Telecommunications group MTN South Africa (SA) is working around the clock to protect customer’s connectivity amid escalating load-shedding across the country.

The group has embarked on an aggressive rollout of batteries, generators and alternate power supplies and is exploring practical and innovative solutions to the power crisis as it works to keep customers connected.

“Despite having placed thousands of batteries at our sites across the country, the efficacy of those batteries greatly reduces once we pass stage four load-shedding,” MTN SA chief technology and information officer Michele Gamberini says, discussing the challenges of battery recharging during increased power cuts.

While MTN has upgraded its battery back-up solutions on over 70% of its sites this year and is currently deploying more additional batteries, the current outage schedule does not allow enough time for batteries to charge.

It takes about 12 to 18 hours for battery back-up systems to recharge, while batteries have a capacity of about 6 to 12 hours, depending on the site category.

“Consistent outages therefore have a direct impact on the performance of the batteries, while consistent theft of the batteries themselves means replacements need to be installed,” Gamberini says.

MTN has also deployed over 2 000 generators to counter the impact of stage four and higher load-shedding.

As the constant pressure of stage four and five power outages requires 24 hours monitoring, MTN implemented power contingencies in place in all provinces.

“To mitigate the risks, we have embarked on several emergency initiatives to ensure higher network resilience, despite the obstacles.”

These include the establishment of “war rooms” for each region with dedicated staff and network partners, focused on restoring major transmission infrastructure and base stations, in the face of severe load-shedding; the deployment of additional emergency generators and an optimisation of the existing fleet of MTN mobile generators; the withdrawal of field maintenance teams to allow them to be redeployed to exclusively focus on site restorations; and the delivery of fuel to all critical facilities to ensure all MTN data centres remain operational.