With Green Future Networks, NGMN is enabling the mobile industry to further transform and meet its environmental and sustainability goals. Since the project started in 2021, we’ve identified the key opportunities and challenges and made actionable recommendations on several key areas – most recently including how to manage sustainability in the Telco Supply Chain and introducing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Green Networks Assessment. Further publications are expected soon, looking at how to reduce environmental impact (water footprint, materials etc) and on network energy efficiency.

Our work in 2023 now moves rapidly into ‘phase 3’, which will focus on 3 topics:

In Network Energy Efficiency, we plan to produce two outputs – an ‘Energy Savings Best Practices’ report that will highlight how operators can save energy through operational changes – and a more detailed ‘Energy Efficiency – industry roadmap’ which will provide decision makers with a checklist of key technologies, process changes, optimisations and the degree of energy savings / energy efficiency that can be achieved through each approach.

In Circular Economy, building on the phase 2 work on Reducing Environmental Impact and Telco Supply Chain Sustainability, we will further analyse how operators working with their value chain partners can enable circular economy in their products and services and produce actionable recommendations to decision makers to accelerate the adoption of circular economy.

Finally, in Metering Standards, we are building on the recommendation from phase 1 that there should be a generic unified metering architecture. The Metering Standards workstream will review the extent to which standards currently support this recommendation and then will take action (liaisons, NGMN member contributions to the standards) to ensure relevant metering standards can be developed.