Navigating the Compliance Landscape in Telecom Tower Infrastructure: Best Practices for 2025 14 Apr 2025, 12:35 pm

In 2025, telecom tower infrastructure companies are navigating a regulatory environment that is growing more complex and demanding. With increasing scrutiny around asset utilisation, environmental compliance, and operational transparency, staying compliant is essential not only to avoid penalties but also to ensure long-term sustainability and stakeholder trust. This article explores emerging compliance trends in the telecom tower sector and outlines best practices, with a focus on how Infozech’s solutions empower infrastructure providers to stay ahead.

Understanding 2025 Regulatory Trends

Telecom tower companies are seeing greater regulatory focus on energy efficiency, environmental impact, asset transparency, and data security. As the industry expands with 5G deployments, rural connectivity initiatives, and shared infrastructure models, regulations are evolving to ensure:

• Responsible power consumption and use of renewable energy, 
• Accurate tracking and valuation of passive infrastructure assets, 
• Adherence to service level agreements (SLAs) for uptime and maintenance, 
• Secure and standardised data handling for operational audits and reporting.

Compliance Challenges in the Tower Infrastructure Space

1. Asset Tracking and Financial Reporting
   With assets deployed across thousands of geographically dispersed sites, keeping track of their location, condition, and utilisation is complex. Inaccuracies can lead to challenges in audit readiness, CWIP tracking, and post-M&A integrations.
2. Operational Transparency and SLA Management
   Manual or fragmented maintenance and ticketing systems often result in missed SLAs, lack of accountability, and delayed fault resolution, all of which carry compliance implications.
3. Energy Usage and Environmental Impact
   Tower companies must comply with environmental norms by tracking fuel usage, diesel generator runtime, carbon footprint, and alternative energy usage, often across diverse energy sources and site types.
4. Billing and Reconciliation Discrepancies
   Site-sharing models and dynamic billing agreements require accurate energy usage data and timely reconciliation. Errors or delays here not only impact partner relations but also raise compliance flags.

Best Practices for Staying Compliant

1. Leverage Compliance-Integrated Platforms
   Tools like Infozech’s iAsset automate asset lifecycle management, from acquisition to retirement, ensuring traceability, geo-tagging, and audit-ready documentation.
2. Conduct Regular Training and Enablement
   Ensure field teams, contractors, and site managers are well-versed in the latest compliance mandates, from safety protocols to SLA monitoring, by conducting structured training sessions.
3. Strengthen Data Governance and Accuracy
   With regulations demanding transparency, platforms like iBill help ensure accurate metering and billing by validating site-level data, integrating energy logs, and applying regulatory-compliant logic.
4. Establish Preventive Maintenance Schedules
   Solutions like iMaintain reduce incident volume and improve SLA adherence through preventive maintenance workflows, automated ticket assignment, and maintenance audit trails.
5. Stay Agile and Informed
   Being proactive with compliance means tracking regulatory updates, participating in industry associations, and conducting internal audits regularly to flag risks before they escalate.

How Infozech Enables Regulatory Readiness

iAsset
Delivers precise asset visibility through geo-tagging, lifecycle management, and digital audits, essential for CWIP compliance, lease audits, and statutory reporting.

iBill
Enables automated, rules-based billing and energy reconciliation for passive infrastructure, reducing disputes and supporting transparent reporting across tenant operators.

iMaintain
Streamlines ticketing, preventive maintenance, and field operations with built-in compliance checks, SLA monitoring, and digital documentation of activity logs.

iROC
Centralises site-level monitoring with AI-based alert management and analytics. Enhances uptime, reduces false alarms, and ensures adherence to operational KPIs mandated by regulators and SLAs.

Conclusion

In the telecom tower industry, compliance is not just about adhering to checklists, it is about enabling operational resilience, financial accuracy, and energy accountability. With the right digital tools and data-driven approach, tower companies can turn compliance into a competitive advantage. Infozech’s suite of integrated platforms empowers infrastructure providers to meet the evolving regulatory landscape with confidence, ensuring smoother audits, stronger stakeholder trust, and sustainable growth.

iBill: Empowering Tower Companies with Automated and Intelligent Billing 10 Aug 2023, 11:04 am

In today’s world, seamless connectivity is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity. As the need for network coverage continues to rise, advanced technologies like 4G and 5G are being implemented adding new equipment on tower sites. The very foundation of this process hinges on the tower structure. Increased tenancy ratios and evolving power models further adds complexity to site dynamics, making billing procedures all the more complicated. Tower companies want to ensure that this surge in demand is supported by a resilient and sturdy commercial structure to maintain growth and profitability effectively.

The existing billing process involves a laborious cycle of verifying, validating, and approving numerous invoices, placing an immense burden on both resources and time. Complications arising from factors like complex MSA MLA, data inaccuracies, and manual processes introduce errors, compounding the challenge. Consequently, delays in billing are a frequent occurrence, causing payments to extend beyond their deadlines – particularly significant for Towercos with bills amounting to millions of dollars. This delay has a substantial financial impact, disrupting the flow of operating cash required to ensure uninterrupted site operations. Moreover, this scenario not only demands the engagement of extra teams but also proves proves to be an expensive, time-consuming, and inefficient endeavor.

In this blog, we unravel the transformative potential of automated and intelligent billing systems that streamlines billing processes and empower tower companies to stay ahead in a highly dynamic telecommunications industry. An innovative billing solution that is precise and capable of handling different billing parameters. A system that is reliable and accurate, and does data validation.

Discover how Infozech’s iBill delivers a seamless tower billing experience to its customers.

