Leading digital solutions platform Globe on Friday sought to make its cell sites disaster-resilient with the deployment of a service that cuts the downtime of cell sites and ensure business continuity during times of disaster, especially typhoons.
Globe collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in developing G-Climate, a cloud native service that uses predictive analytics on various data points such as weather information, weather patterns, and cell site outage data to identify potential outages, specifically during the typhoon season.
G-Climate was developed to address the impact of severe weather disturbances responsible for an estimated 10 to 20 percent of outages at Globe’s cell sites.
“Since communications are vital during disasters, Globe is doing its best to minimize the impact of climate-related risks, particularly the downtime of cell sites in typhoon-prone areas. G-Climate is one of the ways to mitigate the effects of severe weather conditions beyond our control,” said Yoly Crisanto, chief sustainability and corporate communications officer, Globe Group.
“It is great to see Globe create and use G-Climate App built using AWS machine learning services including Amazon SageMaker to drive faster operational decisions in critical situations and natural disasters like typhoons, floods, and earthquakes,” said Stephen Thomas Misa, country head of AWS Philippines.
“More importantly, restoring communication facilities as fast as possible after a disaster strikes allows our citizens to reconnect and stay connected with families, friends, and loved ones and have access to their finances, funds, and other critical support services,” he added.
To predict which cell sites may experience an outage, G-Climate uses historical and current weather data and site information. This allows Globe to optimize the location of engineers, supplies and backup power to prevent or reduce customer downtime.
G-Climate aims to improve restoration time by 30 percent to benefit subscribers impacted by typhoons. Other potential benefits include a reduction in revenue loss, infrastructure damage and restoration costs, and time spent submitting insurance claims.
To ensure network resiliency and business continuity, Globe equips key sites with relevant access technologies and redundant transport facilities in the event of an area-wide outage, fortifies transport facilities, and complements backup environment-friendly batteries with higher capacity generator sets to address prolonged commercial power outages.
Globe also invested in rapid-deployment solutions for stop-gap approaches and quick fixes in areas that need immediate support in times of disasters. This includes cell site on wheels (COW) and tower on wheels (TOW), which are retractable towers that can be deployed quickly to provide temporary coverage and capacity in areas affected by network outage.
Other solutions include the cellsite-on-a-light truck (COLT), genset-on-a-truck (GOAT) mobile generators and Network-in-a-Box (NIB) portable cell sites, which can be set up in strategic locations to provide temporary coverage and capacity in these affected areas.
