• Sustainability is a major priority for many telcos 
• The need to act faster and smarter on the implementation of green network strategies has been driven by skyrocketing energy costs 
• Network operators are increasingly interested in new technologies, such as AI, to tackle environmental challenges

It’s been another year of notable green network developments in the telecom industry, with telcos increasingly turning to AI-enabled tools and network upgrades to help reduce their carbon emissions and cut energy costs.

Here are TelecomTV’s most popular sustainability articles of 2023, which highlight the industry’s efforts to make telecom networks greener, often through the deployment of new solutions and technologies.

1. Are fibre and 5G greener? Telefónica has the stats

25 August 2023: Telco giant Telefónica released the bullish results of an extensive study on the impact of fibre access, 4G and 5G network deployments on environmental sustainability. It found the deployment of fibre access lines results in “significantly lower environmental impacts” when compared with copper-based xDSL lines. In essence, the impact of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) per petabyte (PB) of data transmitted is 18 times lower than that of copper, while on a per-connection basis it is five times lower, according to the telco’s report. Looking at the mobile network angle, 4G and 5G technologies were found to have a lower environmental impact than 2G and 3G, because of “more efficient and lower energy consumption during the transport and processing of data in the network system”. Telefónica’s calculations suggest that the environmental impact of 4G and 5G per access and per PB is more than seven times lower than 2G and 3G. Read the full story.

2. Telcos bet on new technologies for environmental gains

29 June 2023: Telcos are actively seeking ways to harness new technologies and solutions for increased sustainability. Telefónica, for example, has been on the lookout for business partners that develop solutions such as digital platforms for carbon management, tools to measure and reduce energy consumption, and tools that address supply chain emissions. In Africa, Vodacom introduced embedded SIM (eSIM) support for smartphones – a step it claimed will reduce carbon emissions because of the lack of plastic that is produced and shipped with physical SIM cards. In addition, a neutral host-led, shared, indoor 5G radio access network (RAN), developed by Ericsson and used by 3 Sweden, was said to reduce power consumption by up to 70% and lower the equipment footprint by up to 80% compared to legacy distributed antenna systems (DAS). Read the full story.

3. Vodafone UK targets ‘zero-traffic, zero-watt’ future for networks

7 December 2023: At the first-of-its-kind Telcos & AI event, organised by TelecomTV in London, Vodafone UK’s senior manager of energy, Lee Jones, noted that the operator is exploring the use of AI and big data to increase energy efficiency and reach a point of ‘zero-traffic, zero-watt’ across its radio access network. Jones highlighted that energy has now become “one of the biggest use cases across Vodafone Group and UK” for big data, AI and ML. A lot of that, he admitted, is driven by energy price increases, after the telco saw its bill increasing to a “horrendous” level of somewhere between £150m and £160m this year. Read the full story and watch the discussions on demand.

4. BT plays it cool with new sustainability solutions

14 September 2023: BT became the first operator in the UK to organise a Sustainability Festival, which was held at the telco’s Adastral Park research centre in mid-September. At the event, the telco demonstrated a number of liquid-cooling solutions that it is trialling across its network and IT infrastructure in an effort to achieve significant energy efficiency and cost reductions. Most of the technologies on display focused on ways to keep datacentre equipment cool, with some tipped by vendors to deliver up to 70% in energy savings. BT said it might deploy some of the offering across its own infrastructure once it has conducted long-term testing and identified “how to operate the systems in life and the maximum potential energy savings” – a process that is expected to take one to two years. Read the full story.

5. AI can cut network energy consumption by up to 40%, finds Tele2

19 April 2023: Undoubtedly, AI was the biggest talking point in the telco industry this year. Its potential to reduce the environmental footprint of networks has been a growing topic of interest, with Tele2 leading a research project looking into the technology. The three-year AI4Green European research project, which was in collaboration with Orange, Turkcell, Infovista and others, found that smarter mobile networks, such as those using AI, can reduce energy consumption by between 30% and 40% in the long run. After analysing network data and mobile network insights from telcos and universities from several European countries, it concluded that AI helps telcos to “better predict the network’s traffic capacity requirements”. Read the full story.

6. Telcos put the heat on suppliers with green network requirements

28 June 2023: No conversation about addressing climate change and reducing carbon footprints is complete without the mention of supply chain emissions (also known as Scope 3 emissions, and the largest contributor to a telco’s environmental impact). Several developments from telco giants indicated that operators are demanding more of their suppliers and partners when it comes to improving sustainability. Taking a carrot-and-stick approach, Telenor made it mandatory for suppliers to abide by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) – which calls for businesses to halve greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030 and hit net zero by 2050, if the global temperature rise is to be limited to 1.5°C. In another development, Telia highlighted its efforts to tackle supply chain emissions as they represent more than 90% of its total carbon footprint: it reported that 45% of its Scope 3 emissions from purchased goods and services, as well as capital goods, were covered by science-based climate targets by mid-2023 – up by around one-third since the end of 2022. Read the full story.

- Yanitsa Boyadzhieva, Deputy Editor, TelecomTV