Vodacom was recently recognised and honoured for its Drone Site Survey Project.
The company was awarded the Operational Efficiency Solution of the Year Award at the TowerXchange Industry Awards for tower markets in Africa and the Middle East for this year.
TowerXchange is an open community for thought leaders in the emerging market tower industry.
The awards are aimed at rewarding companies which excel in telecom towers, from landmark tower transactions and the formation and growth of new tower companies, to improving the uptime on sites through the adoption of improved processes and technologies.
Andries Delport, chief technology officer of Vodacom said, “We’re both thrilled and humbled by this achievement as it shows that our efforts towards running a sustainable company are yielding fruit. We have identified the most significant environmental impact of our operations as being energy use and the related carbon emissions in our network,” said Delport.
“The noticeable health and safety and carbon footprint impacts from this project are the two factors that contributed to Vodacom winning the award. In addition, the innovation provides a useful sustainable simulation tool for the planning divisions, which is unique in the industry and this is the kind of innovation that is needed by our industry in order to respond to some of the challenges involved in managing our base station sites.”
The Drone Site Survey Project involves the visual recording of all aspects of Vodacom Greenfield towers installations using Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS).
The objective of using UAS technology is to reduce the need to undertake certain physical technical site surveys by effectively undertaking surveys in a virtual environment.
“Since we implemented this project in July of this year, we have reduced the need to commute to sites thus reducing costs and improving [the] quality of time spent by field technicians in our base station sites. We have also minimised costs of UAS technology by utilising existing resources contracted to Vodacom and we have easy access to information with minimal data usage,” concluded Delport.
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