5G is increasing demand for new infrastructure management solutions.

Whether you #selfie or not, you know that 5G and data consumption are driving major development in the cell tower industry.

Ericsson’s Head of Regional Operations, Matt Jones believes the number of towers will reach one million – nearly triple today’s number – as U.S. carriers implement 5G nationwide.

But monitoring that infrastructure is nowhere as efficient as the devices it enables.

Climbers perform roughly 35,000 site visits a year for general inspections. With 5G that number is skyrocketing. The average visit is collected and recorded by hand. The data collection process for a single tower inspection can take up to 8 hours once the climber has manually input data and created the report.

Once the data exists, stakeholders still can’t use it efficiently.

After field teams perform inspections and deliver reports, operations are left digging through a mess of zip files, USB drives, and various company databases–not only increasing costs for site visits but dulling the effectiveness of what is collected.

While drones are helping automate data collection, without platforms to manage that data, it quickly becomes overwhelming.

The result is piles of spreadsheets collecting dust instead of creating valuable insights. A drone flight for a single tower can gather up to 600 photos – or 5 gigabytes of data.

How do we fix this?
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Red Mountain Strata enables vendors, tower owners, and service providers to view all their data in one place using a map-based interface. Combined with Red Mountain Scalar for automated drone image capture, we provide everything you need to streamline your high infrastructure management.

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