Tag Archive for: Sustainability

Publication Green Future Networks: Telco Supply Chain Sustainability Cover

Green Future Networks: Telco Supply Chain Sustainability

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In this first publication of NGMN’s Green Future Networks Phase 2 in 2023, the key challenges mobile operators face in developing sustainable supply chains are outlined. A review of the emerging regulatory and standards environment is conducted.  Approaches and best practices in developing sustainable supply chains are identified by relating the emerging business and regulatory environment to examples of the changes that operators and their supply chain partners may need to make, both at strategic and operational levels. Integrating sustainability goals into the operator’s core objectives is of key importance as well as selecting suppliers whose own sustainability strategies are aligned with these goals. Finally, a checklist based on the best practices in the industry is provided to support operators in developing a sustainable procurement strategy. Examples from across the industry are included that highlight that companies are already embracing many of the concepts identified in this publication.

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Cover image Press and Industry Briefing on 1th March 2022

NGMN Press And Industry Briefing 2022

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Thank you for joining our annual NGMN Press & Industry Briefing at Mobile World Congress on March 1st from 1:30 – 2:30 pm CET live on stage at the Deutsche Telekom stand (3M31).

Our Chairman of the Board Arash Ashouriha together with our CEO Anita Döhler presented an update on NGMN’s growth momentum and strategic focus topics:

  • Mastering the Route to Disaggregation/ Operating Disaggregated Networks
  • 6G
  • Green Future Networks

The present and virtual audience was filled with NGMN Board Members, industry experts and members of the press. Highly interesting questions were posed in the live Q&A following the presentation.

The presentation of the briefing can be downloaded here.

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Metering for Sustainable Networks

Green Future Networks – Metering for Sustainable Networks v1.0

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This White Paper’s recommendations are:

  • To identify and understand the behaviour of energy intensive or under-utilized parts of the network and in order to optimize and manage them in an energy efficient way it is recommended to deploy metering. Metering with more granular measurements will enable to check the energy performance of equipment in real time condition as well as to improve and promote the use of renewable energy source in a more optimized way.
  • It is recommended to deploy metering at the network and technical sites to measure the energy consumption and other relevant parameters such as temperature and humidity of the active equipment e.g. radio, backhauling and core equipment.
  • Standardized metering shall be defined with generic unified architecture for data collection, site internal communication architecture ideally equipped with higher level intelligent Next Generation Control Unit or Data Gathering Unit. In addition, measurement parameters with given accuracy as well as data collection and interfaces, including virtualized and NFV environments should be standardized
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NGMN Calls for Metering Solutions to Reach Net-Zero Emission Targets

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Frankfurt, Germany, January 25, 2022: The Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance (NGMN) today publishes its fourth Green Future Networks White Paper: “Metering for Sustainable Networks”. With this publication, the Alliance calls for metering solutions as an important step for operators to reach net-zero emission targets.

For operators, the reduction of power consumption has been identified as an essential aspect to achieve net-zero emission targets by 2050 or before and to reduce their operational expenses as well. An accurate metering system is a prerequisite to make sure that energy consumption can be properly monitored, measured, and optimised. The NGMN White Paper outlines the metering goals in different parts of mobile networks and the advantages that can be realised with the implementation of metering solutions.

With much of the energy being consumed in the radio networks, particularly base stations, metering solutions have the biggest immediate impact in radio networks. The growing number of sites is another aspect that should not be neglected. The new White Paper mainly focuses on base station equipment and their technical sites.

All insights and recommendations given in this White Paper are also applicable to other parts of the mobile network – including core networks, data centres, and backhaul.

Laurent Leboucher, SVP Orange Innovation Networks, Orange and Member of the NGMN Board says: “We, like NGMN, in particular ask equipment manufacturers to share architectures and communication protocols to improve the measurements of the energy consumption in base stations, being the most energy consuming part of mobile networks. Our request also applies to all other equipment in the network. Accurate metering solutions are absolutely essential to operators – to make progress on energy efficiency, measuring is essential. This will contribute to our net-zero targets and also to reducing networks operational expenses.”

The proposed recommendations for metering solutions assume a unified architecture of a metering system and data collection at site level, for application by operators, thus enabling deployment with low effort. This White Paper covers different use cases and operating models, different topologies of sites including sites owned by one operator, site sharing between different operators, tower companies and RAN sharing scenarios as well.

Another NGMN recommendation is to collaborate with standard developing organisations (SDOs), to create a uniform and more sustainable metering solution for mobile networks by standardising parameters to be measured, data collection methods, interfaces, and communication protocols. Furthermore, it is important to establish an interface between network operators and network equipment suppliers, including manufacturers and vendors.

With these requirements to the industry, NGMN has achieved another milestone in its Green Future Networks Project. This White Paper rounds off Phase 1 while the Alliance has started working on Phase 2 with further publications on various topics to follow in 2022.

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NGMN Defines Industry Standard for a “Global Green Networks Benchmark”

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Frankfurt, Germany, January 18, 2022: The Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance (NGMN Alliance) today announces the establishment of methodologies and KPIs for a Global Green Networks Benchmark. The Alliance’s new initiative is part of its Green Future Networks Programme and is set for generating a global standard for the industry. While current mobile network benchmarks mostly concentrate on comparing service quality and user experience, the new Global Green Networks Benchmark will place the focus on green network operations.

