Abstract
The telecommunications market has witnessed significant growth, especially with Tower Companies (TowerCo) acquiring network towers from Mobile Network operators (MNO) and leasing them back to MNO under Power as a Service (PaaS) contractual agreement. Under this agreement, TowerCo is responsible for providing MNO’s towers with an uninterrupted power supply. However, TowerCo in South Africa is confronted by a series of challenges, including power cuts (load-shedding), vandalism, battery theft, and cable theft.
This minor dissertation undertakes an investigation into these challenges, analyzing their impact on network availability and examining the occurrence of faults, resolutions of faults as well as current backup power solutions. Quantitative, descriptive, and historical methods were employed to collect and analyze secondary data from a dataset consisting of 11 507 towers. The analysis reveals that faults related to passive components are the main contributors to availability drops, due to the impact of the load-shedding stages on towers with a lack of backup solutions. Vandalism and unattended faults also significantly affect network reliability and availability. These findings have broader implications for the overall performance of both TowerCo and MNO, including their revenue streams.