169 Infrastructure tower in the middle of a field or in a dense urban environment, where finding the path or access road can be tricky. With the digital twin, major landmarks—such as London’s Paddington Station with railway lines, skyscrapers, a canal, a bridge, and a busy road—are modeled in fine detail. This Is a Tool Every Vodafone Employee Can Use The amount of place-, equipment-, and signal-related data that the digital twin integrates is staggering. But as Pitchforth points out, no digital twin is perfect. Vodafone has built its digital twins so that people across the company can correct inaccuracies and fill in missing information. “The more people who see the network and know the network, the more people who can report any gaps,” he said. The digital twin also contributes to Vodafone’s pledge to ensure that its UK operations achieve the goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2027. “We’ll always need engineers to go out—there’s no way around that. But we want to reduce multisite visits,” Pitchforth said. “Instead of driving all those trips, the digital twin allows an engineer to visit the site virtually while sitting at a desk. It’s surprising how the emissions savings add up.” The digital twin captures some things at higher levels of detail than others, such as this cell tower captured along with the complex urban environment around it. Image courtesy of Vodafone. Vodafone’s digital twin needed to capture all the trees in the parks around Westminster because leaves can obstruct the signal. Signals on 5G networks transmit at a higher frequency than older networks but this decreases the signals’ range and lessens their ability to penetrate obstructions. Image courtesy of Vodafone.
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