Project Portfolio

Green Future Networks

Project Lead:

• Saima Ansari, Deutsche Telekom

Objective:

Society awareness of the fact that resources are not inexhaustible is leading to new behaviours and demanding that companies become more responsible. Mobile technology is an essential tool for economic and social development, but it is also an industry that has environmental impacts (contribution to climate change, depletion of natural resources, energy consumption, etc.).

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is now becoming a major issue for telcos in general and for their ecosystem.

Furthermore, one of the biggest technical challenges arising in the last years for operators is to stabilize or even reduce their energy expense despite of the increase in the data traffic and the network deployments. The motivation behind this ambition are of paramount importance since they go from the responding to the CSR demands to making business cost-effective.

To prepare for the next standards and next generation we need to be able to accurately measure the environmental impact of services.

The new French law that obliges operators as of the first January 2022 to “inform their subscribers of the quantity of data consumed in the context of providing access to the network and indicate the equivalent of the corresponding greenhouse gas emissions” shows that this topic begins to be an obligation and not simply something convenient to have.

To provide an answer there is the need to take into account the full life cycle of services, including the devices used to access to them. This means developing a holistic analysis considering also, inter alia, the emissions a company is responsible for outside of its own walls, from the goods it purchases to the disposal of the products it sells and uses.

Last but not least, electricity consumption is the operational expense that will probably continue to increase and it also represents the operators’ principal source of greenhouse gas emissions. Increasing the green techniques enabling a more energy-efficient network, is fundamental since the number of customers and the usages continue to grow, which implies an increase of the network’s energy consumption.

The IT network consumes the most energy in the content delivery process. That is the reason why a greater effort in terms of next generation energy efficiency as well as identifying the network parts consuming the most is fundamental.

We need to anticipate changes in the adoption of current digital products and services as well as the demand for more virtuous practices such as low-digital consumption. To do so there are two major areas to cover, the end-to-end services footprint and the eco-design of products. Moreover, the new mechanisms introduced by 5G improve the energy efficiency of networks and optimize their carbon footprint. These techniques can be further studied and exploited.

Finally, the use of on-board metering will allow to better identify the energy-intensive parts of the network in order to optimize them.

The project has already published the following deliverables:

• Green Future Networks: Sustainability Challenges and Initiatives in Mobile Networks
• Green Future Networks: Network Equipment Eco-Design and End to End Service Footprint
• Green Future Networks: Network Energy Efficiency
• Metering for Sustainable Networks

The project is now working on the next phase with a focus on the way forward for operators towards Green Networks with

1. Supply Chain Circular Economy Criteria
2. Reducing Environmental Impact
3. Network Energy Efficiency Phase 2
4. Definition of KPIs and Methodologies for Green Networks Benchmark