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Services |
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Alternate Energy
Solutions for Telecom Infrastructure - Cooling Systems |
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| Telecommunication sector is
the fastest growing sector in the country, adding
on an average of 9 million new customers every month.
Over 400 million Indians already have a mobile connection
by now using both GSM and CDMA technologies. It
is expected that India will cross 500 million mobile
telephone connections by end 2009 and will reach
700 million+ by 2012. With nearly 10 Telecom operators
for every area, introduction of new technologies
like 3G and Wimax, introduction of MVNOs (mobile
virtual network operators), the field is set to
grow more competitive and fierce. |
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| Add to this, it is already
known that Indian Telecom Operators generate, from
their customers, some of the lowest ARPUs in the
world, which creates a unique challenge for these
operators, in terms of maintaining the growth rates,
rapidly scaling and building the required infrastructure
and at the same time, face up to the associated
challenge of covering 65% of the remaining unconnected
India, with problems of physical accessibility,
lack of resources such as Power Supplies, Fuel supplies,
which may not be just in short supply but also costs
more than the purchase prices in the market (wastage). |
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| It is indeed also an established
fact that, the Indian Mobile Telecom Network Infrastructure,
which currently spans across nearly 175,000 Ground
based and Roof Top Towers is rapidly required to
be scaled to nearly 300,000 number of Towers all
across India (shared or otherwise) in the next 3
years or so. These Tower sites house the critical
electronic and digital network that powers the telecommunications
of these hundreds of millions of Indians. To do
that, Telecom industry, has already become among
the largest consumers of fossil fuel like Diesel
in the country, draining Operators cash resources
and inhibiting them from quicker roll outs. |
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| Diesel fuel, etc are used to
run the Electronic networks in the field, at the
Tower sites, to run Generators with huge current
capacities, in order to keep the batteries charged
and run the Air conditioners, which are essential
to keep control of, maintain a cool ambient temperature,
of the heat loads generated by the array of BTS
and Battery equipment. |
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Alternate Solutions that have
been experimented to limit the drain from fuel costs
include:
a) using bio fuels to run the diesel generator sets
b) using free cooling solutions
c) Especially designed BTS equipment to withstand
higher temperatures
d) Photovoltaic Energy (Solar Power)
e) Wind Energy, etc. |
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| None of the above solutions
till date have yielded definitive outcomes, where
operators can either use these alternatives on a
large scale, technically or economically and thereby
save the high costs associated with these alternates,
due to various limitations. |
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| VCON SOLUTIONS: |
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| VCON Services has Collaboration
Agreements with Institut für Luft- und Kältetechnik
Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft gmbH, Germany. ILK
is one of foremost Research & Development organizations,
specializing in development of customized cooling
solutions for any type of requirement. |
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| Early on VCON has realized
that Indian Telecom Operator challenge emanates
from a lack stable and dependable and therefore
highly erratic electricity supply from the state
grids. In large parts of the country, electric supply
from the Grids are available only for a limited
time ranging from 3 hours 12 hours maximum. |
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| VCON & ILK have worked
together extensively, visiting site locations, conducting
interviews with Telecom operators and Infrastructure
providers, studying the alternate solutions on offer,
researching local conditions at various locations,
etc. Consequent to our deeper understanding of the
challenges involved, we have developed a solution,
which will largely mitigate the Operators twin challenges
by meeting the cooling needs of the BTS sites, and
at the same time reduce the dependence on Air conditioners
(minimize there usage) and therefore the load of
heavy duty generator sets, and thereby result in
substantial to huge savings on diesel fuel needs
and bills and other associated problems. |
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| Three onsite situations have
been envisaged, whilst developing our solutions
i.e. |
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- Grid supply – BTS, electronics and AC
are running normally, battery and cold storage
are recharging.
- Running on DG (batteries and cold storage
discharged) – BTS, electronics and AC
are supplied by DG (minimum load to reduce diesel-costs,
no recharging of batteries and cold storage).
This situation has to be avoided.
- Battery supply – BTS is supplied by
battery, air conditioning is done by cold storage
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| VCON is currently with ILK
to develop a proof of concept Prototype cooling
system, in Germany, which will be further tested
in-situ at operator sites within India and upon
obtaining successful results, full scale commercial
production and marketing will follow. |
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| We are currently evaluating
various options where other companies and organizations
have evinced interest in providing financial partnership
in prototype development, as also production facilities
for large scale deployments at a later stage. |
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