NFT’s Adding Value to Public Sector: The ​​Digitisation of Telecoms Assets

Optimizing the benefits of advanced wireless connectivity in cities and rural areas is crucial to unlock the economic, social and environmental value to citizens and businesses. However, in order to achieve ubiquitous connectivity, there are plenty of challenges standing in the way of network deployments such as the access to existing infrastructure, the high costs of infrastructure investment and the ability to leverage existing street furniture, also called public assets, for infrastructure deployments.

This article explores the role of public assets when building wireless networks, and what are the benefits of digitising those assets in making them more accessible to build telecoms networks.

Street lamps, bus shelters, traffic lights, CCTV poles and ducts are all publicly owned assets that are managed and controlled by various public bodies such as Highways England, Local Authorities and other government bodies. Such assets can play a critical role in deploying cost-effective telecom networks at an accelerated pace.

However, there are a number of challenges Telecoms networks providers face when attempting to access these assets to build advanced wireless networks (Wifi, IoT devices or even 4G/5G Small Cell radios), these include:

1. Poor visibility of assets and lack of accurate data to understand suitability and ownership
2. No underlining commercial process, typically very much bureaucratic and very fragmented

In an ideal scenario, to deploy wireless infrastructure Telecom network providers would be able to mount antennas on top of buildings, traffic lights or street lights without the existing complexities. In the same way, fibre cables, a key component in wireless infrastructure, are deployed using ducts and those are usually not inventoried and it’s difficult to know who owns them and how to access them. Tackling those specific challenges will help infrastructure providers access those assets and build networks faster, and help the public sector asset owners in getting connectivity, generate income and address their strategy.

‘In a recent DCMS Analysis of PFI contracts relating to street furniture assets, and best-practice guidance for Local Authorities, DCMS wrote to the 37 local authorities that have a PFI contract and asked a series of questions, of which 86% responded. Around 59% had experienced small cell enquiries, and 42% faced contract issues. DCIA will therefore be producing a project plan to understand how we can best resolve these issues, working in conjunction with local authorities.’ Source

Using NFT’s to give public assets a digital value

Making public assets discoverable and accessible requires digitisation and aggregation of data and governance into one platform. Digitising assets is a process in which all the asset attributes that are relevant for the infrastructure provider are collected in a digital asset management platform (creating a sort of digital twin version of the asset), and the rights to it are converted into a digital token on a blockchain network.

Ownership rights are transmitted and traded on a digital platform, and the real-world assets on the blockchain are represented by digital tokens. Making these assets such as lamp posts and traffic lights digitally accessible would now give them a commercial value that can be traded in an open marketplace. This is where NFT’s, Non Fungible Tokens can become an innovative tool in solving these commercial challenges.

NFTs can record and guarantee provenance and value-add along a supply chain, allowing businesses to trust the identity, origin, and other specifications of a commodity. Combined with smart contracts, which can trigger things like automatic payments or other responses on the occurrence of future events, NFTs can, at least in theory, provide some protection against counterfeiting and other types of fraud. By attaching NFTs to physical goods, an additional level of guarantee can be offered to distributors and consumers to prove that the goods in question are the real deal. Each Public asset will have its own NFT which is designated to its owner and will be transferable to other participants in the supply according to the terms of trade that are set, e.g. renting out a street lightning post for 12 months to a network provider at £50 per month.

Bringing assets into the open marketplace

At Weaver Labs we are working with Transport for Greater Manchester on a pilot project to aggregate and digitise all the relevant data used from the traffic lights and the controller cabinets to build the 5G test network used to connect the AI sensors to control the traffic lights.

Getting all the data has been largely an empirical process, which took months of planning with the following key challenges:

1. There was no single repository of data about sizes, lengths, supported weights, availability of power and existing telecoms assets already mounted in the traffic lights and controller cabinets.
2. There are different layers of ownership and technical servicing that makes it difficult to access information to properly plan and build a wireless network in a dense urban area. Moreover, the access to the different authorization layers for different elements of the network is also a tedious process.
3. It took several site surveys to collect all the relevant information, and each stakeholder had different layers of data requirements which ranged from structural information to electrical and electronic information.
4. Using tools like Google Maps to “guess” where the wireless or IoT nodes can be placed may be sometimes a waste of time, since the data is not at all up to date and there cannot be any trust on the existing conditions of those public assets based on what the Street View is showing.

Local authorities who own all these public assets would want to see digital twins created of them, to remove frictions in the future and facilitate wireless infrastructure to be mounted. Collecting this data can cut up to two-thirds of network planning times, and adding the commercial layer with the use of NFTs and open marketplaces can cut up to 90% the time to secure sites to deploy telecoms infrastructure.

We see a near future where these digital twins will be converted into NFTs where they are given a value and unique code, and can be traded in an open marketplace of Telecoms assets, such as the one we are creating with Cell-Stack, the Cell-Network.

This is now a national strategic matter

Over the last few months, publicly owned assets have become a national interest. DCMS has launched a multi-million pound program called Digital Connectivity Infrastructure Acceleration (DCIA) to explore ways to make it simpler and quicker for mobile companies to use publicly-owned buildings and curb-side infrastructure — such as CCTV poles and traffic signals — to host wireless and IoT equipment. The UK government will invest in piloting the latest innovations in digital asset management platforms to enable local councils to more easily share data and both parties to commercialise those assets in a simple and agile way.

Authors: Keyu Sumaria & Maria Lema