Orange and Huawei boost their cooperation to invent and build high energy efficiency telecommunications networks by 2020

Paris, Wednesday, December 9, 2015

In the frame of COP21, Orange, one of the world's leading telecommunications operators, and Huawei, one of the world's leading suppliers of telecommunications solutions, are reaffirming their will to reinforce a promising collaboration started in December 2013, by agreeing today on ambitious objectives to invent and build high energy efficiency telecommunications networks by 2020.

As highlighted by Mari-Noëlle Jégo-Laveissière, Senior Executive Vice President of the Orange group's Innovation, Marketing and Technologies division: "This partnership will accelerate the implementation of high energy-efficient solutions in Orange's infrastructures to achieve our 2020 objective of reducing CO2 emissions per customer-usage by 50%. This innovative approach in research and development of ecosystems will assist society in energy and environmental transition”.

Mr Zhilei Zou, the president of Carrier Business Group within Huawei commented: “Today’s agreement re-affirms Huawei’s commitment to contribute to Orange 2020 environmental objectives by providing better energy efficient solutions.”

Work carried out by Orange and Huawei since 2013 has already led to advances in three areas

• Design of customer connector cards that reduce energy consumption by 50% for ADSL access and 70% for fibre-optic access. Orange is currently assessing the cards for future deployment on their fixed networks.
• Development of energy-saving features for mobile networks that can save an average of 10% of radio equipment energy consumption. Orange has already started to deploy these features in their mobile networks.
• Design of an innovative modular convergent infrastructure (fixed and mobile). A platform is already set up at Huawei research laboratories in Shenzhen. This infrastructure uses the most recent energy supply solutions and cooling systems (400 VDC, liquid cooling, etc.). Orange plan to launch a first pilot trial for this solution in 2016.

Orange and Huawei will focus, further develop and test in field situations, new solutions that bring more energy efficiency and environmental benefits

• Design of new network architecture, enabled by fibre-optics (more bandwidth, longer distance).
• Use new components and signal processing algorithms to improve mobile network power amplifiers.
• Virtualize Network Functions to optimize telecommunications infrastructures.
• Improve data storage management within the cloud.
• Leverage new power supply (400 volts direct current instead of 48 volts) to improve overall energy efficiency.
• Develop and implement testing for renewable energy technology (solar and wind).
• Leverage liquid cooling systems, introducing more energy-efficiency compared to air cooling systems.
• Design and implement testing for end-to-end energy-managed telecommunications infrastructures (equipment, sites and networks).

Orange and Huawei share the same ambitious vision: "zero watt @ zero load".

Find out more

• Orange and the COP21
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