The winners of telecommunications giant MTN’s latest edition of TADHackJHB have developed a cell tower protection application aimed at mitigating the growing crisis of vandalism and battery theft at telecommunications base stations.

The CharOn solution, produced by winning duo #1632, allows individuals to report suspicious activity within the vicinity of the cell towers, with the app notifying authorities should enough data of the same case be reported.

MTN held its TADHackJHB, hosted since 2016, at its Roodepoort headquarters in mid- October, under the global theme ‘Localised and Contextualised – Battle of the Bots’, with participants required to develop technology solutions to address challenges facing communities in South African townships.

CharOn developer #1632 won $1 000, or R15 000, for their winning solution.

Earlier this year, various telecommunications majors warned that vandalism and battery theft at base stations across South Africa had reached a crisis point, with losses estimated at hundreds of millions of rands and resulting in the permanent shutdown of dozens of sites.

The severity of the damage to cell towers forced MTN to permanently close 53 base stations, while its peer, Vodacom, has had to fork out millions of rands more to replace its batteries with expensive, more secure lithium-ion alternatives to limit the mass scale of the theft.

The damage to towers and infrastructure has resulted in excessive costs to repair and replace batteries and equipment, which extend into hundreds of millions of rands, MTN network operations GM Ernest Paul previously said.

“The industry is under pressure to deal with not only improving security to curb the theft of batteries and vandalism but also having to pay increasing amounts to replace batteries and repair damage,” he adds.

Vodacom group chief technology officer Andries Delport previously reported that between 1 500 and 2 000 batteries were stolen each month.

“Hackathons such as TADHack serve as an invaluable incubation hub, where innovative and scalable solutions that address some of the socioeconomic challenges are created,” says MTN information technology executive Phinda Ncala.

The hackathon, which is run simultaneously in more than 30 locations, provides a platform to leverage technology to develop home-grown solutions.

This year’s edition attracted 200 participants, making TADHackJHB the largest event in the global hackathon network for 2019. A total of 47 projects were submitted during the Johannesburg edition.