It’s no secret that telcos have been looking for new avenues to better monetize their infrastructure assets.

This has led some to either sell some of these assets, such as telecoms towers, or even spin them off into totally independent units. Others are following a similar pathway, with traditional broadcasters rethinking ownership of radio towers.

Seizing the opportunity

For many reasons, it makes sense that broadcasters are utilizing these assets more effectively.

As Riku Helander, senior vice president of telecom, Digita, explains to DCD, there’s instant power at these sites that makes them ideal for other opportunities.

“Equipment shelters and buildings on a broadcast site are significantly larger by area in comparison to telecom sites. Broadcast tower sites also have high-capacity grid connections, which telco sites lack,” says Helander, which highlights the easy availability of access to the grid as a key benefit.

Founded in 1999 as a spin-off from national broadcaster Yle, Digita provides digital infrastructure and services to Finland, where it claims to be the largest independent owner of telecommunications masts.

The company provides services for media companies, consumers, mobile operators, industry, infrastructure companies, and property owners. Broadcast companies are now using these sites to deploy Edge data centers.

“Since these sites are used to broadcast video and radio, they are very well connected,” explains Helander.

“So with regards to data centers, since we’re hosting part of the infrastructure for video and radio broadcasting, we thought it would be a natural extension to start looking into also providing this service to other parties as well,” he adds.

At present, DigitalBridge-backed Digita has only deployed two Edge data centers at its towers. The company operates 38 broadcasting towers across the country.

According to Helander, an opportunity has presented itself in the market for Edge colo data centers to be deployed at its broadcast towers from the country’s migration away from analog to digital.

“Television has migrated to digital broadcasting from analog, and here in Finland, we have now also transformed, both on the terrestrial and cable TV as well, to HD-only quality.”

Due to this, the power requirements of the broadcasting infrastructure have reduced significantly.

“In essence, the main broadcasting stations have been designed for a significantly higher power consumption than they are experiencing today. So if you look at the situation, you have excellent connectivity, availability of power with relative ease, and you also have the resilience of having the power backup systems available for the site. From that viewpoint, they are good locations for data center activity as well,” he says.

Monetizing these existing connections

Others have similar plans, including České Radiokomunikace (CRA) in Czechia, Telecentras in Lithuania, HKBN in Hong Kong, and Rai in Italy. In the Netherlands, Cellnex has also deployed data centers at TV and radio tower sites.

Rai, which has five Edge data centers across the country, has confirmed to DCD that it identified the tower data center play as a way to differentiate its strategy.

“The idea was to go to the market with a new offering of Edge data centers and colocation facilities. And basically, this is what we are doing. The idea was to differentiate our tower broadcasting business with data centers,” a spokesperson told DCD last year.

The company added that the sites were connected via Rai Way’s fiber network, which spans more than 6,000km.

“Because we are building data centers on land that is already owned by Rai Way, they are already connected by our own fiber ring.”

Towering above the Baltics

The Latvia State and Television Radio Center (LVRTC) is another company that has deployed data centers at TV and radio tower sites.

Founded in 1924, state-owned LVRTC is Latvia’s main operator of the terrestrial radio and television broadcasting network.

However, the company also provides infrastructure and services for Internet, telecommunications, and data centers. It was in the last decade that LVRTC started using its infrastructure to deploy data centers at some of its tower sites.

“When I first joined the company in 2014, one of the first main tasks was to write the business plan on how we can commercialize square meters in our towers and infrastructure units,” says Janis Delvins, head of data center business direction, LVRTC.

Like Digita, Delvins tells DCD it was a “natural fit” for the LVRTC to enter the data center game.

“We need to think about what to do with these available square meters, because we have connections between towers and between Internet service providers. It felt natural to go into the data center business.”

One of Riga’s most famous attractions, the Riga Radio and TV Tower on Zaķusala Island, is actually owned by LVRTC, and is the largest tower of its kind in the European Union. Despite being a key part of the Baltic city’s landscape, the tower also serves a bigger purpose.

“At the moment, this is the biggest colocation point in the Baltics,” Delvins points out. “90 percent of all Internet services produced in this region go through this building. At the ground level, there is [a] high-availability data center there as well.”

LVRTC claims to offer 99.75 percent service availability at the Tier II data center site.

Delvins adds that LVRTC wants to deploy more data centers in Latvia as it aims to “provide sovereign secure cloud for AI solutions.”

He adds that the amount of capacity LVRTC’s customers are demanding has shot up significantly in recent years, noting that five years ago an unnamed customer had a 3kW rack, while that same customer is using a 25kW one today, and is not even a hyperscaler.

“It’s important that we’re ready to provide the amount of capacity that our customers want, while being efficient.”

Towercos do the same

It’s not exactly a new play to utilize tower assets to host Edge data centers. Tower companies such as SBA Communications and American Tower have notably deployed multiple data centers close to towers.

American Tower opened an Edge facility in Raleigh, North Carolina, earlier this year, and has plans to build more of these sites, including a 4MW Edge data center in Indianapolis.

In an interview with DCD last year, Jake Rasweiler, SVP of innovation in the US tower division at American Tower, noted that the towerco was utilizing its towers and easy access to fiber to deploy such sites. In Rasweiler’s words, where there’s fiber and power, there’s a play to build data centers.

“The fact that we have power, fiber, and land makes it easier to build a data center or extend the use of that land to a data center, so we think that’s a natural way for us to extend the capabilities that we already have on our tower sites,” he said.

Separately, the company could acquire more towers, including a portfolio of broadcast towers from French company TDF Infrastructure, another business that provides radio and television transmission services.

TDF (Télédiffusion de France) is another broadcaster that has notably built data centers in buildings previously dedicated to broadcasting television, radio, and telecom signals that have been repurposed.

Cloud RAN focus

When it comes to the use cases driving these data center deployments, there’s a range of potential use cases that come to mind.

One of which, is around mobile connectivity, with Digita’s Helander highlighting Cloud RAN as a potential use case at broadcast tower sites.

In short, Cloud RAN is cellular network architecture that centralizes and virtualizes base station functions into a cloud-based data center.

“As part of the tower growth, mobile network operators (MNOs) are also piloting Cloud RAN solutions, which is also a potential growth area for Digita as well,” he says. “Additionally, since Edge data center solutions are key ingredient in the streaming delivery chain – the growth of streaming services supports growth of our data center business.

“We are positioning ourselves for the use cases such as people who want to have the lowest latency of streaming services, or who want interconnection services, so that they can then spread it out to the hyperscaler infrastructure over here.”

Helander says Digita is anticipating the wider rollout of Cloud RAN in the coming years as an opportunity for its broadcast stations. The technology is still fairly early in its commercial deployment.

Come one, come all?

Reports suggest that more companies could follow the trend in deploying Edge data centers to these tower sites, including BT in the UK.

While BT has been quiet on this publicly, the telco giant has a vast tower and telephone exchange portfolio across the country, as the company decommissions its legacy copper network.

Meanwhile, mobile carriers such as Verizon have also been vocal about tapping into opportunities at the Edge. Frontier, in the process of being acquired by Verizon for $20bn, offers what it calls ‘Edge Colocation’ at more than 2,500 locations, including its Central Offices.

By 2028, STL Partners estimates that there will be nearly 2,000 network Edge data centers globally. How many of these will be located at a broadcasting tower site remains to be seen. Stay tuned