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Telco’s Green Goals: Achieving Energy Efficiency With the Use of Digital Technologies and Autonomous Networks

Telco’s Green Goals: Achieving Energy Efficiency With the Use of Digital Technologies and Autonomous Networks Image Credit: meekodong/BigStockPhoto.com

The ‘E’ of ESG and the telecom services providers

ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) is related to the sustainability of the enterprise. The Environment related factors in ESG are specifically related to how the organizations can consciously work towards reducing green gas emissions, disposing of industrial or electronic waste responsibly, use of resources like electricity and water wisely amongst factors related to air pollution, water pollution biodiversity, and deforestation.

Over the last few years, ESG factors have become a must-have in portfolios, and the ESG-linked funds are not expected to slow down, creating significant economic value in the GDPs. Countries are also making ESG-related disclosures mandatory in annual reports or independent sustainability reports.

According to a report published by Analysis Mason in 2021, investments in communications are on the rise in the ESG mutual and exchange-traded funds. There has been an increase in the issuance of green bonds by the telecommunications industry – in which commitment to sustainable targets is necessary to access the proceeds.

Telecommunications operators mostly report only greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and efficient use of energy by organizations is directly correlated to reducing GHG emissions. Research conducted by GSMA demonstrated the growing importance of achieving energy efficiency by the network operators for reducing the cost of capital, achieving better operational performance, and positively influencing stock prices. Though global operators like Deutsche Telekom, China Mobile, Vodafone, and AT&T report energy efficiency year on year, they are charting their strategies toward reaching net zero GHG emissions by 2050, as long-term sustainable strategies.

“Aligning to net zero to date, 62 operators representing 61% of the industry by revenue and 46% by connections have committed to a science-based target of rapidly decreasing their direct and indirect emissions by 2030. This is an increase of 12 operators since last year’s report. A considerable portion of operators have also committed to net zero targets by 2050 or earlier, accounting for 39% of mobile connections and 43% of global revenue.” – Source: GSMA Intelligence, 2023

While it is true that energy efficiency can be maximized using renewable energy sources, it is also important to leverage the power of automation and technologies to proactively manage efficient energy consumption. In this article, we see how the energy efficiency from radio to transmission to the core, can be effectively driven using digital technologies like cloud computing, AI/ML, IoT, big data analytics, digital twin, etc.

Role of digital transformation in achieving telco green KPIs

Digitalization is the most important factor in sustainable development and implementation of the ESG transformation. The processes of digital transformation and ESG transformation must be synchronized to obtain a synergistic effect.  The inclusion of AI/ML techniques enhances the network’s capabilities to achieve lower power consumption and the dynamic adaption of the network elements for various energy requirements. The GSMA and the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO) also suggest that the telecoms industry can enable emissions reductions in other industries too through digitalization and IoT, which could save billions of tonnes of CO2 emissions per year.  Whether it is reducing industrial emissions or installing private networks and automating the mines to improve safety and ensure lower carbon footprints.

Autonomous networks

Software-defined autonomous Networks (AN) and network function virtualization support ensuring that the energy is consumed efficiently. AN is a revolutionary approach to automating networks using digital technologies to achieve intelligent and automated software-based Zero Touch network management. Expert decision-making morphs into machine-based decision-making and learning. This enhances the system's capability to cope with complex and uncertain issues, greatly improving the response speed, resource, and energy efficiency of network services. Autonomous networks assist in creating “zero bits, zero watts" capability, which is nearly impossible to maintain in a typical network. Starting from tool-assisted execution and awareness, to defining the rule-based automation to executing an Energy-saving closed-loop by monitoring the traffic trends to real-time adjustment of the energy-saving use cases based on the traffic prediction models.  Each Closed Loop deployed in the network is responsible for a specific goal(s), e.g., optimization of handover performance or minimization of energy consumption.

Some of the key use cases for energy efficiency in autonomous networks by means of virtualization extend to wireless network energy saving, RAN energy saving, virtualization of the CDN, Access network virtualization, consolidating the WAN edge infrastructure into a single SDWAN platform, separation of the control and user planes, end to end full stack slicing consisting of energy efficiency SLAs, the convergence of the transport and access networks and finally to the broadband access network.

Introducing the autonomous network level for energy saving will benefit the operators to achieve the full autonomy goal step by step and have a clear view of which typical issues can be addressed by the telecom system in corresponding steps. The requirements for each autonomous level for energy saving are different for each type of network. So, it is important to introduce the autonomous network level definition for energy saving during the network strategy along with the other virtualization goals and use cases.

Containerized network function virtualization

Network function virtualization using containerized applications on the cloud with multi-tenant architecture helps organizations to be more sustainable in addition to a greater degree of operational efficiency. This helps in reducing power consumption by utilizing the network functions as a service by means of the right sizing and sharing of the network resources. The hyper-scale data centers in place of dedicated data centers reduce the network complexity, enable on-demand scaling & deployment of the network resources and enable automation of the controlling of the network for ensuring efficient and proactive energy management.

Digital twins

Network Digital twins are viewed as the natural extension of autonomous networks. Specifically, virtualized, software-based networks will create the necessary foundation for the extensive use of digital twins in efficient planning and predictive operations, and management of the networks. Operators like BT contextualize digital twins in energy planning and investigate the modeling of smart meters to offer scenario planning for achieving energy efficiency using IoT platforms. Closing the loop of the autonomous networks using the digital twin analytical power will greatly enhance the energy efficiency across different networks of the telco to assist in more sustainable and proactive automated field operations. Creating digital twin platforms on the cloud further enhances the ease of use of AI/ML technologies and analytics to achieve a greater degree of intelligent energy planning and management with reduced costs as compared to establishing the same infrastructure on legacy data centers. Vodafone UK recently announced a network digital twin platform with google cloud services and claimed to be mapping 40 million environmental features. The platform enables use cases like managing data center cooling and lowering the power at mobile sites during off-peak hours. Vodafone has claimed that the move has also resulted in €500m of operational savings.

The interventions

To ensure an integrated strategy, telcos need to embed the Environment factor in every aspect of their strategies including digital transformation, technology strategy, business strategy, platform strategies, enterprise architectural decisions, and so on. The end-to-end perspective will enable telcos to comprehensively cover the various factors. It will also enable leveraging synergies across the service and resource lifecycles, across the entire customer journeys, across all the networks, and across the different horizontal and vertical business models of the telco. For instance, network automation using software has a direct impact or implication to modernize the B/OSS systems of the telco for enabling the end-to-end use cases, orchestration, and business value realization. There is also an inevitable potential to strategically use Digital B/OSS to define the use cases for sustainability, driving superior customer experience, achieving energy efficiency, and monetization of the new business models.

Author

Dr. Jigna Srivastava, founder of DT Simplified, is a renowned thought leader in the space of telco digital transformation. She brings more than two decades of industry and consulting experience. Her expertise is in devising end-to-end digital strategies and enterprise architecture for telcos spanning across IT, Digital B/OSS, Cloud, and Network Automation. She has been instrumental in defining and driving the adoption of digital strategies, and building digital architectures, and has been instrumental in large transformation programs to drive innovative digital business models. She has also devised the DT Simplified® framework, which is an extension of her Doctoral research model outlining the “Antecedents of digital transformation and their impact on the business performance” for a successful digital transformation of telecom services providers. She also teaches subjects like Information Systems Management, Business Intelligence, Data Analytics and Digital Technologies as a Visiting Professor in leading post graduate management colleges/universities in Mumbai, India.

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