What makes iBill – Infozech’s Tower IP & Energy Billing Solution a better choice?

iBill, by Infozech, specifically caters to the challenges faced by tower companies in billing their customers accurately and timely. It can handle multiple billing processes, including rental, energy, and fiber. iBill reduces manual effort via automation. It shrinks the billing time by about 58%. With iBill, customers have observed that the average billing period for towercos has gone down from 21 days to 12 days. Timely billing ensures smooth and enhanced cash flow and allows tower companies to focus on other strategic initiatives.

iBill stands out as a scalable billing solution that seamlessly integrates with existing systems like site management and ERP, creating a unified billing ecosystem. This integration provides a comprehensive view of the business, enhances data exchange, and hence, ensures accuracy and data consistency. It supports scalability as tower companies expand their infrastructure and tenant network.

iBill brings transparency to the whole billing process reducing disputes between the tower company and its tenant. It maintains comprehensive audit trails and historical data. Real-time data and customizable reports offer valuable insights and help in making data-driven decisions. iBill is an intuitive system that empathizes with the user and adapts as fast as them. It is lucid & flexible enough to let the user accommodate these changes seamlessly with faster TAT, ensuring a tailored solution that is unique to towercos’ business needs.

Watch Ankur Lal, our CEO, present iBill to industry leaders as Dragons in TowerXchange meetup MENA

About Infozech:

Infozech is a Technology solution partner serving large Tower Companies and Operators. With deep domain knowledge of the Telco-tower infrastructure business, we excel at understanding our client’s business processes and transforming them into efficient workflows for automation. We do this with our proven Software Modules, customization and configuration capabilities, services, and consultancy, in the Tower Domain business to ensure a faster TAT for our clients. We enable our customers to improve their Revenue assurance and power efficiency, by providing superior opex management and control. Thus, leading to better financial performance and enhanced end-customer experience. We do this by optimizing business processes and revenue management, reducing the cost of operations, maintenance, and energy, particularly reducing risks such as revenue leakage, and protecting capital assets.

Our purpose is to provide technology solutions that unlock enterprise value of distributed, mission-critical, and strongly networked technical assets.

Follow us on LinkedIn for more insightful perspectives on enhancing tower billing processes. Feel free to check our White Paper on Tower Billing

The post iBill: Empowering Tower Companies with Automated and Intelligent Billing first appeared on Infozech.

A “single source of the truth” for asset data? 9 Dec 2022, 11:52 am

TowerXchange speaks with Ankur Lal on how Infozech are enabling improvements in site management and asset tracking

Read this article to learn:

• The biggest challenges towercos face capturing and storing asset data
• Why a “single source of the truth” is so important
• How a centralised asset database streamlines acquisitions
• Improvements to energy efficiency

Jack Haddon

In the past couple of years, the telecom industry has entered a period of unprecedented growth and evolution as demand for ubiquitous connectivity becomes essential. The emergence of 5G has led to site densifications increasing the number of assets, increased pricing pressure, due to intensified competition, and challenging telecom tower companies for their returns on invested capital. With towerco assets spread over huge geographical areas, keeping track of all assets and their condition is a complex and challenging task. But if ignored, the failure of even a single piece of equipment can shut down site operations, causing the loss of thousands or even a million dollars.

Asset Management is emerging as a priority area for telecom infrastructure industry leaders. Traditionally telecom industries are constrained by a lack of visibility on assets making tracking ROI on assets even more difficult.

TowerXchange: What are the biggest challenges towercos face when it comes to capturing and storing asset data from their sites?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

Over the last few months, our business solutions and marketing team have been talking to several CXOs of the telecom industry across different geographies and have realized that their biggest challenge is “Asset Lifecycle Management” – Telecom infrastructure companies’ asset data have multiple images spread across different business functions (O&M, Finance, and other teams) and tracing them in real-time is far more challenging than ERP systems indicate. The absence of complete and accurate asset information leads to 20-30% of assets being untraced, and unaccounted for, which can impact an organization’s bottom line.
Assets follow a lifecycle – from acquisition to maintenance and operation, to decommissioning or replacement. Often for an organisation, maintaining a shared set of asset information at each stage of lifecycle – a single source of truth becomes challenging considering the volume and variety of asset information. This leads to duplication of data both within and across functions.

Other Business challenges that tower Infrastructure Enterprises face are:

• Limited Visibility of Site Assets- the data versions that ERP (Finance), Network (Technical), and Operations have are rarely in sync.
• Unavailability of consumable Asset Data- Insightful Dashboards on Asset’s Performance, Consumption, and Availability
• Lack of Centralized Asset Data Repository Critical Site-Asset data resides in Silos in multiple systems with multiple functions.
• Inefficient Asset Movement Tracking due to heavy dependency on Excel-based tracking
• Ineffective Equipment Warranty/Insurance/AMC Management

TowerXchange: what is iAsset, can you briefly introduce its key features?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

iAsset is Infozech’s cloud-based asset lifecycle management solution that integrates, informs, and instructs. IoT-enabled iAsset works as a ‘single strategic system’ enabling organizations to transform their operations, digitally. It provides complete knowledge of “what you own and its true potential” which is considered the first step in developing a robust asset optimization strategy.
iAsset adds intelligence to automated workflows, real-time alerts, insights from data, dynamic edge control of assets, predictive maintenance, cross-domain analytics, and real-time visibility. Infozech’s asset management system helps strengthen the link between Operational Excellence and Financial gain by presenting real-time information on asset lifecycle.
Some of the key features of iAsset are

• Asset Data Collection, Verification & Tagging: The iAsset team gathers asset data from different sources and physical asset verification is done using asset tags like Bar & QR codes, GPS, IoT, and RFID which helps in logging accurate asset information into a system.
• Centralized Asset Database: centralized repository for active, passive, and network assets is created which manages asset lifecycle and geographical information and becomes a single source of information to all departments about the asset environment which increase Asset Visibility by 15% – 20%
• Asset Movement Digitization: an acknowledgment-driven process where the stakeholders approve, reject, send & receive the asset, and the real-time location is updated of each asset. This asset movement digitisation has helped towercos reduce Unplanned Downtime by 5% – 8%.
• Asset Audit: iAsset offers planning, scheduling, audit activity definition, and user assignment for site audits. This also helps to identify the missing and newly found assets at the site which keeps the end users aware of the ground reality of assets. Reduce the Audit Expenses by 70% – 75%.
• Asset Warranty Management- iAsset manages your asset’s warranty, insurance, and AMCs. iAsset actively tracks these associations and reminds you multiple times before they expire. It reduces the cost of repairs by 18% to 20%

