Maria Rampa: Hi, I’m Maria Rampa and welcome to this episode of Engineering Reimagined.

Every year advancements in wireless communications technology creates greater opportunities for virtual connections, whether via sensors to operate robots and drones or by vehicle-to-everything systems to enable autonomous transportation.

But these are not the only elements in our wireless telecommunications ecosystem.

Above our heads, tower infrastructure is the enabler of rapidly advancing wireless technology.

The past couple of years has seen a huge transformation of vertically integrated telecommunications companies, as a result of M&A activity, into: service providers – those who deliver the wireless telecommunications services – and infrastructure operators – those who own and operate the physical towers.

This transformation has required a step-change in mindset and behaviours. What happens when you need to start thinking like an infrastructure company rather than a telecommunications service provider? Your business forecasts changing from 5 to 50 years is just one example.

In this episode of Engineering Reimagined, Aurecon's Data & Telecommunications Industry Director, Simon McFadden, speaks to Amplitel CEO Jon Lipton about creating a national specialist tower company following the partial sale of Telstra’s tower business. Amplitel is on a journey to become Australia’s leading provider of tower infrastructure, creating a digital twin network across its 8,000 tower sites and investing in new tower technology, particularly with the emerging rollout of 6G.

Let’s hear how they are navigating this exciting and challenging path.

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Simon McFadden: Hey, Jon. Welcome to Engineering Reimagined, great to have you here.

Jon Lipton: Thanks very much, Simon. It's certainly great to be here.

Simon McFadden: I'm in New Zealand this week, and we've been reflecting as a team that telecoms is a very interesting industry, and I've been lucky enough to work in it for a long time. Often emerging engineers look to the big structures or the big developments and think that looks really exciting. But I'd be really interested to know what inspired you through your career with the background in engineering and science to work in telecoms, but also to stay in it over the long run.

Jon Lipton: I've been in the telecommunications industry for nearly 25 years, so it's nice to pause for a moment and reflect on how that all started. I don't know if there's one specific point or moment, but I do recall my parents actually, for my 13th birthday, purchased me a Citizens Band radio, CB radio, as it was called. In fact, I remember it was a 40 channel Uniden AM CB radio.

Simon McFadden: You are an engineer Jon.

Jon Lipton: Talking to some random person several suburbs away quickly grew to upgrading to a sideband radio and finding a bit of additional power and making connections with people all over the world. Then I actually connected my commodore 64 computer and started to interpret some satellite images and other data over the airwaves. So I became quite fascinated with both emerging tech and connection to other people. So I guess that evolved to working in telecommunications. That seemed like the ideal career path.

Simon McFadden: I do remember having a commodore 64 and coding at the time and learning about that and making games, which was a lot of fun, right.

Jon Lipton: The magnetic cassette that used to get that horrible noise.

Simon McFadden: Yeah.

Jon Lipton: You play that to anyone who was around in the late seventies and eighties, everyone knows that noise. But I played it to my kids the other day and they're like, "what is that?".

Simon McFadden: My kids probably do the same thing. If we look at the telecom tower industry, the idea of having tower companies has been around for some time. There have been a lot of countries that have moved to large proportions of telecom tariffs being owned by private companies particularly in the US and a whole series of countries. And over the last couple of years, we've seen a lot of change in the industry in Australia and New Zealand, with deals including the creation of your business, the $2.8 billion sale, or monetisation, for 49% of your business from Telstra. If you could reflect on the change from a Telco to a Tower-co. We've seen quite a shift in the time horizons that people think over, they're thinking a quarter to a year to maybe max five years in a telco. But Tower-cos are typically thinking 20 to 30 years over their forecast. So have you any reflections on that?

Jon Lipton: For those that don't know, Amplitel was established 1 September 2021. It's hard to believe that we're only some 17 or so months old. There's certainly been a rapid evolution in change in the industry over that time. And as you also said, that was following the transfer of the towers from Telstra Corporation at 49% sale to a consortium of investors. The consortium includes the Future Fund, Australia Retirement Trust, Commonwealth Super Corporation, and Morrisons and Co. Now, clearly we're focused on a number of strategic objectives that are aligned to running an infrastructure business as opposed to a Telco business. Fundamentally, that's taking a much longer-term view of the investment required to improve our asset utilisation. And that's certainly been the most significant change. I remember like it was yesterday, during the monetisation process, one of the folks at Morrisons said, can we see your 50-year forecast? And I had assumed they meant five years because three years was a bit of a challenge for us.

