Communication towers are undergoing a transformation from traditional communication infrastructure to intelligent, integrated, and green comprehensive information infrastructure. Key development trends include deepening the transformation to digital towers, serving the low-altitude economy, green and energy-saving development, expanding underground space applications, and deepening co-construction and sharing.
China Tower is driving the transformation from "communication towers" to "digital towers," deeply integrating its core capabilities of "location + sensing + computing + power + security" with AI technology, and developing industry-wide large-scale models such as the "Longitude and Latitude Large Model." By the end of 2024, China Tower had upgraded over 220,000 "communication towers" to "digital towers." In the low-altitude economy sector, it utilizes tower grid resources to install drone nests, creating a low-altitude infrastructure network.
In terms of green energy conservation, it promotes innovative products such as integrated energy-saving communication towers and adopts technologies such as non-powered cooling to reduce energy consumption. A single integrated energy-saving communication tower can save over 1300 kWh of electricity annually, reducing energy consumption by approximately 30%. Simultaneously, it utilizes the energy storage capacity of base stations to provide comprehensive energy services such as battery swapping, charging, and backup power to the public. The co-construction and sharing efforts have been continuously deepened, with the sharing rate of newly built towers increasing significantly from 14.3% to over 85%. Through the two-way open sharing of "social towers" and "communication towers," it is equivalent to building over 1.2 million new towers, saving the industry over 210 billion yuan in investment.
