Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:24):
Hello and welcome to our preview of this year's Green Network Summit, part of our year-round DSP Leaders Coverage. I'm Guy Daniels and this is the fourth year of the summit where we investigate how telcos are reducing the power demands of their networks and improving energy use, which has now become a business imperative for them to achieve profitable future growth. And as always, we bring you a mix of panel discussions, analysis, and insights from our partners. These programs will be available to watch on demand from 7:00 AM UK time each morning of the summit. We then bring you our live q and a programs, one per day streaming live from 4:00 PM UK time. So watch the videos, send in your questions, and then settle back for the live show.

(01:23):
Well, let's take a detailed look at the agenda for the Green Network Summit and give you a little taste of what to expect. Day one starts on Tuesday, the 4th of February, and our first panel discussion of the summit looks at how to improve network energy efficiency with ai. And given that energy costs make up about 23% of a telco's network, opex, can AI applications help network operators to improve the energy efficiency of their networks? And if so, how? Well to address the key issue here, we have panelists from Telefonica Cult Technology, Juniper Networks, and Luth Computer. We recorded the panel last week and here's a sneak peek for you.

Diego Lopez, Telefonica & ETSI (02:16):
I had the opportunity to work with some colleagues that were making work on AI to optimize, not to optimize the use of the network, but to optimize the amount of energy that we were spending with the track roles when attending, dealing with incidents at customer's premises. And it was an amazing amount of energy that we were saving in France, probably of fuel for the trucks and the vans, but we were saving energy as well. So the idea is that I think that right now we have AI systems that are being applied here and the for different activities that are mostly focused on assessing decisions that are taken by engineers and planners. Still, we still lack the point in which we take the following step on making AI more part of the control at the top of certain control loops. I'm trying to understand this.

Mirko Voltolini, Colt Technology (03:29):
We have a very complex network and actually spans multiple countries and you, I'm sure everybody's aware of the price of energy is being heavily dependent on the type of power plants you have. And it can vary quite a lot. Country by country there are actually some very large differences. Sometimes it's twice as much as expensive kilowatt per hour in a certain country compared to another one. And again, with our complexity, we have multiple options from going from A to B for setting up network routes for ourselves, for internal use, I mean operations and also exposing that to customers. So we have the ability to create a green paths that doesn't necessarily mean the shortest possible path, but is actually the most energy efficient path. It may not be again, necessarily the lowest possible consumption of energy, but more the actual, again, lowest possible spend based on the path that you choose.

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer Specialists (04:32):
So I'm currently working with a group with the open infra foundation. We're the edge working group, we're working on a white paper on this topic should be out in a couple months. So what is immediately apparent with our initial conversations is just how complex the issue is. And I think it's a good use for AI because there's multiple variations and variables and factors as Merko and Diego both mentioned that go into optimizing the network for energy efficiency, but also balancing that with making sure the network is available at the same time. I mean a lot of data centers, cloud applications optimize their energy efficiency by tracking the usage and then just turning machines off and then spinning them up when they're needed. But telco usage doesn't really follow that same very predictable path. So it requires a lot more understanding of the variables and that's where AI can help with the decision making process.

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (05:57):
I see lots of our customers using AI on things like configuration management. So we see many times customers saying, Hey, our power utilization's high, and we go and look and do some audit work and we find that often customers haven't turned those power saving features on. And that in itself is something very simple to fix, very simple to do. And we're encouraging our customers to use AI as a way of managing configurations and changes, but also looking at how we optimize those configurations to get the most out of the network.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (06:39):
And at 4:00 PM UK time, it's our live q and a broadcast. Please, if you want to ask a question, do send it in nice and early. We receive a lot of questions for our live shows, so the more interesting your question, the greater the chance of it getting onto the show. Well, day two follows on Wednesday, the 5th of February, the second and final day of our online event, and we have a panel discussion that looks at the benefits of building a green ran. The radio access network accounts for about 75% of the total network energy usage for a mobile operator with the radio units accounting for the vast majority of that. So how can vendors and operators reduce this huge power budget? Well, we have panelists from Dosha Telecom, doomo, Euro Labs, apple Door Research and the Open Networking Foundation. And here's another brief preview for you.

