PhilTower Consortium Inc., the country's leading digital shared infrastructure provider, announced an operations partnership with SiteSee and QNSI to digitize 1,350 cell towers acquired from a leading telecom company in the country last September 2022.

The SiteSee digital twin platform, combined with QNSI field surveys and audit tools, enables PhilTower to optimize its infrastructure and capture new revenue opportunities faster. The combination of SiteSee's advanced tools and QNSI local service delivery capability is gradually replacing traditional engineering inspections and enhancing asset management practices.

The digitization of Philtower cell sites began in December 2022, intending to improve the information exchange and collaboration with its clients (the MNOs) by providing a more comprehensive and streamlined process for asset management, more accurate co-location identification, and built quality compliance. The drones-based survey by QNSI is integrated into the comprehensive site audit services. SiteSee processes the drone images into accurate 3D models. The SiteSee Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms are applied for each cell site to render a digital twin of the assets.

This partnership with SiteSee as the technology principal and QNSI, a local project management and service provider partner, has quickly enabled this new technology to be integrated into PhilTower workflows.

Devid Gubiani, CEO of PhilTower, said, "Digital transformation is revolutionizing our industry, and I am proud that PhilTower has taken the lead. These state of art technologies, like drones and AI, help streamline and accelerate our operations and provide enormous benefits for our customers as it creates transparency and speeds up transactions. Apart from the advanced technology applied, digitalizing our tower portfolio is a demanding task in terms of logistics and managing large field operations. QNSI's local knowledge in rolling out large-scale field operations nationwide has proven to be a critical success factor in getting the program off the ground."

P T Pawar, Chief Operations Officer of PhilTower, said, "The drone audit resulted in operational efficiency in terms of accurate and detailed asset registers, reduced truck rolls and audit time, accelerated loading analysis, ease of co-location process and deployment. We also anticipate the potential saving in future tower preventive maintenance costs. This strategic partnership is one of our steps towards digitalization and modernization of distributed assets".

Matti Jokinen, Director of QNSI, said, "Deploying drones as part of our services was new to us, but from the onset, the advantages were clear. We have quickly trained our existing staff for the technology and equipment. It has become just 'another tool in the box' that makes our work more efficient and safe for our staff while providing us the capability and scale to support the industry in its digitalization drive. We currently operate a fleet of 20+ drones, which allows us to audit over 200 sites per month with more pilots in training to meet the market demand. We typically capture over one thousand photographs or well over one gigabyte of data per site, ensuring the AI algorithms can provide close to 100% accuracy in automatically detecting antenna loading and structural issues such as missing bolts or corrosion."

David Pash, Director of SiteSee, said, "We are delighted to partner with PhilTower and QNSI in the Philippines. Our digital platform has been built from the ground up over the last six years to cater to the specific needs of the global TowerCo industry. We now have a global customer base and are excited to be introducing our technology to the Philippines wireless telecom market".