Like many telecoms operators around the world, Turkcell is continuously investing in its fixed and mobile network infrastructure to enhance broadband services and evolve to next-generation technologies like 5G. However, a significant chunk of that investment is the energy infrastructure necessary to power it all.

In 2020, Turkcell partnered with TTG to develop a solution called SYNERGY. The primary challenge that SYNERGY had to address is the fragmented nature of the average telco energy infrastructure. Turkcell and TTG realized that transforming this environment into an optimized, zero-touch infrastructure would mean redesigning network operations so that data could be collected from the field and ported to a single platform in a way that provided insight to the entire energy infrastructure.

The starting point of building SYNERGY was to test and analyze the communication protocols, messages and registers on the interfaces for each field device type. Once two-way communication is established, the system queries device-specific data points every five minutes and stores the collected information (such as temperature, load current, voltage, alarms, status, etc.) in the database for various purposes.

In developing SYNERGY, Turkcell and TTG took inspiration from recent TM Forum Catalyst projects. The project included a demo of closed-loop automation using real-time network monitoring and provision of additional 5G network slices via dynamic orchestration – all integrated seamlessly and with zero-touch.

According to Turkcell, the implementation of the SYNERGY platform has already generated savings in a number of areas; its battery investment cost is now 20% lower; reduced Turkcell’s fuel consumption by 7%; 5% decrease in energy-related availability losses.