TowerXchange: What opportunities does having a “single source of the truth” data set open up in terms of interactions between different departments at a towerco?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

The Asset Repository is a single, centralised database that stores and tracks organisational assets physically and financially. It maintains the asset’s unique identifying information which can be shared across the organisation thus eliminating redundancy and inaccuracies in asset reporting. The repository houses a complete history of acquisition details, maintenance logs and cost history over an asset’s operational life.

iAsset adds value to the entire value chain of a telecom company by:

• Helping the Procurement and Decommissioning team by displaying all assets in the network and streamlining the entire asset ecosystem from planning.
• Increasing asset visibility by making all asset lifecycle information available on a centralized platform.
• Finance team uses accurate asset information to drive CAPEX planning and reduce external audit efforts for cost savings and effective audits. With the minutest details of Tower, Antennas, RRUs, etc. being maintained in the repository, it becomes very easy to identify an Operator’s Allocated and Consumed space to avoid over-billing and under-billing
• Helps the Operations and Maintenance team by reducing the manual tasks of reconciliation and asset tracking.
• Reduced Time to Market to onboard customers faster as time spent for structural analysis, feasibility Testing, EPA Analysis, etc. as these analysis can be done quickly from data available in a single source of truth, accessible via your desktop or mobile.

TowerXchange: How does a centralised asset database streamline the acquisition of towers from an MNO in a SLB transaction?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

In a traditional HOTO( handover takeover) SLB transaction, a sample of a few sites is audited and reconciled against FAR, a new approach taken by Infozech via its solution iAsset presents our highly customisable iAsset mobile application for due diligence activity. Its dynamic checklist captures more than 1000+ attributes of a site enabling the field personnel to scan, capture asset data, and store geo-tagged assets along with photos. Physical verification is scheduled for each and every site without an exception. Through this application, the back-office team successfully verifies the collected asset data during each site audit. Even the Finance team benefits from this data verification as they could reconcile the same against the fixed asset register (FAR) making the entire process transparent and reliable. All this leads to the creation of a “centralised asset data repository”

We empowered one of our customers in the MENA region to lead the way for the tower industry by deploying due diligence processes and helping them with digital handover. It covered structural, technical, operational, and asset audits with infra tagging for all assets available at sites taken over by our customer. The mutual goal was to analyse site conditions and create and maintain a central repository of sites as their Digital Twin.

Now they are reaping the benefits of the process and have gained real time control over site inventory. They can plan better for the scope of additional tenancies and revenue streams. The data available to them for advanced modeling and prototyping is highly reliable and they are now conducting improved predictive maintenance of sites and assets.
The goal of asset tracking is to provide full visibility into Asset Lifecycle and to allow an enterprise to locate and monitor key assets easily, prevent quality issues and detect theft.

TowerXchange: How can towercos ensure that the data stored is always timely and accurate? What processes are being implemented to ensure this is possible?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

The goal of asset tracking is to provide full visibility into Asset Lifecycle and to allow an enterprise to locate and monitor key assets easily, prevent quality issues and detect theft.
From the time asset is procured and sent to the warehouse, to it is deployed, maintained, repaired, discarded, etc all are tracked. One of the common challenges arises when an asset has been moved to an incorrect location.
The Asset Tracking Module of iAsset automatically timestamps the movement in the master database for any movement of assets at the site. This enables tracking life of the asset as it moves from one location to another and helps in the timely movement of assets driving business value creation, and end-to-end visibility into operations. Asset tracking enables Asset managers to assign assets to specific sites/locations. When another Asset Manager pulls up the database it’s immediately clear that the current asset has already been allocated elsewhere.

TowerXchange: How does iAsset help ensure energy efficiency at a tower site?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

iAsset captures multiple attributes and aspects of an Assets from cradle to grave! Over an asset’s productive life, iAsset captures its make, configurations, performance, and maintenance logs including breakdowns, repairs etc. If interested functions look closely they get better visibility into critical asset attributes such as run hours, energy, and residual value, which enables accurate forecasting, outage management as well as insights for efficient energy management.
Business analytics produced on accurate asset data enables Towercos to drive excellence toward operational cost and energy efficiency, towercos can

• Allocate resources more efficiently, improve asset utilisation, minimise downtime, and increase returns on assets.
• Look at the consumption patterns and plan to procure energy efficient assets.

This interview is published here.

IoT site management: the future of tower operations 15 Nov 2022, 11:55 am

Read this article to learn:

• Who are Infozech?
• Why billing accurately is so important for towercos
• How M&A deals create friction between tenants and towercos
• Supporting operational and finance teams
• Optimising energy management and cutting emissions

Matt Edwards

With a keen focus on an easy-to-use and cost-effective platform, Infozech has an impressive record of deploying IoT and telecom site management solutions for various telecom infrastructure companies and operators across the globe. In this interview, Ankur Lal, Founder & CEO shares how Infozech’s solutions are generating value for their customers in terms of revenue assurance, operational efficiency, and cost optimisation.

TowerXchange: Please tell us about Infozech, and how your solutions make telecommunication tower companies’ operations more efficient.

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

Infozech is a technology solution partner serving large towercos and MNOs. We are purpose-driven and have been working in the telecom and tower infra vertical for over 23 years now. Our deep domain expertise enables us to understand our clients’ business processes and convert them into efficient workflows for automation.

Our key focus is on optimising and reducing the cost of operations and maintenance, energy, and automating end-to-end-businesses processes. Simplifying periodic audits of assets and bringing field information to a central place builds operational efficiency through data accuracy and improved data quality. We are an expert at digitising, validating and consolidating all information to a single reliable source of truth which can be used to generate insights for strategic decision-making. We do this with our proven software modules, customisation capabilities, services, and consultancy.