Simon McFadden: Obviously a typo.

Jon Lipton: Yeah, obviously a typo. So we were building the five year forecast and we sent it through and where's the other 45? But if I give you an example of how that's evolved, we plan and design our towers from day one now, with sufficient structural capacity to support our customers equipment and take into account their anticipated future needs. We don't want to build any towers that are eventually only ever single tenanted. That's a significant change from building infrastructure to support an immediate need, always at the lowest possible cost. So, in just a relatively short period of time, we're starting to see that thinking propagate right throughout the team. But it's been a challenge. But I think we're starting to think more like an infrastructure company than a telco now.

Simon McFadden: One of the things that we've chatted about at times is digital twins, the idea of a metaverse for towers. And we've talked about that somewhat tongue in cheek. Right? But when we look at the digital technologies that are available right now, there are some that, it's pretty obvious that we can use to make information available to everybody in the supply chain or in the ecosystems that working around the tower portfolio, customers, suppliers, et cetera, to do things better. And then there are some things that seem harder to do a good cost benefit analysis on and be sure that, yeah, that's a great idea, I'm going to go with that level of technology or information. And I know that you've spoken publicly at a couple of conferences about the idea of a metaverse for towers and would you want to maybe just explain what you think there and maybe how you see that playing out over the next number of years?

Jon Lipton: We absolutely recognise the importance to continue to adapt to our customers current and future needs. And a key strategic objective for us is to improve our asset utilisation by improving access to our infrastructure. We're really passionate that leveraging digital twins and ultimately, and it is a little bit tongue in cheek, developing a towers metaverse will enable our customers to access our infrastructure easier than ever before and make faster decisions informed by real time data. Today, as a customer with access to our system, if you have equipment on one of those towers, or you're considering placing equipment on one of our towers, you can gain a very detailed view of that infrastructure. So our customers can virtually scope sites in three dimensions and get served accurate as-surveyed information. So the digital twin simplicity will help our customers to understand that infrastructure quicker, all from their device, all in a matter of seconds. We've already created over 2,000 unique digital twins and we're on track to have created digital twins for 90% of our mobile structures by 2025. And that's because we want to continue to build these twins to transform that customer interaction and give our customers the tools to optimise future deployments and reduce our customers deployment times. We're seeing a really quick evolution of digital twins. From a twin that provides a view of what the real world looks like. That's just a twin of the physical counterpart to now what we're seeing is a set of models that sit behind those twins that can be queried to understand how that infrastructure will behave over time and support our customers’ needs. And this is the really exciting bit about the twins. So we believe as we build enough of these digital twins, and the models that sit behind them, and we integrate more and more data, we start to build up a unified view or a national digital twin. Now, there won't be a single monolithic twin of the entire national footprint of our towers. I don't know if that's going to be particularly helpful, but if you can imagine rather a federation of many twins and models, and we're calling that the Amplitel Towers Metaverse. In this metaverse, or federation of many twins really, not only is each digital twin its own accurate visual representation of the actual tower, but each twin has its own unique set of models to represent how it will behave and interact with each other. It's a model of the physical asset. From a customer perspective, a customer may have a future planned radio coverage area. The towers metaverse, our vision is it could help a radio planner or a designer optimise where they should install radio kit to meet those coverage requirements, rather than I want kit on that particular tower at that particular height as it works today. So our vision is to completely transform the way customers will interact with us and give them the tools to optimise future deployments, reduce our customers capital and deployment times. That's how we're thinking about the twins. And when you build enough of them and they can interact with each other, we're calling that the Towers Metaverse.

Simon McFadden: Jon, it makes me think about the benefit of data analytics and some of the work that our teams have been doing together around asset management and optimising investment over 30 years in the portfolio to improve the internal rate of return on the investment, but really optimise maintenance decisions and use the available data to inform what to do next. When you've got all the data sets in the metaverse, you will find out things that you didn't know that create value for your customers and for your business as well. Have you seen a change in the business around asset management and decisions and formality around that over the long run?

