Two services: the antenna site, and the fibre behind it.

Service 01 · Antennas

Antenna sites built for more than one tenant

The tower is the visible part and the least of the difficulty. The work is in what surrounds it: finding a position that actually serves the settlements around it, agreeing the ground with the people who hold it, getting the approvals, and getting materials to a place the road may not reach in the wet season.

We size structures for several tenants from the outset. Reinforcing a mast after it is standing costs far more than building the capacity in at the start, and a site that cannot take a second operator is a site that never reaches its own economics. Licensed operators mount their own radios and run their own service; POP owns and maintains the site beneath them.

• Site selection against settlement patterns, terrain and existing coverage, not against a map alone.
• Land and community agreements negotiated locally and documented properly, because an undocumented site is a future dispute.
• Civil works and steel designed to a multi-tenant load from day one.
• Power that holds. Off-grid and hybrid systems sized to measured load and to the bad week rather than the average one, because in this market power, not radio, decides whether a site stays up.
• Backhaul per site: fibre where a route exists, microwave where there is line of sight, satellite where nothing else reaches yet.
• Remote monitoring and local maintenance, so a failing system is known before the site drops, and fixed by people who live nearby.

Service 02 · Fibre optic

Fibre routes for the backbone and the city

Fibre is what turns a set of sites into a network. It carries traffic from towers to towns and from towns to the national backbone, and it is the only medium with the capacity that 4G and 5G traffic will need over the life of a site.

Nigeria is building fibre at national scale. The Federal Government's Project BRIDGE sets out 90,000 km of new open-access fibre, which would take the national backbone past 120,000 km, in a programme of about $2 billion now planned to be delivered within three years. Programmes of that size are delivered route by route and section by section, and they need builders who can also operate what they build.

POP brings the fibre work of the group. In DR Congo, POP Congo SA is developing fibre optic infrastructure projects with State partners, from corridor survey to construction in road drainage channels to open-access operation. That is the experience we bring to fibre in Nigeria.

• Route survey and design, including crossings, bridges and the civil works along existing and new roads.
• Construction: ducting, cable, splicing, chambers and testing.
• Open access, so that every licensed operator can use the route on the same terms.
• Operation and maintenance after handover, because a route that is built and then left is a route that fails.