We are growing in technology year on year and building some great success stories. We help telecom and tower companies move:

1. From disintegration to integration – integrate multiple department-level IT and systems to create a unified system that eliminates organizational silos.
2. From inaccuracy to improved data quality and Accuracy of assets

TowerXchange: Why is billing accurately so important for towercos?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

Billing is a critical revenue system! Billing inaccuracy has a huge business impact in multiple areas of operations

Overbilling leads to disputes impacting customer satisfaction, requiring huge numbers of man-hours and working capital to clarify and resolve such mismatches. During this process, payment remains stuck impacting cash flows and puts your client retention at risk

If there is underbilling, there is not just a loss of significant revenue, but also of working capital where energy is a pass-through and where a tower company has paid more to the vendor than what it charged to a telco. In some cases these leakages are identified and billed later on but the delay in recognising and materialising has a huge impact.

The issues and disputes related to recurring over and under billing lead to frustration and loss of trust mainly because of the lack of an integrated system that identifies and corrects input data at the source level.

TowerXchange: What makes billing accurately a difficult task?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

With rapid changes like the evolution of technologies (5G,4G), fierce competition and M&A, billing scenarios between towercos and tenant MNOs are evolving faster than ever before and becoming increasingly complex. The quantity of data processed is so high that billing automation is now a necessity to bill accurately and manage revenues. In a workflow system with high configurability database integrity is compromised and bills generated are not accurate which leads to revenue leakages impacting profitability.

Some of the common challenges we have seen telecom and tower companies face are:

1. 1. Energy billing as a total may be small in revenue compared to rental but is the cause of most billing disputes. A lack of accurate and reliable consumption data is the key reason that most of the billing systems lack the mechanism to validate the consumption data to build more accuracy.

1. 1. It is very challenging to turn the language of the MSAs/MLAs into an updated and accurate pricebook. 90% of billing is done on key parameters such as tenancy and tower type, while parameters like antenna height, floor space and region contribute 10% (and these 10% parameters are major contributors to billing errors)

1. Low system flexibility and configurability to handle rapid changes in MSA/MLA means workflows are hardcoded and require a significant amount lot of time for reconfigure.

How customers are benefitting:

1. Time to bill has been reduced by 58% (from 21 days to 12 days)
2. Revenue realisation increased by 5-7%
3. Disputes reduced to 3% from 20%
4. Input consumption data compliance reach to 95% from 55-60% on average
5. Team size for handling only billing reduced by 60% through process automation.
6. Audit findings are significantly reduced

TowerXchange: How can operational teams benefit from better billing mechanisms to recognise revenues?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

We see a lot of disputes between towercos and telcos over inaccurate billing due to data inaccuracy. Resolving these disputes takes up time and effort from operation teams. Our billing solution does data validation and exception handling which helps with accuracy in billing and minimising disputes. iBill does billing on all the parameters which further minimize revenue leakage. It maintains the audit and historical data, and brings confidence in data & versioning for the customer’s account manager. If still there is any dispute the solution holds input data in a single repository making discussions more transparent and resolving disputes faster.

All of this will significantly reduce the effort of billing and operational teams. Better acceptance of the bills by telcos helps build deeper customer relationships based on trust, improving customer satisfaction.

TowerXchange : How can finance teams operate better, chase outstanding sums more accurately and speed up reconciliation?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

Finance teams have several important KPIs with respect to billing; billing on time, billing customers on all parameters while ensuring each contract is recognised fully and meets regulatory and auditory requirements, and ensure there is no stuck cash flow. Telcos can then accept the bill and release payment.

Infozech’s iBill helps in all three:

1. We automate end-to-end business processes to reduce the billing generation cycle.
2. We have an expert team in understanding, capturing and configuring all MSA parameters so that billing is done without a miss and there is no revenue loss.
3. We build billable data accuracy with justification through all relevant data points to prevent or reduce disputes so that telcos accept the bills and there is no delay in payment.

With all validated data stored at a single place and with stringent checks, an accurate bill is generated so finance is able to better assess their position with greater visibility of revenue. iBill reports provides deep insights about the financial health of sites. Loss-making sites are identified and highlighted and the actionability can be defined. From this information, management is able to maintain sustainable margins for at least 95% of the sites.

TowerXchange : How can better billing enable better total energy management?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

An ideal billing solution enables and empowers billing owners to manage the very core of billing; data curation. iBill integrates with power systems to get the energy consumption data for billing and both sanitises and validates it. iBill collects site load and site consumption data and uses data validation rules to identify exceptional sites which are likely producing erroneous data. In case of missing values the system takes averages based on historical data to generate accurate bills leading to increased revenue assurance.

With better billing based on accurate energy data a towerco can see a comparative analysis of its power consumptions on similar sites to identify opportunities for optimisation.

TowerXchange : What particular issues arise from power-as-a-service billing?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

Power-as-a-Service (PaaS) revenue relies heavily on the towerco being able to bill its customers for the actual power consumed in a given period, where the rate per kilowatt has been contractually agreed. Normally, an average is taken for this as operators consume more at certain times of the day, so an intelligent energy management and billing solution is required to generate the average consumptions per day, week, and month for all tenants. Additionally, the system must have the capacity to measure actual consumptions at any given point of time.

With the rising costs of diesel many operators are imposing generator run caps on the towerco/PaaS partners as the cost is higher than making use of grid, hybrid systems and of course the targets they have set for reducing carbon emissions. In these cases of DG capping, the towero can lose out on his revenue in both MLA types:

• PaaS Actual consumption will not be able to bill the agreed average energy consumed if exceeding the generator run hour cap
• PaaS or Towerco pass-through cost: The towerco will not be able to bill the customer for the actual fuel costs if generator run time exceeded the daily cap.

Other challenges without the intelligent billing and energy management solutions are as follows

• Multiple tenancy billing
• Battery charging consumption measurements
• Site load measuring not being applicable to tenants
• DG cooling off periods and forced run hours due to poor grid availability measured

TowerXchange: Does better billing have a role to play in carbon emissions reductions and going green?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG Protocol) is one of the most widely used emissions reporting standards for businesses. GHG Protocol requires companies to break down their emissions into three categories or scopes:

• Scope 1: Direct emissions. This means that they directly come from your company’s owned or controlled source such as company vehicle emissions.
• Scope 2: Indirect emissions from purchased sources, such as your company’s consumed electricity or cooling.
• Scope 3: All other indirect emissions within your value chain including the upstream supply chain and downstream GHG emissions (e.g. from customer usage). Think of emissions from business travels, waste disposal transportation or investments.

