• Network operators need to reduce their network power consumption to cut costs and meet sustainability targets
• TelecomTV recently held its latest Green Network Summit 
• We asked our audience about the most effective ways for telcos to become more energy efficient
• Ongoing green developments by their network equipment vendors are critical, according to our voters, who didn’t show much love for AI’s potential impact on network energy efficiency

You might want to sit down before you read this… according to an audience poll conducted during TelecomTV’s recent Green Network Summit, using AI applications is NOT – I repeat, NOT – the best way for telcos to make their networks more energy efficient. In fact, according to our respondents, there are lots of other strategies that are better suited to helping cut network power consumption. 

During the course of the two-day summit, we asked our session attendees to answer the following poll question: How can telcos most efficiently reduce their energy-consumption levels?

We provided seven possible answers and respondents could select as many as they deemed applicable.

‘Source more power-efficient technology from vendors’ attracted the most support, with 75% of the 91 attendees who voted choosing this option. This is a perennial favourite – it topped the poll in 2023 and ranked second in last year’s Green Network Summit poll. 

The option that attracted the most votes last year was the “Use of AI and data analytics for real-time ops management”, which is completely understandable given that AI fever was rampant in early 2024 and there was much discussion in the industry about how AI applications would accelerate network automation processes and help with tasks, such as powering down network elements that were not needed to provision services. That option attracted support from 69% of voters last year.

But, quite unexpectedly, the AI option in this year’s poll was far from universally popular, as you can see from the chart above, with ‘Increase the use of AI throughout the network’ attracting votes from just 46% of our voters. That’s a genuine surprise for us humans, as well as our AI assistants… 

So what else was popular? Switching off old networks, it seems… ‘Consolidate platforms and sunset old networks’ received votes from 65% of our respondents, up from 57% last year, while ‘Accelerate innovation and fund green tech’ attracted a lot of support (55%), up from 46% last year. Sharing physical network resources, with votes from 49% of our respondents, was slightly more popular than last year (44%). 

Telcos generating their own renewable energy has lost some of its shine as an option, though: This year it attracted votes from just 35% of our respondents, down from 46% last year. 

One thing that didn’t change from last year is that our audience still doesn’t believe that shifting workloads to the private cloud will help reduce energy bills in a meaningful way: This year that option attracted votes from just 21% of our respondents, though that’s slightly better than last year’s score of just 14%.

You can catch up with all of the summit’s sessions, including the live audience Q&A shows, on demand right now by clicking on this link and be sure to check out TelecomTV’s dedicated Green Network channel.  

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV