay a financial penalty.
So far, we have never had to pay.We are helping co-location and raising the bar in terms of quality of service. Nigerians Almost all the people who work here are Nigerians, so
this high level of service is being delivered by Nigerians.
My background is in this business and I have brought my knowledge and experience here.
There is very good team spirit in Helios. There is a culture of success and our people take pride in what they do.
By having less towers, if nothing, you help the aesthetics of the environment. In certain areas, everywhere you look, its masts and towers. By co-locating, you are sharing elements such as generators, you can make savings which you can translate into raising quality of service. With co-location, you can put more measures into making sure you do a better job.
If it was costing more, why would anybody come unto our towers in Portharcourt or Ibadan? This patronage reflects value for money because our up-time is so good , operators are getting a a lot more money and keeping their customers happier.
Abuja
We do charge a small premium for our towers in Abuja - we have to pay more for the permits in Abuja, than we do in other places.
Anybody else can go into the marketplace. We put in $50 million and we had no guarantees that it was going to work here.
It works in Europe and in the USA but there is nothing to say that it is going to work in Africa.
There is nothing to stop the operators co-locating together. There is no law that says you are not allowed to co-locate.
In a large company, there would be many people with many different voices . You are always going to get voces of dissent. The point is we don't have a monopoly.
We just happened to be a company which was already operating in many other cities before we came to Abuja.
My understanding is that the Abuja authority said operators would have to co-locate with another operator.
The fact is that we are specialists and we were delivering a co-location service, making it easy for operators to come unto our towers.
It seems a re-affirmation of co-location as being the way forward. Abuja is just one city where we are doing co-location.
We are an internationally funded company delivering world class service . We are happy to work with any network in any state or any city. Some of our towers in Kaduna are now full. If we were so expensive, why would they fill our towers so quickly?
We are a Nigerian company, predominantly run by Nigerians and we are delivering world class standards and that's something people should applaud. When I first came here, people said it was not possible.
I haven't found one person yet in Nigeria who said co-location is a bad thing. We're showing people how to do it as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Next year, we will probably spend $100 million (N12.5 billion) on our business here. A lot of this is raised on the international market, so operators can focus on delivering state of the art services to their customers. We're showing people that 100 percent achievement is possible.
Local Sourcing
The bottomline is that we source as much products locally as is practical. We don't want the wahala of bringing in equipment from outside Nigeria. It's a major logistical challenge to bring things into the country. A lot of things which were last year not available in terms of quality and quantity, are slowly becoming available. People are responding to that demand.
Nigeria is a challenging market and is not for faint hearted people who are not resilient. On the other front, it is the fastest growing market in all of Africa, which is why so many telecom companies want to come into Nigeria.
Some of the challenges companies face in coming into Nigeria include power and the availability and price of capital.
In co-location, there's been the tendency to use sanctions, so everybody's gotten angry about it. If you said to operators 'if you co-locate your towers, we would give you a tax break or permit that is motivating rather than mandatory, people might respond better to it.
Co-location by common agreement is a good idea.
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