Yes, an intelligent billing solution pulls its data from the Energy Management System as we have multiple power sources with separate reporting and units of measure for billing. A good towerco business model weighs heavily on multiple tenancies, each having in their MLAs different sustainability targets set by each customer, and these are then reported on separately.

So the billing solution plays a major role in reporting on the energy emissions reductions due to receiving the following data inputs:

• Energy management system supplies data on all power sources utilised to supply each tenant with power in the month
• Maintenance management system provides the data on all site maintenance activities which includes the site visit travelling
• Asset management system provides all the data for the movement of assets, tower corrective or planned upgrades due to the customer requests.
• MLA inputs which were agreed by the operator and Towerco (contract terms for emission reduction)

As you can see, billing is a very important aspect of towerco opperations for converting M&A deals into revenue, for revenue assurance, for customer relations, for operational performance and for sustainability targets.

This interview is originally published in TowerXchange at https://www.towerxchange.com/data/news/documents/b20p1844kk6fmg/iot-site-management–the-future-of-tower-operations

Poll Verdict: Is the Telecom Tower industry delighted with their Remote Monitoring System? 18 Oct 2021, 12:43 pm

Overview:

Around the world, tower structures are helping telecommunication companies to provide connectivity even in the most remote areas. However, monitoring and managing the extensive list of passive infrastructure available at these sites is a subject of critical concern. Efficient management of towers is pivotal in retaining customers and plugging the revenue leakages. The towers in remote geographical locations are exposed to frequent site downtime and bogged with maintenance and energy issues heavily impacting the SLAs.

It won’t be wrong to say that for tower owners and telecom service providers remotely monitoring telecom tower sites and intelligently managing them has become more of a necessity. Effective monitoring of towers empowers tower operators and telecommunication companies in quickly addressing critical alarms and gaining more control over sites.

Current Analysis:

Figure1: Response breakdown of poll participants

On a recent LinkedIn survey conducted by Infozech many core industry people got candid and shared their responses for the issues faced with remote site monitoring. They shed more light on the features expected and required in an end-to-end site monitoring system. The findings from the poll and a short summary of the understanding is shared below:

• 94% of the participants believe that tower companies are still troubled by the persistent problem. That is they face difficulty in solving critical issues because of lack of real time site visibility.

• 82% of people acknowledged that in the absence of a remote monitoring system, tower companies worldwide experience a delay in taking actions on critical issues as there are no real time alerts.

Figure2: What is an inevitable feature an end-to-end site monitoring system must have?

• Close to 44% of the industry people have agreed that ‘Interactive dashboards for descriptive analysis’ is a fundamental feature for an end-to-end site monitoring system. The ‘Intelligent alarm configuration’ was declared as the second key feature backed by 28% of the participants. While 17% believed that ‘Tower video surveillance with short recordings stored centrally’ is a prominent feature the RMS system must have.

Figure 3: What is the primary element Telcos and Towercos consider in a solution partner?

• More than half of the survey takers (60%) admitted that Tower and Telecom companies weigh ‘Expertise’ more than ‘Ratings of a solution on a reliable channel’ or ‘Quick support and availability’ when looking for a solution partner.

• 60% of the respondents admitted that their present RMS system is equipped with the primary features they require to avoid tower site failures and adequately manage tower assets. However, on the contrary, 40% acknowledged that telecom sites still lack a reliable RMS system to monitor and manage tower sites effectively.

If you would like to know more about Infozech’s remote monitoring solution for managing tower operations download the brochure now. If you are interested in directly engaging with our SMEs and finding out the value iROC can offer to your business, reach out to us at sales@infozech.com. We would be happy to set up a remote meeting to discuss further.

Creating a holistic digital twin framework to optimize Telecom and Tower company operations 2 Sep 2021, 7:57 am

To get a recording of this webinar click the link below.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW WEBINAR

In this webinar, our speakers take you on an insightful journey of how tower and telecom companies can achieve their objectives with a holistic data approach and manage the collected data better with digital twin for improved site and asset visibility and enhanced maintenance. Watch it to find out how:

1. Tower and telecom companies can embrace a holistic data approach to improve site and asset data collection and analysis to get the most value.
2. How intelligence can be added to the collected data to enhance predictability and maintenance of site and assets through cloud using digital twin technology.
3. How organisations can discard the legacy systems and utilise data to automate the process for proactive monitoring, tracking and management for improved site and asset visibility.

• Curating the data journey: Digital transformation initiatives would yield a higher ROI only if they are backed with an efficient data strategy.

• Creating a holistic framework: An effective data strategy aligned with organizational goals will help tower and telecom companies envision the holistic whole model and maintain a balance between data collection and data consumption.

• Predictability and better maintenance: A data driven approach to analyze better performance and condition to forecast maintenance schedules enables better maintenance and predictability of entire Tower and Telecom operations.

• What are the types of IoT Technologies used in the solution?

A number of IoT technologies can be supported by digital solution ranging from bar codes, qr codes, bluetooth sensors, smart meters or smart locks. It can also support more advanced solutions and linked to IoT sensors to catch data from there. Sensors like RMS can as well be integrated with this solution to capture data.

• Can you explain something about your platform?

We have an integrated platform that captures data in abundance around different elements of the network, around different IoT elements as well as distributed elements from the cloud, mobile, or oss systems. The platform has an interactive interface which can track assets in the field through which we can link the mobile assets to the FAR (fixed asset register). By tracking like this you can observe a noticeable difference in the turnaround time and get access to instant information. Our platform enables you to turn your assets into cognitive assets by capturing data and turning it into actionable insights.

Use Cases of Digital Twin in Telecom and Tower Business 26 Aug 2021, 10:28 am

To get a recording of this webinar click the link below.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW WEBINAR

In our interaction with the finance and operations department of different telecom and tower companies over the past number of years, we have observed that the challenges related to asset management are immense. There is a need to deploy asset intelligence for monitoring, maintaining and managing assets from remote locations in order to improve asset utilization.

