How Optenet can help operators towards energy cost optimization

At a time when power and fuel expenses create one of the biggest cost streams for the cellular operator community, Optenet, an IIT Mumbai research spinoff is coming forward to derive meaningful insights that can help operators in terms of adopting cost optimization approach.

“Today all the operators are facing this challenge of maintaining a cell site. It needs power and fuel to run its operations and that is where the problem is. Power and fuel expense constitute majority of operating expense, and Diesel alone constitutes about 40% of overall Power & Fuel expense. Optenet specializes in helping operators to make informed decisions that bring benefit at every site, while operators retain the flexibility in introducing new initiatives,” says, Abhay Karandikar, Professor and Head, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT, Mumbai.

This holds special importance when operators are spending huge amounts of money towards running their cell sites. As a site-specific decision making capability can significantly reduce the operational expense (OPEX) for the operators.

“Given the large number of cell sites we have in India, there is a need of a data analytics driven approach for site-specific decision making. With Optenet solution, SPs can strengthen the planning process and take informed decisions that benefit every individual site. Optenet has developed a data analytics based recommendation engine for reducing site OPEX and optimizing CAPEX deployment towards OPEX reduction initiatives,” he added.

This data analytics driven solution has been field tested in some of the most challenging operating environments with two operators in seven circles of the country and the results have shown that there is a typical savings of about 20% on energy costs.

“In addition to the ability to analyze cell site-specific data and recommend most optimum solution, Optenet also helps in terms of reducing the time to evaluate new initiatives and helps service providers realize the returns on their investment much faster. Most importantly, the process ensures that the best possible decisions are taken on a continuous basis," he adds on.

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