11 October 2022
Megmar Holdings
Megmar and PowerX have announced the first stage rollout of breakthrough technology which will see operating costs and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduced from cell towers in Angola.
The solution unlocks data intelligence to redefine remote monitoring, site operations and maintenance for entire cell tower networks and its equipment and uses AI to drive autonomous continuous site-level improvement at scale.
The deployment will enable Megmar’s network operations centre (NOC) to see at-a-glance sites where resilience is at risk or which sites are running inefficiently. The system also learns from past usage behaviour and live weather reporting to automatically adjust load balancing and power usage to optimise performance with no manual interventions. As such, tower operators will no longer need to estimate when a component is nearing its end of life, is malfunctioning or if power reserves are running short. Instead, they will be able to engage in real-time with detailed operational information and dispatch engineers to solve problems only when they are needed, and with the right equipment to hand.
“Megmar’s expert local market knowledge, energy and openness enabled us to work closely together to calibrate the PowerX AI,” said Justin Head, CEO at PowerX. “Together, we have built a solution to meet their clients' financial and environmental objectives in a way that no other solution could. We are now managing the load and energy requirements of the tower site without human interaction, in real time – it’s a radical new way of doing things.”
The PowerX AI software deployment will relay back to the NOC how individual sites are running and take in a range of data streams to autonomously optimise site behaviour to meet market needs and manage costs. One aspect of predictive maintenance is that it makes planning operational site visits much more predictable and cost-effective, while significantly reducing downtime by addressing problems before they become catastrophic.
“Managing and maintaining cell towers in Africa is a complex and unpredictable task. When things go wrong on a site, which they eventually will, an engineer must often travel far to remote locations over rugged terrain in burning heat. Properly diagnosing the problem can often only be done on-site, so the engineer might not even have all the right kit in their truck,” said Andre Herbst, CEO of Megmar. “PowerX changes the game completely. It not only increases cost predictability for CFOs and reduces greenhouse gas outputs to help firms meet their environmental commitments, but the information it produces saves countless man hours and increases the length of life of expensive tower components.”