In this webinar on “Use cases of Digital Twin in Telecom and Tower Business” we aim to help you understand how digital twin enables organisations with intelligent insights to proactively resolve asset-related issues and enhance asset management.

• With 5G rollout and increased data demand, there is a requirement to constantly upgrade sites. The additional assets on sites are multiplying. A digital twin will help operators and tower companies plan their space optimally.

• With digital twin, Telecom and Tower companies will get better visibility into their data. The intelligent insights driven from virtually monitoring data can help these companies analyse trends and manage sites proactively.

• A digital twin can help your organisation to identify and mitigate risks, avoid any SLA breaches and improve operational processes.

• Digital twin acts as a single source of truth for the various departments of telecom and tower companies enhancing overall productivity.

• A digital twin can simulate an asset, process or the interworking of the whole system.

• How Infozech’s iAsset solution is different from other existing asset management solutions in the market?

Infozech’s iAsset solution is designed to handle the complete life cycle of the assets with a mobile-first approach. All asset information is captured and updated from the field. It maintains the complete history of master and performance data of each asset to digitize the legacy systems with the right Information and generate valuable insights.

• Is it possible to reconcile web-based GPS data into your system modules for trouble ticket tracking?

Our system has the capability of raising the trouble tickets automatically and then assigning them to the technicians associated with the site based on the GPS coordinates of the nearest technician. This technician can be tracked on the map with GPS coordinates (captured by Infozech’s mobile application) giving a real-time picture to TOC /NOC user. They can view the estimated time of arrival of the technician on-site and accordingly take a call.

• Sometimes companies use different DBs for warehousing and inventory, do you consider data standardization service within the solution?

Yes, data standardization is one of the major functionalities. While we create a central repository of the data to be used by different departments, we do take care of data standardization.

• Every month there is different energy consumption on a site. Can we analyse the reasons for it, for instance, if it is due to different data traffic across each month on specific sites?

It is possible to collect the real-time energy consumption data on the site at the DC level with the help of smart DC energy meters and then come up with the probable reasons for increased consumption which could either be increased traffic or the addition of some unidentified load on the site.

Improve Asset Visibility and Control Revenue Leakages 19 Aug 2021, 11:18 am

To get a recording of this webinar click the link below.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW WEBINAR

The asset list across Telecom and Tower companies is exhaustive as well as difficult to manage. Due to ineffective tracking and manual processes with no centralized database sees 10-15% assets unaccounted or underutilized across sites. Effective tracking, monitoring and managing assets is crucial for companies to not only reduce reconciliation efforts but also bring down unnecessary operational as well as capital expenses.

Watch this webinar to gain insights on how you can improve your asset tracking through digitisation and achieve your Capex and Opex goals.

1) Keeping track of all assets and their health is challenging. Digitization can improve asset visibility by transforming operational processes from people driven to data-driven.

2) Asset upgrades are increasing exponentially in the 5G revolution. With a digital twin, you can get a 360-degree view of site asset data and generate huge returns on assets.

3) With digital transformation your organization can observe 15-20% savings in Capex due to the prediction of asset procurement cycles as well as a 10-15% improvement of the total investment on return on assets.

4) Through real-time asset data availability Customer Billing Accuracy increases by almost 30%-35% and all the billing details can be accessed from a centralized repository.

1) How do Infozech’s solutions integrate with ERP and is it possible to institute corrective actions into ERP from the solution?

Infozech’s solutions have already been integrated with the ERP of some of our customers. We have been integrating with Oracle, SAP as well as others. Integration generally takes place through API and there are other ways of doing so, therefore; it is not a big challenge. The real challenge is to figure out how to enrich the data in ERP. This corrective action can take place through various primary keys which are set between the two systems.

2) Do you have a mobile application solution that can integrate with customer’s existing systems for empowering field teams and data enrichment?

Yes, we have a mobile application as we follow the mobile-first approach to design our solution. All the checklists, collected data as well as all the maintenance activities which get performed at the ground level are done through this mobile application. This can be seamlessly integrated with any of the legacy systems in order to enrich the data and helps in maintaining all the maintenance logs and histories for archival and retrieval.

3) You mentioned that OEM tags are not ideal, which tags do you recommend and can they be read by a mobile application?

OEM tags are not ideal as in that case you will have to interact or communicate back to the OEM to ensure all the tags are readable by the mobile application. Looking at the current scenario, the QR codes are the most preferred as these can be read by any basic smartphone making it a feasible solution.

4) How easy is it for this module to integrate with other internal asset tracking systems?

It is extremely easy and it is dependent on what kind of integration the user’s internal asset tracking system supports. It’s great if they have a microservice architecture that is based on APIs. If it’s something else through which we can integrate directly through databases or through other modes of integration then that is also possible. We can integrate with multiple third-party legacy systems like Ticket Management Systems, CRMs or ERPs.

5) Some components e.g electricals could be very minute in size than others due to their usage, in that case, tagging can be a challenge. What could be the solution for this?

Surely assets come in varying sizes ranging from minute assets to heavy assets and this is where the sizing capabilities of different asset tags like bar codes, QR codes come into picture. For some of the electrical components which are consumables like spare parts we generally see most of the companies reduce the size of QR codes and improve the accuracy with which the asset mobile application can read the tag. Infozech does the same and improves the accuracy of mobile applications so that whenever minute QR codes or minute spare parts are scanned, it gets read easily.

6) How easy can you manage the missing assets master plan ?

Our mobile application records both the active and passive assets and then a centralised master database is created. So we identify all the stranded assets, missing assets as well as missing data. Whatever data the customer has, we reconcile that data and create a master out of it. Once the master is captured, we take this master data to the sites for physical verification which helps in identifying what is missing, or which assets are additional and not captured in the data.

