According to a statement, creation of the digital twin required the mapping over 40 million environmental features using GIS (geographic information system) software. These included buildings, hills, valleys and trees.
To quote the statement directly: “Engineers now have access to a 360-degree virtual view of the network from their laptop or mobile device over a secure connection. They can plan where to position new mobile sites more effectively and identify which ones need upgrading or repositioning to meet increases in customer demand, or to compensate for the construction of new buildings or tree growth.”
Vodafone GIS lead, Dr Rebecca King, said: “A customer’s mobile phone might cut out due to what we call clutter. This is usually down to the construction of new buildings or seasonal tree growth interfering with the signal strength. We like to visualise these in a digital format so that we can better plan the expansion of our network around them.”
Boris Pitchforth, lead architect at Vodafone, said: “The digital twin gives us an unprecedented understanding of our entire UK mobile network. It is like Minecraft for data scientists.
“We can be smarter and faster about how and where we add new 5G features, and target capacity increases with greater precision. There’s also the added benefit of being able to reduce our carbon footprint as our engineers won’t need to make as many site visits, especially to masts in remote areas.”
