By Prince Osuagwu

AIRTEL Nigeria last week made history as the first telecommunications company to announce a landmark deal to upgrade 250 diesel powered stations in Nigeria to Green-sites. An initiative designed to enable the company harness solar energy to operate its base stations.

The deal is with frontline telecommunications Equipment manufacturers Ericsson and is expected to help the company cut down a considerable level of CO2 emissions and prevent network outages associated with inconsistent power supply.

The company also announced an investment of over $600m in the past one year to expand the capacity and enhance the robustness of its network in pursuit of world class Quality of Service (QoS).

The company’s Chief Operating Officer and Executive Director, Mr. Deepak Srivastava, who conducted ICT media professionals around the e-site at the weekend, regretted that non-availability of regular grid power supply to sites across the country is responsible for over 70% of down time, resulting in poor QoS.

A typical e-site

For him, the Green-Site would go a long way in addressing this critical challenge even as his company was also exploring other options including a partnership with the World Bank to address the nagging issue of power supply especially to the remote communities.

According to him, “even as we pursue the Green-Site solution we have in the last six months installed dual generating sets in 200 sites and installed high back up batteries in 600 sites. By March next year, we are looking at deploying an additional high capacity back up batteries and 500 new Generating Sets”.

He lamented that in some other countries, operators are concerned with managing customer experience rather than keeping the sites up as is the case in Nigeria, where power outages, fibre cut and community issues have combined to undermine the integrity of the network quality.

Accompanied by his Chief Technical Officer, Awadhesh Kumar Kalia; Regulatory Director, Osondu Nwokoro and Corporate Communications and CSR Director, Emeka Oparah, Srivastava, disclosed that “Airtel has invested heavily on Site Rollout, Power improvement projects, fiber roll-out, microwave replacement, technical engineering, network capacity enhancement and adaptive multiple rate”.

He added that Airtel has built over 500 additional sites in the last six months and intends to complete an additional 1000 sites by March 2012.

He hinted on his company’s plans to grow its existing 4500km of fiber by 1800km, giving a total of 6,300km by March 2012. The initiative is expected to provide alternate and multipath redundancy and additional trunk capacity, and reduce the impact of fiber cuts on network availability.

Airtel also said it was replacing old Microwave radio links with modern high capacity equipment and a total of 150 hops are to be replaced by March 2012.

“We are committed to improving the capacity and robustness of our network because it is equally in our interest as we continue to grow our customer base. Nigerians should rest assured that we will co-operate with the regulator to ensure that the prescribed quality standards are always met and even surpassed” Srivastava added.