Co-location reduces COPEX – Hussain

Chief executive officer, Helios Towers Nigeria Limited, Mr. Fazal Hussain, has said that co-location reduces the Cost of Operational Expenditures (COPEX) for the telecommunications operators.

Speaking at this year’s Titans of Tech lecture held in Lagos, Mr. Hussain, said that co-location enables operating companies to have better focus of their businesses.

According to him, building individual base stations, for instance, does not make economic sense of business.

Stressing that co-location helps in growing the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) of a given network as well as Value Added Service (VAS), because the operator would have enough chance to focus on improving its market share with quality services.

He described infrastructure as the main engine of telecommunications and sharing it becomes imperative because the operator has to optimize the capacity, coverage, uptime and transmission which is now available.

Hussain noted also that the high cost of bandwidth is still a drain in the pipe for companies like Helios Towers who provide base stations for sharing among operators.

He outlined market challenges to include lack of wireline, high cost of interconnection, and no carrier carrier, to name a few.

And to mitigate some of these challenges, he said, his firm has to lay fibre optic cable, almost at every base stations to allow improved coverage and services.

This, he noted, has been the key success factor of his firm and efficient management of sites for operators, which eventually reduce the cost of backhaul fibre to the towers, reduction in bandwidth costs, just as power generation takes up to 50 per cent of the running cost.

As said by him, the seeds are there for a converged economy in Nigeria, although roll-out is still costly and amounts to about 80 per cent of Capital Expenditure (CAPEX).

“Sharing of infrastructure give operators chance to invest in modern technologies,” he declared, asserting that it should be encouraged by all and sundry.

Pointing out that sharing infrastructure enables operators to focus on customer needs, maintaining that co-location is the way to go.

Titans of Tech lecture was organized by Technology Africa.


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