Challenges in Outsourcing of Telecom Tower Management - System Integrators Perspective

Abstract

The phenomenal growth in mobile subscribers over the last few years has created huge opportunities for the telecom infrastructure industry. The operators in developed markets have already moved on to advanced active infrastructure outsourcing, operators in developing markets are beginning to realize the potential of passive infrastructure outsourcing. The intense competition in the telecom industry forced all the operators to look for opportunities to reduce the cost of operations by outsourcing tower infrastructure management related activities which demand huge capital expenditure and operating expenditure. Thus the telecom tower industry is growing continuously to cut down cost and reducing the time-to-market. There are number of challenges and risks for incumbents and greenfield telecom operators in this working model. Today a telecom operator has outsourced various core and non-core functions and processes to multiple vendors which pose a major challenge for all the SI’s to work together in a harmony to deliver end to end SLAs and quality service to the client. Though outsourcing tower component of the network to an SI seems to be a beneficial aspect for the operators, the tower outsourcing is a comparatively new concept in the telecommunication industry in India. The research presented in this paper primarily explores the tower management outsourcing challenges faced by system integrators (SI’s) and actionable recommendations. Paper presents an extensive literature survey based on which select critical factors have been identified for creating a framework that could be used by telecom operators and SI’s for successful implementation.

Keywords: System Integrators, Tower Management, Outsourcing, Framework

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