If your car breaks down in Death Valley, CA, after dark, you will feel uneasy, with good reason. There is no reception in the nearly 14,000 square km area that is so much more than just a valley: it hosts landscapes ranging from snow-covered mountains and dunes to meadows and steep canyons. In such a vast and geologically diverse region, providing mobile coverage with traditional technology is impossible. This is Starlink territory, an Elon Musk project that brings satellite-based internet to users otherwise cut off from civilization.
However, cutting-edge tech such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality or Industry 4.0 need fast and robust networks that only conventional mobile technology can guarantee.
Cost-effectiveness considerations, sustainability and the need for shared infrastructure called for tower companies to be spun off from the telco providers. While that process started in the United States in the very late 1990s, it only reached Central and Eastern Europe in the early 2020s.
Vantage Towers, a Vodafone spin-off, is a leading tower company that operates approximately 86,000 towers across 10 countries in Europe. Vantage Towers Hungary has 2,500-plus towers and puts up another 150-200 new ones each year. Following a listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, Vantage Towers is currently owned by a consortium of Vodafone, KKR and GIP.
“Many believe our job is to provide coverage, but in fact, we we provide connectivity to people and businesses and enable communications with our infrastructure,” Gergő J. Budai, the Vantage Towers cluster managing director for Hungary as well as the Czech Republic, Ireland, Portugal, and Romania, explains to the Budapest Business Journal.
In addition to ground-based and rooftop towers, Vantage Towers also builds so-called distributed antenna systems (DAS) that boost the signal locally in indoor and outdoor environments.
Situations and locations that scream for such solutions are plenty. Budai mentions Vodafone’s 20th business anniversary at Várkert Bazár where the use of DAS was inevitable given that the venue is built into the side of the Buda Castle hill via huge concrete blocks, making it far from ideal for reception purposes. The opening day of the 2023 Athletic World Championship in Budapest marked another challenging milestone.
“When the announcer called upon 40,000 viewers on the spot to use an app in the hope of winning a car, it made you sweat for a second,” Budai recalls, adding that, thankfully, the 42 mini antenna systems lived up to expectations.
“Our technology is agnostic in the sense that service is robust for every telco provider; a good example is the MVM Dome” the MD adds. “It is also ideal for office buildings where tenants don’t want to be locked to one single provider.”
The entire business model is changing, too. Now, facility owners and managers order and pay for the deployment of the service, and Vantage Towers brings the providers on board so that every one of their tenants can have a signal.
The general condition of the Hungarian mobile networks are of great quality. However, the median mobile internet connection speed of around 54 Mbps is no more than the average figure in the region. In terms of 4G, the last few percentage points of coverage are being added, and 5G is progressing massively. The one problem is the “Nimby” effect. Everyone wants network stability, just “Not in my Back Yard.”
Budai stresses, “We are talking about a safe technology, though, as evidenced by countless scientific studies and 40-plus years of experience. Even trams’ pickups have more electromagnetic radiation.”
Even so, conspiracy theories and crazy ideas persist. During COVID, for instance, 5G antennas were attacked in places as geographically diverse as Europe and South America because people thought they were spreading the virus. The damage done, affected telecommunications in the areas concerned, causing delays and quite possibly leading to deaths, even though at that time in most places 5G was not available and it was older networks that were damaged.
In a bid to blend in less obtrusively, mobile network towers camouflaged as pine or palm trees do exist, but you would never mistake them for real trees. Accordingly, they can’t be cut down by accident, unlike a blockbuster comedy where the effort resulted in electrocution (and funnily executed reanimation).
Whether the reception is robust enough depends very much on topology. In the Czech Republic, for instance, aprroximately 4,000 base stations are needed to provide coverage for a population of a similar size to that in Hungary. Here, only roughly 3,000 are required.
However, greater efforts remain pivotal in pushing mobile service towards perfection. Vantage Towers’ Gigabit Innovation Track project, for example, aims to provide the foundation to establish an extensive 5G mobile communications infrastructure along train tracks in Germany. And while researchers are already working on the next generation of 6G technology, nationwide developments continue.
“The number of infrastructure companies in Hungary are starting to exceed that of providers. One thing is for certain: technology and the market are always changing, developing,” Budai concludes.
Vantage Towers does everything in its power to keep its operations green. Its towers run on 100% renewable energy. The equation is changing substantially: electricity used to come from the grid first; backup was a lithium battery park and, if needed, a diesel generator. Now, solar is the primary energy source, batteries come second, and the grid is the third line.
But what difference does 5G actually make? It comes down to real time vs. a few tenths of seconds, Budai explains.
“We gave goalkeepers VR sets enabled with 4G and 5G, respectively. The upgraded one allowed them to save; with 4G, they didn’t stand a chance,” he explains.
Autonomous car positioning can also be tricky depending on the technology: a 30-50 cm difference can decide whether you have an accident. Where 5G really comes into play is in machine-to-machine communications. Smart cities, remote robotic surgeries and intelligent factories will all need a real-time connection, hence no latency, for which 5G is crucial.
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of November 4, 2024.
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