A third of Vodacom’s network has no power at any given point

Vodacom has revealed the shocking impact that constantly elevated levels of load shedding are wreaking on the country’s mobile networks.

In the last two quarters (September to December and January to March), the average grid availability to its more than 9 550 towers has been around 67%. This means that at any given point in time around a third of its sites are not being supplied by power from Eskom or municipalities.

The most recent quarter (to March) saw 2 068 hours of load shedding, compared with 605 hours in the April to June period.

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During load shedding, mobile operators must rely on battery and diesel backup systems to ensure their networks remain operational.

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Battery systems struggle to provide the required power in load shedding stages above four as there is simply too little time to recharge before the power is cut again. These are also easy targets for thieves.

Network performance suffers

This has an impact on the performance of mobile networks (we’ve all experienced one bar of 4G coverage).

Vodacom says in the first three months of this year, so-called ‘R1 availability’ on its network declined to 94% from 98% between April and June 2022.

Coupled with this is the fact that demand for mobile data soars during load shedding. It says data traffic grew by 45% in the first three months of this year.

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Infrastructure that is already under strain has to deal with this increased demand, which it says is “incrementally challenging as load shedding stages increase”.

In the past year, Vodacom has spent an additional R300 million to mitigate the impact of load shedding. It says this “largely related to diesel”, with some additional spending on security and maintenance.

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Since 2020, it has spent “over R4 billion in back-up power solutions such as batteries and generators”, with around R700 million invested in the past 12 months. It says “the sustained levels of load shedding has been disastrous for the South African economy and the industry as a collective”.

Vodacom is pinning some of its hopes on a “virtual wheeling” pilot project, which it remains confident will be “signed off in the near term” with Eskom.

This will allow it to source electricity from independent renewable power producers. The complexity of its network – with more than 15 000 low-voltage sites in 168 municipalities – has prevented it from using standard wheeling to procure power from renewable generators.

It says the virtual wheeling project “will have a significantly positive impact on the country’s power grid and ultimately on the over 20 000 towers across the industry that require reliable power supply to operate optimally”.

MTN’s plan

Previously, MTN said that load shedding resulted in a R695 million hit to earnings in South Africa during 2022. This translated into a 3.4 percentage point decline in its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) margin.

With load shedding worsening this year, it has seen an impact on voice revenues as the extent of power outages “heavily disrupted network availability”.

It says it has begun “the rollout of its comprehensive network resilience plan” which will be complete by the end of this month. It will spend at least R1.5 billion this year to secure its network against load shedding and theft at its base stations.

It will install additional battery capacity which will provide at least six hours of back up, and deploy static and mobile generators. It says it is also “piloting solar solutions on a limited number of sites”.

So far, it has seen encouraging results from the investments in its Joburg network and it plans to roll this out across “high priority sites in key provinces” by the end of this year. The rest of the network will be completed in the first half of next year.

MTN anticipates load shedding to persist at stage four and above for the remainder of 2023.

This article originally appeared on Moneyweb and was republished with permission. Read the original article here.

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