A REPORT ON TELECOMMUNICATION AND NETWORKING

BY Sagar Sawhney 08EUDEC089

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Mr. Ajay Kumar Nangia, Circle O&M Head for Delhi/ NCR Circle, VIOM Networks Limited, my project guide for extending his full support and guidance throughout this project. I would also like to thank everyone in the VIOM Networks Limited Delhi/ NCR Circle for extending their full support and co-operation. This project has been a great learning experience for me and I would like to thank VIOM Networks Limited for granting me the opportunity on such an exciting and challenging project.

Date

Sagar Sawhney

TABLE OF CONTENTS ~ What is Telecom Industry? ~ Financial Structure of Tower Infrastructure Companies ~ Passive Infrastructure ~ Active Infrastructure ~ Block Diagram of Tower Working ~ Brief Description of Tower Parts ~ Types of Tower ~ NETWORKING AN OVERVIEW ~ Key Players in Telecom Industry ~ Conclusion

What is Telecom Industry?

Telecommunication is the transmission of information over

significant distances to communicate. The phenomenal growth of mobile subscribers in India over the last few years has created huge opportunities for the telecom infrastructure industry. The tower industry is growing continuously with the active support of the Government. During the early years, the mobile operators were directly involved in the installation and maintenance of the mobile towers. The intense competition in the telecom industry forced all the operators to look for opportunities to reduce the cost of operations by outsourcing network related activities which demand huge capital expenditure and operating expenditure. While some companies created their own captive tower companies, a few others pooled the towers and formed joint ventures. In India even today operator owned tower companies control more than 90% of the market share. The tower companies in India are of 3 types. 1. Tower companies formed through joint ventures like Indus tower which is a joint venture by Airtel, Vodafone and Idea. 2. Tower companies formed though de-merger like Reliance Infratel which is a wholly owned subsidiary of RCom. 3. Independent tower companies (pure play operators) like GTL etc.

Financial Structure of Tower Infrastructure Companies

The telecom tower business in India is very lucrative with long-term growth prospects as the agreements are signed with the mobile operators for a minimum period of 10 years. Thus the tower infrastructure companies are insulated from the volatility of the telecom service business which is currently going through a phase of declining revenue and profit. The commercial terms between the tower company and its tenants are governed by Master Service Agreements (MSA). These MSAs are generally considering 10 to 20 years of lease which ensures stable and predictable cash flow for the tower company by way of rent. However each tower depending on whether it is GBT or RTT will require a very high capital investments ranging from Rs 1.5 million to Rs 2.5 million. The business model provides for a high incremental profit when the tenancy ratio is improved. Tenancy ratios are expressed as a fraction of total number of tenancies / total number of sites present. At present the average tenancy ratio for the industry is 1.55 per tower which is expected to grow to 1.84 by 2015. However for a long term viability tenancy ratio of 2 will be required. The working capital requirement is relatively low as most of the operating expenses are pass-through and recovered from the tenant operators. The operating expenditure like rent, fuel and energy charges is shared by the tenants on a monthly basis.

The monthly rentals charged by tower companies are approximately Rs 30,000 (US $ 667) for GBT and Rs 21,000 (US $ 466) for RTT per operator.

Passive Infrastructure

Passive Infrastructure sharing is nothing but sharing non-electronic infrastructure at cell site. Passive Infrastructure is becoming popular in telecom industry world wide. Passive infrastructure being one of the most important components of a mobile network, the same has been a critical area of operations for telecom companies in the past. However, with increasing competition posing an urgent need for telecom companies to expand their coverage and sharpen their focus on core operations so that they can sustain and improve their market position; passive infrastructure has assumed the status of an independent industry during the past few years. With the emerging of new companies every year passive infrastructure has taken a whole new leap in the world of Telecommunication. Key components include: - Steel tower/antenna mounting structures - Base tower station shelter - Power supply

- Battery bank - Invertors - Diesel generator (DG) set for power backup - Air conditioner - Fire extinguisher - Security cabin, etc.

Active Infrastructure
Active Infrastructure sharing is nothing but sharing electronic

infrastructure. Spectrum-sharing concept is based on a lease model and is often termed spectrum trading. An operator can lease a part of its spectrum to another operator on commercial terms. Though this mechanism, along with that of MVNOs, exists in the US, Europe, Singapore and Australia.