The proven partner for tower owners in MENA- Infozech’s CEO describes how the company has made an impact in MENA 31 Mar 2021, 6:03 am

With a keen focus on an easy to use and cost-effective platform, Infozech has an impressive record of deploying IoT and telecom site management solutions for various telecom infrastructure companies and operators across the globe. In this interview, Infozech’s CEO shares how Infozech’s solutions are generating value for the MENA telecom industry in terms of revenue assurance, operational efficiency, and cost optimisation.

TowerXchange: Please tell us about Infozech and how your solutions make telecommunication tower companies’ operations more efficient?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

Infozech is an IT solution partner serving large Tower Companies and Telecommunication Operators embedded with its deep domain understanding of the telecom tower infrastructure business and ability to understand their business processes and convert them into efficient workflows for automation. We have been doing this with our proven software modules, customisation capabilities, services and consultancy, in this domain for the last 22 years.

We have been empowering telecommunication and tower infrastructure operators to improve their financial performance and enhance their end-customer experience. Our key focus is on optimising and reducing the cost of operations and maintenance, energy and automating end-to end-businesses processes. We utilise our deep understanding of their current and future needs and satisfy them based on our profound expertise of the infrastructure, customisable modules of our module suite and integrate them with their existing embedded IT systems and hardware. We accelerate information flow, that provides meaningful insights for smart, actionable decisions. Our business solutions are customised in accordance to the customer’s core business functions using latest technologies, library of validated domain specific system/modules, operational procedures and process flows.

TowerXchange: With 5G rollout and new site, there is an extensive asset list to be managed. How does Infozech’s solution help in enhancing asset visibility?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

At Infozech, we understand how valuable assets are and how important it is to store real-time information about asset data to avoid costly downtime. Tracking and monitoring assets is a cumbersome process and not having a centralised solution that allows more control on the process significantly affects efficiency and productivity. We dedicated a webinar to addressing challenges related to asset visibility as well as the viable solutions companies can implement to achieve capex and opex goals. Towercos and telcos are still relying on old-school techniques of email and SMS based approvals and escalations to manage equipment repair, replacement and deployment. We saw how asset data is managed and stored in silos across ERPs and excel spreadsheets, increasing the chances of errors. Asset visibility is impacted and so is optimal capital planning and decision making. The static reports shared by the legacy tools are difficult to analyse and customise; thus, no meaningful insights are derived from them either.

It is only after organising this data through validations and predictive intelligence companies can visualise critical insights and gain asset intelligence through analytics. In one of our webinars, we addressed challenges related to asset visibility and the viable solutions companies can implement to achieve capex and opex goals.

iAsset from Infozech is customised based on our customers’ needs to help with the due diligence process giving tower and telecommunication companies visibility on what they own and how they can get the most value out of it. Our solution empowers the field force by helping them seamlessly record all data like snapshots, location details, timestamps on the mobile application and even lets them capture data offline.

TowerXchange: How is Infozech helping Tower and Telecommunication companies with data reliability and thus in improving their data management strategy with data analytics?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

Over the years we have seen a lot of enhancements of RMS devices being deployed at sites as well as an increased use of IoT and cloud-based technologies by the tower and telecommunication companies that have embarked on their journey towards automation.

In our interactions with multiple telecommunication and tower company CXOs, we derived that the biggest challenge is not the availability of data, but the data quality, the ability to assimilate that data, clean and store it to derive meaningful insights through applied analytics. The lack of inhouse data expertise and the inadequacy of solution providers in breaking down data into consumable chunks is stopping towercos and telcos from taking the best business decisions.

Telcos and towercos today need a holistic approach from collection to consumption of data to maximise revenue and cut expenses. We hosted a webinar in June 2020 sharing insights on the ways to unlock the value of the data organisations are collecting. To achieve optimum results through data analytics, companies will have to understand the core of their data, that determines the quality of output (data-based decisions). Setting up multiple rules in hi-tech IoT solutions at the time of data collection ensures that data collected is accurate, well verified and processed before it is fed into the system for data modelling and analytics.

To get the desired ROI companies must look at translating verified data into common formats. They need a cognitive system based on algorithms to identify and flag data anomalies and use it to fine-tune the discrepancies which arise in the data set. With proper data analysis organisations can improve the predictability and maintenance of sites and assets. Our advanced iAnalytics platform is able to collect, organise and analyse reliable and relevant data and help decision makers utilise these insights

TowerXchange: What advantages does digital twin technology deliver for Tower companies and Tower asset owners?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

We are seeing a mega digital disruption of digital twin technology adoption being approached by the towercos and telcos. Undoubtedly, this will help them gain better control on their operations and stay ahead of the curve. Through a virtual model created in the central repository they can now monitor, diagnose and predict the status of assets on sites to detect possible dysfunctions; not only improving predictability but also better maintenance. This technology is going to simplify asset management especially in remote areas and improve the response time for addressing asset-related issues.

As the list of deployed or stored assets for these companies is exhaustive and they are spread out across huge geographical areas, keeping track of assets and their condition is extremely challenging. The advanced modelling and prototyping with digital twin and the total inventory control gained helps organisations to digitally visualise and come up with a robust asset optimisation strategy. The towercos and tower asset owners will benefit by getting more control on visibility on the cost of repairs and replacement and see a significant decrease in operational overhead.

TowerXchange: A key stage for a telco and towerco is doing due diligence on towers which have been acquired, or which have been inherited in a carve-out, how is Infozech helping these organisations? Can you also share any success story to prove the delivered ROI?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

Absolutely it is essential because the process gives a real view of the condition of sites and assets and their maintenance. It is necessary to ensure that the data captured and stored is accurate.

Generally, it’s the responsibility of a highly skilled team to carry out this activity and our platform empowers them by helping them capture data smoothly and pay attention to details. Our highly customisable iAsset application for due diligence activity enables the field personnel to capture asset data, scan and store tagged assets along with capturing geo-tagged photos. Through this application the back-office team successfully verifies the collected asset data during each site audit. Even the Finance team benefits with this data verification as they could reconcile the same against the fixed asset register (FAR) making the entire process transparent and reliable.

