The client is a leader in providing tower infrastructure services to leading telecom companies. Since their inception, they have supplied infrastructure for more than 100,000 towers. In addition to installing towers, they operate and monitor towers for their clients.
The infrastructure provider employs field operators across all their sites to ensure smooth functioning, reporting, and alerts in case of any malfunctions in the field.
Manual dependency on collection of data led to inaccurate reporting
The reports submitted by the operators, upon manual inspection, constituted the towers’ maintenance status like fuel or battery consumption, replacement of parts, and more. Our client needed access to these reports in real-time, but there were challenges around aggregating the required data from across hundreds of thousands of sites. The field reps were also delayed in sending out timely alerts to their maintenance teams in case of any malfunctions or shutdowns.
Since all the data was furnished by the operators working remotely, the accuracy of the data could also not be validated at the main office.
IoT-enabled cellular towers provide ease of operations
The client realized the need to modernize the way they maintained and operated the cellular towers. As their digital consulting partner, Persistent designed and developed a turnkey IoT-enabled solution on Google Cloud to read real-time data from all their field sites.
The solution consolidates and stores the data on Google Cloud Platform and generates reliable and accurate reports for easier access and consumption. Currently, the solution has been deployed at 1000 tower sites and can be scaled to all the 100,000 sites without any changes to the code, once the hardware is installed on the other sites.
Kamal Puri, Google Business Unit, Persistent Systems
We used the following Google Cloud Products –
- BigQuery
- PubSub
- DataFlow
- IoTCore
Phase II: Getting the system to generate tickets
In the second phase of the project, we built a consolidated and centralized reporting platform for their support centers that monitors all their tower operations. Further, the solution auto-generates tickets in case of any issues, without relying on manual intervention.
With this upgrade, the client has been able to gain fresh insights into towers’ operations across different geographies and take manual efforts off their day-to-day ticketing task.