Key components of Active Infrastructure include: - Spectrum (radio frequency) - Base tower station - Microwave radio equipment - Switches - Antennas - Transceivers for signal processing and transmission, etc.

Block Diagram of Tower Working:-

Brief Description of Tower Parts:-

1) Diesel Generator: A diesel generator or D.G. is the combination of diesel engine with electric generators which are used to generate electric energy as emergency power-supply if the main supply fails. 2) Servo Stabilizer: Servo Stabilizer provides a controlled A.C. supply as required by the system for its functioning and maintains an A. C. voltage of 240 volts. 3)P.I.U : Power Interface Unit is intended to be used for replacement of Servo Stabilizer, AMF Panel, Isolation Transformer, AC Distribution Panel, Lightning and Surge Arresters, Alarm Panel, Generator Battery Charger, etc. at telecommunication site. 4) A.M.F: when supply served to the main switch board fails, Auto Man Failure panel will send the power failure signal to generator set. Then the generator set will run and serve the supply to main switch board. 5) ACDB: Air Blast Circuit Breaker or ACDB is a panel that provides power to different Sections .It is a Circuit Breaker using compressed air for operation and arc quenching. 6)A.C. :They are different from air conditioners used in houses but used for maintaining optimal temperature of 25-27C inside the shelter room . Available in 1, 1.5, 2, 3 and 4 TR models Split type. 7)SMPS : Switch Mode Power Supply or SMPS is used to convert A.C. power into D.C. power as required by the batteries .it is about 48 V .

8)Battery Backup : For uninterrupted Power Supply or UPS system a group a batteries is used for providing input Power during any power failure.

Types of Tower
On the basis of where tower is placed it is characterized namely:1) GBT: Ground base tower or (GBT) as the name suggests has a ground base .They are erected on the ground with a height of 40 meters to 80 meters. These ground based towers are mostly installed in rural and semi-urban areas because of the easy availability of land. Ground Based Towers involve a capital expenditure of around Rs 2.5 million depending on the height of the tower. A GBT can accommodate 5 to 6 tenants in its tower.

2) RTT: Roof-Top Tower (RTT) is placed on the terrace of high-rise buildings particularly in urban areas. It is better than GBT as it can catch much more signals due to its height. Their height varies from 12m to 23 m depending upon the need. 3)RTP : Roof Top Pole or RTP are used in cities like Mumbai and Delhi where the high rise buildings are available, instead of towers poles are erected for installing antennas. A roof top pole can accommodate 2 to 3 tenants.

NETWORKING AN OVERVIEW

CELL SITE: A cell site is a term used to describe a site where antennas and electronic communications equipment are placed, usually on a tower or other high place, to create a cell in a cellular network. The elevated structure typically supports antennas, and one or more sets of transmitter/receivers transceivers, digital power sources, and sheltering. A cell site is sometimes called a "cell tower", even if the cell site antennas are mounted on a building rather than a tower. In GSM networks, the technically correct term is Base Transceiver Station (BTS). The term "base station site" might better reflect the increasing co-location of multiple mobile operators, and therefore multiple base stations, at a single site. Depending on an operator's technology, even a site hosting just a single mobile operator may house multiple base stations, each to serve a different air interface technology. MSC: The mobile switching center (MSC) is the primary service delivery node for GSM/CDMA, responsible for routing voice calls and SMS as well as other services (such as conference calls, FAX and circuit switched data). The Gateway MSC (G-MSC) is the MSC that determines which visited MSC the subscriber who is being called is currently located at. signal processors, control electronics, a GPS receiver for timing, primary and backup electrical

The visited MSC (V-MSC) is the MSC where a customer is currently located. The anchor MSC is the MSC from which a handover has been initiated. The mobile switching centre server is a soft-switch variant of the mobile switching centre, which provides circuit-switched calling, mobility management, and GSM services to the mobile phones roaming within the area that it serves.