We empowered one of our customers in the MENA region to lead the way for the tower industry by deploying due diligence processes and helping them with digital handover. It covered structural, technical, operational, and asset audits with infra tagging for all assets available at sites taken over by our customer. The mutual goal was to analyse site condition and maintain a central repository of sites in their Digital Twin.

Now they are reaping the benefits of the process and have gained a real time control over site inventory. They are able to plan better for scope for additional tenancies and additional revenue streams. The data available to them for advanced modelling and prototyping is highly reliable and they are now conducting improved predictive maintenance of sites and assets.

Through the digital handover process they could make audits and track asset movement effortlessly. Today the organisation is deriving more intelligence about the condition of assets and have seen improvement in decision making and capex planning. By creating a central asset repository they have observed 10% more asset utilization, 15-20% improvement in site asset visibility as well as a 5-8% decrease in unplanned downtime of sites due to identification of faulty assets in advance

TowerXchange: A lot of tower and telecommunication companies are concerned about Grid energy optimization. Is Infozech capable of enabling companies to reduce operational leakages by monitoring grid energy?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

Tower and telecommunication companies often lack sufficient information on how and where to reduce energy consumption and manage grid energy. Challenges of grid theft, voltage fluctuations, lack of consistent power from the electrical grids and delays in grid bill payments result in substantial operational leakages.

We recommend deployment of smart solutions which can empower telcos and towerco operators to stay updated with grid related information from any location. A centralised energy management solution benefits the companies by ensuring uninterrupted power supply for avoiding downtime and improves the reliability and efficiency of grids along with lowering opex. Real-time energy tracking and monitoring solutions enable tower operators to assess anomalies and instant rectification. Based on collected data, energy audits are conducted and differences are settled. The turnaround time for bill approvals and payments also improves significantly.

Infozech’s smart grid energy management solution is capable of efficiently tackling the challenges of higher turnaround time on grid bill generation, approval and payment by automating the entire process. The companies adopting green power can effortlessly track and monitor green energy through our energy tracking solution – iETS.

The periodically generated analytical reports provide customers with actionable insights like determining budget and consumption forecasts, detect grid theft, maintain precise energy records and streamline grid operations. Infozech digitises and automates the entire process of grid billing thereby reducing the chances of manual error. It ensures that bills are tracked, reconciled, payments are made timely and data is stored in a single repository therefore, eliminating the need for paperwork.

TowerXchange: What makes Infozech a valuable partner for any Towercos which are establishing a presence in MENA?

Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:

Infozech comes with an expertise of more than 22 years in providing efficient tower management solutions. We understand that installing, operating, managing, and maintaining telecommunication infrastructure is not easy especially when thousands of sites spread across multiple geographies including remote locations are in question. Our solutions are designed and developed to help telecommunication and tower companies get the most value by capturing all the adequate data and analysing the collected data for anomaly detection in the ongoing operations proactively. Besides, our tower and telecommunication management solution’s flexibility, user-friendliness, ability to integrate with multiple hardware has garnered appreciation from most of our customers.

The strong local presence in MENA with offices and subsidiaries in Jordan, Dubai and Saudi Arabia helps us understand the challenges of tower and telecommunication companies of these regions better. We are mindful of the work culture and the commitments and better understand the solutions and the technology which will benefit our potential customers in the region.

I am convinced that our experience in improving telecommunication and tower companies’ responsiveness, agility and ability to scale through any challenges despite the curveballs to ensure customer delight sets us apart from our competition. Our ability to deliver and show value in terms of operational cost savings in a very short span of time after deployment, makes us a preferred partner. We strongly believe that building enduring relationships based on trust makes us a valuable partner for any tower or telecommunications company in the MENA region as well as globally.

How can a digital twin enable tower and telecom companies to drive business with Insights? 26 Mar 2021, 9:16 am

A digital twin is a promising concept for the tower and telecom companies which when adopted can help them face the grand challenges in terms of site and asset visibility, financial (Opex and Capex) planning, operational efficiency, resource optimisation and productivity.

Presently, if a customer wants to deploy more assets on a site, the network design team plans site visits for the managed service provider. The Managed Service Provider (MSP) has to fill a hardcopy checklist for the high-level design which is extremely time-consuming, post which the data is manually fed into excel sheets. After the design is created and shared with the customer or the network build, a shopping list is prepared and shared with the procurement team. Before the data is fed into ERP, there is usually a long process for request validation. This is just one of the operating blocks impacting the success of the business.

Insights gathered through Digital Twin:

With digital twin, the network design team gains more visibility into the tower structure type, the weight load, power load, effective projected area, as well as tower section configuration. Whereas, the procurement team gains more insight into the number of un-utilized assets, idle assets, procurement history, supplier history, stock in warehouse and repair centre as well as assets nearing their service time. Similarly, a digital twin helps Tower and Telecom companies effectively handle the energy management gaps by bringing more transparency through real-time energy data and analysing the same to optimize energy management challenges.

Extensive site and asset environment view:

Digital twin offers Towercos and Telcos a comprehensive, real-time and reliable 360-degree view into their site and asset environment. Businesses can view tenant consumption details, financial information such as rental charges per tenant, land rent, energy costs, monitor assets, report stranded, missing and stolen assets quickly and take necessary actions. Through combination of human and machine intelligence, technologies and analytics, companies can now have passive infrastructure details, monitor location and site conditions, track tower company’s service and maintenance histories remotely by collecting data points, some images and documents.

The benefits reaped:

• Monitors grid, fuel, battery and renewable energy consumption in real-time to manage and track energy consumption optimally and save operational costs.
• Prediction of procurement cycles saves almost 15-20% of CAPEX.
• Budget based to need based transformation is observed in the procurement process.
• Instead of making new investments, the idle or un-utilized assets tracked through digital twin can be redeployed, thus saving huge OPEX.
• Create great value by building healthier customer relationships and collaborations with timely vendor payments.

There is a lot to explore on the opportunities telecom and tower companies can leverage with the insights gathered by embracing digital twin technology. To find out how your organisation can accelerate the digital twin implementation, watch our webinar on “Use cases of digital twin in telecom and tower business.” Reach out to us at pooja.pawar@infozech.com to access our on-demand webinar.