Oleksandr Komarov, president of Ukrainian mobile market leader Kyivstar, disclosed on Monday that more than 1,000 of the company’s base stations are temporarily inoperative on a daily basis due to power outage, Interfax reported. Mr Komarov wrote on his Facebook page: ‘In addition to the problem of stations lost in the occupied territories and the front line, there is a problem of mass shutdown of stations due to power outage. Because of this, more than 1,000 stations do not work for some time during the day, with the greatest losses in the daytime.’ He added that the Kyiv, Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Poltava and Sumy regions were disproportionately affected.
The executive explained further: ‘Most of the base stations are able to work autonomously for several hours, because they are equipped with batteries … that can support a site that consumes from 6kWh, [but] batteries also need to be charged – from 24 to 48 hours each … With the current shutdown schedule the batteries physically do not have time to fully recharge.’ The situation is helped somewhat by usage of generators, with 420 stationary and 264 mobile units currently operating.
Komarov added: ‘The situation will be helped by improving the connection of base stations to a more priority power supply, the purchase of even more generators, an increase in the number of field technical teams, and the purchase of new sets of lithium batteries, which have a larger capacity and a fast recharge cycle.’ Other coping measures involve dynamic shutdown of equipment in certain frequency bands (e.g. LTE-2600) to enable base stations to run 20-30% longer on batteries, and crowdsourcing power from private or public generators.
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