The Wireless and mobile site build industry and its race to the bottom....

I am saddened that, every day, people are dying in my industry - even sadder when the majority of these deaths could have been prevented.  This week three riggers lost their lives in the US in a preventable accident.

What we are seeing with financial and time pressures on jobs is a (now literally deadly) race to the bottom - cheapest equipment, cheapest labour rates, fastest schedule for roll-out (seldom achieved - right??).  And why is this?

I see several reasons but the main is a flow of price chains being driven downwards in a farcical arrangements where even major vendors are holding reverse auctions to get the cheapest prices for components (even for towers)  - and the same with labour rates with continual downward pressure.  THIS IS NOT THE WAY TO BUILD A QUALITY NETWORK - EVER!!!!!

(A balanced Time/Cost/Quality triangle)

What is wrong with this, as we are seeing now, is this race to the bottom has casualties - in a network terms its long term quality of service from build shortcuts, in human terms its peoples lives and safety - and the irony is the carriers/ operators are the ones who will suffer customer complaints and churn when their network quality problems come home to roost.  Worldwide there are countless examples of this. Their network coverage, data speeds and even deployment speeds and overall site costs would all be better with a change of approach.

The network operators (and their equipment vendors in turnkey roll-outs) need instead to change the focus from COST and onto that of VALUE - big difference -in fact its a huge difference but when innovation comes in, when contractors are making reasonable money and ways of delivering value are used then you see productivity going up, you see safety improving and also the quality of the network and hence its reliability statistics improve out of sight.  Operators need to look more closely at the value they are getting in network builds and upgrades - taking a whole of network life cost look not a "cheap and nasty " now look.

(When you cut costs and time - guess what goes out the window - network quality, build quality, including safety)

And when you run projects like that they are more cost effective than disasters where every cent is squeezed out of the supply chain.   This cost cutting and time focused approach means that there is a lot of dud project managers, dud logistics people and even duds in the guys at the industry front-line - but you pay peanuts you get monkeys - and other than throwing poo around (and isn't it usually their own...), monkeys have a limited use on a telco project!!!  In the end the quality of the delivered site or network will be compromised as short-cuts are taken and the cheap work fails.

When you look at sports teams you don't see many champion winning outfits that try and get the very cheapest of cheap players and then get them to work with the very cheapest equipment they can find for them.

I dont have the answers on how we need to implement this everywhere but it needs action pretty much worldwide to get out of the crazy ruts major projects always seem to go through.  I do see some glaring areas in Australia that could be improved straight away though.

As Benjamin Franklin famously stated:  “The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten”

Apologies if this is a bit of a rant - but I am saddened than every week I seem to read of a climber somewhere in the world not going home to their family at night because of the above.