How tower and data center operators can enable and monetize rapid 5G buildouts

By Mykola Konrad, Head of Product, iconectiv

Sponsored Content – Suppose you own a prime piece of property in a boomtown renowned for bidding wars because, as the saying goes, they aren’t making any more land. Now imagine that no one knows it’s available for sale or lease.

Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Yet that’s what many tower and data center operators, commercial real estate companies and other businesses do when they don’t have an easy way to communicate the assets that they have to  the communication service providers (CSPs) that are ready, willing and able to pay for access to them.

5G illustrates both the opportunities and challenges. Many 5G base stations are deployed at towers, just like 3G and 4G. But unlike previous generations, 5G needs many additional locations because of its reliance on small cells to deliver the gigabit speeds necessary to open new use cases and revenue streams.

In fact, by 2025, North America will be home to more than 335,000 5G small cells, which enable fixed wireless access (FWA) services such as residential broadband. As a result, CSPs will need access to hundreds of thousands of office buildings, shopping centers, parking garages, apartment complexes and other commercial real estate locations to deploy their small cells.

CSPs also will need access to fiber and data centers to connect all of those small cells, plus their traditional sites, to other CSPs and to cloud providers. Tower, data center operators and commercial real estate firms can provide the fiber and interconnection points that CSPs need to support enterprise applications such as edge computing.

Yet many tower and data center operators inadvertently miss out on these opportunities because they don’t make it easy for CSPs to find and review their asset portfolio.

The Common Language for Doing Business

To capitalize on the 5G opportunity, tower, data center operators and commercial real estate firms need to adopt the framework that over 1,800 CSPs and other telecom businesses use every day to describe, identify and share the most important attributes of network infrastructure such as towers, poles, routers and points of presence. This framework is iconectiv® TruOps^TM Common Language®, which provides an industry-standard naming system for locations, equipment, connections and service functions.

This consistency and accuracy enables CSPs to make informed business decisions quickly to build out their 5G networks and activate service for new customers. CSPs also use Common Language to streamline interconnection, maximize operational efficiency and minimize errors in network design and provisioning.

Common Language also complements the digital twins that CSPs increasingly use for network planning. For example, adding Common Language to digital twins helps CSPs pinpoint the ideal location for each new tower to maximize covered points of presence (POPs), while also minimizing interference with equipment on existing sites and equipment on neighboring sites.

Tower and data center operators can increase their asset portfolio visibility by entering their network infrastructure information in the Common Language Central Location Online Entry System (CLONES) database, which covers over 5 million U.S. sites representing more than 10 million network entities. As the industry’s authoritative database, Common Language is the resource that CSPs turn to first when looking for new sites, fiber and data centers. In fact, when a CSP finds the infrastructure that meets its requirements, there’s not much reason to look outside Common Language CLONES.

Common Language’s new network view feature further streamlines planning by allowing CSPs to simply enter a street address or other location information for a prospective site. An interactive digital map then shows all of the telecom functionality for that site, enabling them to quickly make informed decisions about network planning, routing, interconnection, service activation and new technology rollouts. Network view also eliminates the expense and errors that come with doing that research manually.  

Even when tower and data center operators haven’t heard of Common Language, there’s a good chance that Common Language has heard of them. One example is real estate investment trusts (REITs) that purchased tower portfolios from CSPs, which registered detailed information using Common Language. The REITs that acquired CSP tower portfolios for leaseback over the past two decades are often unaware that this information remains in the Common Language database and is still used every day.

The catch is that unless those REITs have a Common Language subscription, they’re not taking full advantage of it because they have no way to verify that each of their sites is listed in the database. They also can’t update information about each site’s capabilities or add newly acquired or built sites to the database.

Similar benefits apply to data center operators. For example, in a major city, Common Language enables CSPs to quickly identify all of the data centers capable of hosting its core and radio access network (RAN) functions. By using Common Language to register their assets, data center operators can take advantage of trends such as neutral hosting, where a third party builds and operates a single mobile network that multiple CSPs use to serve their customers, such as in malls and airports. This business model helps CSPs expand their coverage faster than if they built the network on their own, which is one reason why the global neutral host market is on track to be worth $8.7 billion by 2027. It’s also one more reason why Common Language is a must-have for tower and data center operators that are serious about the 5G market.

Visit iconectiv at Connect (X) 2024 booth 815.