Despite the rising popularity of Viber, WhatsApp, Skype and other services that people use to chat, stream content and hold video conferences for free, the telecom industry continues to grow. Companies that operate in this market are investing heavily in IoT, virtual reality and network upgrades. They are also switching to state-of-art equipment and experimenting with innovative service offerings.
If there’s one factor that can arrest the nose-diving profitability of telecom operators, it’s the cost of powering the base transceiver stations, or cellular towers as they are called. Grid outages are common in most tower sites, as are long running hours of diesel generators, over-sized batteries, with just a sprinkling of renewable options here and there. By no measure does this constitute the right energy mix for a tower that guzzles power 24×7.
