The international alliance focused on automation of telecom towers has a new partner: Ubiik. The advanced metering infrastructure innovator is the latest member of the Tower Automation Alliance (TAA), set to collaborate on energy monitoring projects for telecom towers.
The new membership of Ubiik will play an important role at the alliance as they will join and strengthen the ‘Tower Asset Monitoring’ and ‘Greening the Network’working groups with the purpose of helping telcos monitor and optimize their base stations power consumption, ushering the industry towards a more energy- and cost-efficient era. Being in Taiwan, they become the first partner of the alliance of the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region which will bring an important know-how of this area and expand global coverage to the rest of the partners.
The projects involve installing smart meters for base stations installed on towers, connecting them via their operator’s own wireless network, as well as integrating management software operating energy monitoring, energy management and billing. This is the latest architecture for IoT systems used for sub-metering of industrial assets to securely perform remote monitoring and maintenance while enacting energy management (provisioning and billing of the infrastructure).
Since 2020, Ubiik has been providing a turnkey smart metering solution to a Japanese telecom operator for its base station energy monitoring in Japan. The telecom operator deployed 55,000 4G and 5G base stations for which Ubiik has been validating its end-to-end solution: electricity meters, communication modules on LTE technologies interfaced with the Japanese telecom operator’s cloud-based LTE network, and Ubiik cloud software platform.
The benefit sought after from the solution is to reduce the energy bill for the operator by more than 30% compared to the usual way of splitting utilities cost merely by the number of tenants on the tower.
“Base station owners are facing real challenges at the tower site with the push for renewables, energy savings and the drive for OPEX optimization of tower assets,” said Fabien Petitgrand, Ubiik CTO. “Ubiik base station monitoring solution incorporating smart meters, connectivity and software management, enables TowerCos to apply the benefits of smart metering to tower sites and reduce operating costs. Since 2019, the Advanced Metering Infrastructure Ubiik has been deployed in Taiwan including more than 800 power meters installed on rooftops or on telecom towers: each monitoring Taiwan telecom operators' base stations. Joining the Alliance will enable us to collaborate and partner with other members to solve the challenges telecom site owners are facing today.”
Accelerating the pace of innovation for the telco sector
Ubiik and its proven advanced metering infrastructure breakthrough are a highly valuable addition for the TAA as it opens the door to automating the energy management and maintenance processes that support a site and its related equipment with dramatic ROI.
The leading-edge realization of Ubiik demonstrated at the base station energy monitoring level is the first of its kind that the TAA, facilitating collaborations among its members, will take to the next level including optimization of all tower assets on tower sites.
“We are excited to welcome Ubiik expertise and knowledge to our alliance to boost the ‘Tower Asset Monitoring’ and ‘Greening the Network’ groups as these are key topics to the telecom tower industry,” said Jesús del Estad, CEO of the Tower Automation Alliance. “We strongly believe that Ubiik will add a great value to the alliance contributing their vision on energy management and helping our partners grow in decision-making”.