Telecoms Come Together to Create Global Open Site Interest Group

The Global Site Forum was held at MWC 2019 in Barcelona. During this forum, Huawei and a number of leading global carriers, tower companies, and third-party partners jointly initiated to create the Open Site Interest Group.

With this move, Huawei aims to build a site resource sharing platform and develop site construction standards through broad collaboration among diverse industries as 5G scaled construction is set to take off a big way. Huawei also released a full series of industry white papers on sites, power supply, and transmission, presenting a systematic understanding of future site construction.

Challenging site acquisition and immense costs of site construction are two long-standing issues facing global carriers. The success rate of site acquisition has long been hovering at around 60%, creating an obvious obstacle in site development. It usually takes six to nine months for a carrier to strike an agreement on constructing a site at a desired location. Completing a site construction additionally requires enormous project costs and other rental expenditure at a very high level.

All of these factors create a considerable bottleneck that hinders the development of mobile infrastructure networks. Reports from the Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA) also indicate that as much as 70% of site investment is consumed by related auxiliary facilities. As we move towards 5G, those issues will become even more aggravating, especially for new deployments that are believed to be primarily based on micro and pole sites.

The sustainable growth of mobile communication requires huge efforts from all related parties. On top of innovating on site technologies, such efforts must also focus on close cooperation among industries, maximum use of public resources, and full play of site sharing to resolve site acquisition and reduce total ownership of costs (TCO).

Forming the Open Site Interest Group together with industry partners in this forum is another example of Huawei's continued efforts to promote site development. By creating an open industry platform, this group hopes to share, replicate, and promote good practice in site development, to gain policy programs and support in opening up public social resources, and to encourage partners from other industries to jointly develop site ecosystems in return for sharing the dividend of the 5G industry.

Huawei comprehensively explained its perspective on site construction through a full series of white papers on site, power supply, and transmission. The Smart Pole Site White Paper outlined the concept of modular site construction, turning sites from a base station platform to an ICT platform that works to serve multiple purposes.

In the 5G Power White Paper, based on its thorough understanding of 5G networks, Huawei proposed an impressive 5G energy strategy to allow for an efficient energy use and support a simple and smart energy management. The 5G Microwave White Paper pointed out that bandwidth and delay of 5G microwave are comparable to fibers. 5G can be built quickly and at low cost with 5G microwave.

Hao Yingtao, President of Wireless Site Domain of Huawei's Wireless Network Product Line said, said: "Huawei is committed to innovating and providing solutions to the network construction problems facing global carriers. We are always open-minded and more than willing to work with parties from various industries to create a better environment for the development of mobile communications. We welcome more and more parties to join The Open Site Interest Group to contribute to developing mobile networks that can deliver a better experience and gain site development dividends in this process."