Saima Ansari, Deutsche Telekom & NGMN Alliance (07:41):
Historically speaking with each generation of the rating networks, we have seen higher efficiencies and the supplies worse to the radio units. And actually there are several strategies that are implemented to improve the energy efficiency of that if we start from the hardware side in itself. So we will see that we have now the design of the power efficient chip sets, more efficient power amplifiers and other components which bring down the overall power consumption. From the software point of view, if we see that radio units can dynamically adjust their power output based on real-time traffic demands, for example, during peak hours, the transmit power and the active component can be scaled down while still maintaining the customer experience. We have also seen in the 4G and 5G different types of sleep modes. For example, deep sleep where most rfm, the baseband components of the radio units are turned off during the low traffic period or micro sleep tx. This is another example to turn off the transmission components for very, very short duration, like somewhere in the milliseconds or something.

Joan Triay, DOCOMO EuroLabs & ETSI (09:00):
It's not just only about the capabilities that are being nowadays specified and implemented in terms of being capable to switch off and on the component carriers and the RF band, either selectively some of them or all of them, but also the capabilities that are being defined to change the configuration of the radio frequencies. And here for example, some of the latest advancements consider making reselection of the transmission and the reception array or also being capable to change the MO configurations or the SBB blocks for the synchronization or even changing the transmission power of the radio units. And that together with the specification of the sleep most that has already been introduced can also bring up a lot more benefits in terms of energy efficiency. Also potentially making savings in energy consumption

Sarat Puthenpura, ONF & Linux Foundation (10:04):
Both neuro and non critical to, I mean they're important for energy saving that play its own role. There's no contrast about it, but I need to bring in the aspect of Oran adoption here. If you look at the interfaces, the non RT R is interfacing with RAN using an interface called O one and which is fairly advanced, and the other one for neoteric is E two, which is still not mature. So if you want to get some benefits out, if you want to get some immediate benefit in allergy savings and you go for on off cell a complete, sorry, the node on off, you could achieve that with nonna much faster because of the maturity of the interface. And also you could do some adapters to the own interface and interface that with, I would say traditional ran through the EMS. We have done that and we have quite a bit of data to prove that's a viable option.

Francis Haysom, Appledore Research (11:12):
I think the key technology to getting this right is operational automation. It's the ability to put automation on top of this to be able to automate change, to be able to automate change in functionality, software, et cetera, software, software distribution. And increasingly to be able to automate and put in place autonomy within the Rand it ran ran runs itself to a set of intents. Those will be key to getting this energy efficiency right, because none, unless you can do that change trust, that change repeatedly, that change, it's very difficult to see how some of this stuff will actually be taken beyond the science lab and taken into the scale and scale network.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (12:01):
And at 4:00 PM UK time, it's our final live q and a broadcast, we'll be joined by more of our panelists who are going to answer as many of your questions as they can. Well, that's a preview of the programs we have in stock view, but we are also running our viewer poll and we do this for every summit and we're always amazed by the number of responses we get from you. This is the question we are asking, how can telcos most effectively reduce their energy consumption levels? There are seven answer choices. Just select whichever ones you think are the most important and you can cast your votes. Now. It's up and live. Don't leave it too late. And we'll take a look at the progress of the voting during our live q and a shows. Then the week after, I'll be joined by my colleague Ray La Mara, editorial director at telecom TV for a special extra shot program. Ray will present his analysis of the poll results and the two of us will discuss the highlights of the panels and interviews and bring together the major themes and outcomes. Don't forget to register at telecom tv to view the summit videos. There's no charge. Join our community and be part of our ongoing DSP leaders coverage. And I hope to see you for the Green Network Summit starting Tuesday, the 4th of February. Goodbye for now.