Jon Lipton: We're learning as an owner of tower assets to take that much longer-term view of the health of our portfolio, and we recognise where we're at in that journey. So, we approached yourselves, Aurecon last year to help us identify improvements and bring some of the best practices in the way we manage a portfolio of assets over a 30 to 50 year horizon. And together we're identifying changes in our asset management approach that we're confident will yield significant potential savings over the long-term and importantly maintain and further improve the safety and robustness of our portfolio. It's exciting to look at new ways of managing critical infrastructure.

Simon McFadden: Just talking about challenges for a moment, New Zealand is coping with the impact of the recent cyclone here, and so I've met with operators and tower companies and there have been a lot of very significant impacts around the country. Structurally, the towers seem to have coped pretty well. When we're thinking about climate change adaptation, and we see changes in design codes for structures, they evolve over time to include higher wind speeds and so on. Are you seeing any other challenges or how do you think about navigating those?

Jon Lipton: I'm glad you touched on the sustainability and the climate codes. We actually have our lead engineer who chairs the Australian standards for towers, so we play an absolutely active role right across the industry in that area. In terms of other challenges, for new towers in the Australian tower-co market, it's all about securing premium locations. Who can secure the best location first? What data, what tool sets are being utilised to ensure the investment in this future location is likely to yield multiple tenants? There's a lot of competition currently in this race to secure the premium locations first, so that's one of the challenges. And then tower alternatives are probably the most interesting challenge facing the industry. Are there alternatives to towers? Certainly, in very built up and metro and established areas, small cells continue to gain momentum with the operators. We're seeing these small cell antennas being placed on rooftops, building walls, traffic lights, bus stops, as common practice. There's a real choice of street side furniture for the operators.

Simon McFadden: We hear a lot about 5G, and I know that rollouts are happening at different paces in different countries. Not for the first time, there are continual 5G upgrades. When you look forward to 6G, what are you seeing, what are you hearing?

Jon Lipton: 6G is not that far away, particularly in the context of the time frames we're talking for infrastructure companies. So, with 6G and further rollouts of 5G, we are seeing mobile network operators densify their networks. We know the average mobile data usage continues to grow at an unbelievably rapid rate. We also know that network operators can keep up with this growth by adding more spectrum or by increasing the number of sites they operate. And that densification in turn drives demand for additional passive mobile infrastructure to support that equipment. As you get into these higher speeds, the properties of the higher bandwidth millimetre wave doesn't have the same propagation as the lower frequency. So the laws of physics demand more and a much shorter range. So for infrastructure companies like ours, how can we innovate to improve that customer experience, whether that's building on our digital twins or some sort of shop front to provide easy access to all the available locations and make it easier for operators to roll out these densified networks and equipment rapidly and easily.

Simon McFadden: Just touching on career for a moment, when you reflect on your own journey, what would you say to somebody who's a young engineer or scientist on their career path if they have the aspiration of becoming a CEO in the long run?

Jon Lipton: Be bold and just question everything. If you aspire to be a leader, you need to be able to make a positive change and not just change for the sake of change. You need to reimagine how things are done and find better, faster, cheaper, more efficient ways to do things. That's what leadership is. And importantly, learn how to take people on that journey with you. If you can't take your team of people along that journey, it doesn't matter how clever or how good your engineering or tech solution is, you won't be successful. So question everything, find better ways to do things and then learn how to take people on that journey.

Simon McFadden: It makes me think of our chairman, Giam Swiegers, one time in a chat said to me, Simon, all leadership is change management. I'm sure he would expand on that if he was here, but I think of that often, which it's the point that you're making around, you got to bring people with you. Right.

Jon Lipton: There's plenty of things over my career that we had the brilliant, the best tech, it was great, but we didn't take people on the journey, and you have to learn from those mistakes and understand what went wrong. And it's rarely the tech, the tech's the easy bit, it's bringing people along that journey and that can be tricky, but that's the key to good, strong leadership.

Simon McFadden: Jon, thank you very much for your time today.

Jon Lipton: Thanks Simon, it's been great fun.

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Maria Rampa: We hope you enjoyed this episode of Engineering Reimagined.

We’ve come a long way from transmitting voice calls to now sending video, text and data via wireless technology, and it’s fascinating to consider the future potential of telecommunications towers, particularly when you consider these enormous structures may one day be transformed into something quite different.

If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe on Apple, Google Podcasts or Spotify and don’t forget to follow Aurecon on your favourite social media platform to stay up to date and join the conversation.

Until next time, thanks for listening.