BSS: traffic

The base and

station

subsystem (BSS) between of a mobile radio

is

the

section

of

traditional cellular telephone network which is responsible for handling signaling allocation phone and channels the network to mobile switching subsystem. The BSS carries out transcoding of speech channels, phones, paging, transmission and reception over the air interface and many other tasks related to the radio network. BTS: The base transceiver station, or BTS, contains the equipment for transmitting and receiving radio signals (transceivers), antennas, and equipment for encrypting and decrypting communications with the base station controller (BSC). Typically a BTS for anything other than a Pico cell will have several transceivers (TRXs) which allow it to serve several different frequencies and different sectors of the cell. BSC: The base station controller (BSC) provides, classically,

the intelligence behind the BTSs. Typically a BSC has tens or even hundreds of BTSs under its control. The BSC handles allocation of radio channels, receives measurements from the mobile phones, and controls handovers from BTS to BTS (except in the case of an inter-BSC handover in which case control is in part the responsibility of the anchor MSCtion of the BSC is to act as a concentrator where many

different low capacity connections to BTSs (with relatively low utilization) become reduced to a smaller number of connections towards the mobile switching center (MSC) (with a high level of utilization). Overall, this means that networks are often structured to have many BSCs distributed into regions near their BTSs which are then connected to large centralized MSC sites. The databases for all the sites, including information such as carrier frequencies, frequency hopping lists, power reduction levels, receiving levels for cell border calculation, are stored in the BSC

Key Players in Telecom Industry

WTTIL QUIPPO: WTTIL the tower arm of Tata Teleservices move over to an independent & professional management run by Quippo Telecom, to make it a truly independent tower operator without being managed by a Telco. The combined entity , therefore, have a portfolio of over 18,000 towers thereby making it the largest independently managed tower company in India, with an enterprise valuation of approximately Rs 13,000 crore (US $2.6 Billion) and has a Tenancy ratio of about 1.84X INDUS Tower: Indus Towers Limited provides Shared Telecom Infrastructure services to all telecom operators in the wireless space and other wireless service providers such as broadband service providers. The company is the leading tower company in INDIA with a Tenancy ratio of 1.71x and more than 100,000 towers.

Bharti Infratel : Infratel is a function within Airtel and is responsible for managing the passive infrastructure of Airtels wireless business .The company has a Tenancy Ratio of about 1.62X and more than 30,000 towers in INDIA. VIOM NETWORKS: Viom Networks, a joint venture between Tata Teleservices and Quippo, a Srei Group Enterprise, is the Pioneer in the Shared Passive Telecom Infrastructure industry in India. The company was set-up with a mission to provide innovative shared telecom infrastructure solutions leveraging world-class technologies all telecom service providers. Having pioneered the concept of telecom infrastructure sharing with less than 100 towers in 2005, Viom Networks today has become the worlds largest independent telecom infrastructure company with a portfolio of over 38,000 towers across all 22 telecom circles in the country, and with plans of rolling out nearly 20-25,000 additional towers in the next two years while targeting a tenancy ratio of 2.5x. The company has by far the highest tenancy of over 2.2x per tower. It is also the strongest player in neutral host shared In-Building Communication Solutions (IBS).

Reliance

Infratel:

Reliance

Infratel

Limited

provides

passive

telecommunication infrastructure in India. The company builds, owns, and operates telecommunication towers, optic fiber cable (OFC) network, and related assets; and provides these passive infrastructure assets on a shared basis to wireless and other communications service providers, as well as to non-communications customers under longterm contracts. The company has more than 48,000 Tenancy ratio of about 1.74x . towers and a

BSNL / MTNL: Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. formed in October, 2000, is World's 7th largest Telecommunications Company providing comprehensive range of telecom services in India. This government owned company has a Tenancy ratio of about 1.07X and more than 45,000 towers. GTL Infra: GTL Infra is in the business of provisioning passive infrastructure at cellsites on a shared basis to multiple operators. GTL Infra is the largest neutral and independently managed tower Company in the world. The company has Tenancy ratio of about 1.17X and more than 32,000 towers across INDIA. The others include small Telecom Tower companies like Tower Vision, Aster Infrastructure, KEC International, and India Telkom Infra etc At present India has around 330,000 towers in India and it is estimated that another 130,000 towers will be required during the next 3 years. However this projection may come down if the anticipated consolidation takes places among the telecom operators.

Conclusion
The telecom tower industry in India is expected to grow at 20% during the next 5 years. This growth is driven mainly by the current capacity constraints, increased rural penetration strategy and additional requirement for rolling out 3G services. It is advantageous for the mobile operators to tie up with tower companies as it is faster and

cheaper to roll out the network by collocating with Infrastructure operators (IP) rather than expanding their own network.