Arash Ashouriha, SVP Group Technology Innovation, Deutsche Telekom and Chairman of the NGMN Board states: ”Implementing concrete actions to mitigate climate action is a key priority for our industry. At Deutsche Telekom, our goal is to make sure that everyone can #takepart and connect over a green network. We are committed to ambitious net zero targets and are continuously optimizing our network to ensure the best quality for our customers while striving to systematically reduce the energy consumption. The Global Green Networks Benchmark from NGMN will certainly help the entire telco industry by providing transparency regarding the operator’s sustainability. In addition, it offers operators a unique opportunity to prove their sustainability credentials towards their customers and be recognized for the positive environmental and societal impact.”

Anita Döhler, CEO at NGMN, emphasizes: “There is a clear need for a Global Green Networks Benchmark. Being recognized for the operation of Green Networks will encourage Mobile Network Operators to engage even more in exploring innovative methods and solutions to implement their networks in an energy efficient manner and to increase the focus on reducing the E2E services’ environmental footprint, for instance, through improved eco-design of products and the implementation of new business models fostering a circular economy. Such efforts will also stimulate supplier innovation.”

The general objectives of this NGMN initiative are:

  • to establish globally applicable KPIs and methodologies,
  • to define a global evaluation methodology, and
  • to define the data sources for the assessment and how such data are obtained

In the first step, the benchmark will focus on high level sustainability indicators, followed by more detailed assessments at subsequent stages.

The networks’ traffic volume is expected to increase exponentially in the coming years and keeping the energy curve flat will be a challenge for the industry. In addition, climate change is becoming one of the major concerns from the end-user perspective resulting in more and more end-users looking for sustainable services from their network providers. Although many operators have committed to net-zero targets, there is a high potential in improving network energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which NGMN is addressing with all its Green Future Networks’ activities.

NGMN invites interested industry players to join this new endeavor for the benefit of the global ecosystem.

Green Future Networks - Network Energy Efficiency

Green Future Networks: Network Energy Efficiency

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The energy performance of mobile networks has improved over the years due to introduction of new generations of cellular technology, with better spectral efficiency, advanced hardware with lower power consumption and also many energy saving features introduced in mobile networks. As the deployment of these energy saving features represents an important step in improving energy performance of mobile networks, this publication studies the different existing and coming new energy saving features and of course their potential when rolled out in the networks. It also defines the next steps for further energy performance activities and studies. Other topics addressed by the publication are related to the different types of hardware, architectures, and site solutions.

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NGMN Identifies Key Energy Saving Solutions for Mobile Networks

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Frankfurt, Germany, November 9, 2021: Today, the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance released “Green Future Networks: Network Energy Efficiency”, a publication which focuses on best possible ways of reducing the energy consumption of mobile networks, a key concern of Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and an important step towards greener networks. In its publication, NGMN studies the different existing and future energy saving features and their potential when rolled out in the networks – among others, the usage of automatic wake-up/sleep modes, virtualisation technology, and the usage of efficient power amplifiers combined with massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO).

Key aspects include:

  • application of energy efficiency techniques across the three levels of next generation network operation – the base station equipment level, the site level and the network level
  • importance of leveraging the spectral efficiency of the 5G air interface and its more advanced sleep modes
  • importance of deploying sleep mode functions that shut off hardware when the load is low (path to zero watt at zero load)
  • usage of renewable energy for on-grid and off-grid sites, smart batteries, power efficient power supplies
  • free and liquid cooling solutions in technical sites
  • flexible cooperation between 5G and LTE
  • positive effects of massive MIMO solutions in 5G
  • advantages of virtualisation technology for energy efficiency of mobile networks
  • benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based energy saving solutions and what it takes to build such algorithms

Laurent Leboucher, SVP Orange Innovation Networks, Orange states: “Tomorrow, networks will be greener by design! Today, Orange is already working hard to save energy consumption and reduce the carbon footprint of its networks, making continual progress, through its research efforts and operational deployments. However, this needs to be an industry move and this is where the NGMN Alliance plays a strategic role in unifying the industry. With our knowledge and experience in this area, Orange is delighted to co-lead NGMN‘s Green Future Networks project. As an industry, altogether, with the right technologies and skills, we will be able to fulfill our ‘Green’ commitments.”

Anita Döhler, CEO of the NGMN Alliance, says: “To continue improving the energy performance as well as reducing the global networks energy consumption, vendors and operators are encouraged to put a strong focus on the solutions identified by our Green Future Networks project. The path to zero watt at zero load for future network generations is to be continued, especially, considering the use of AI techniques to intelligently coordinate and optimize more precise decisions for activation and deactivation of the sleep-mode and shut-down features, as well as on-demand network dimensioning.”

The publication also addresses server virtualisation technology which allows workloads to be optimally scheduled on hardware, for example by consolidating workloads onto a reduced number of CPUs for energy efficiency. With virtualisation technology, multiple applications and workloads can be run on a single server, thus increasing energy efficiency. This allows multiple network workloads to run in Virtual Machines (VMs) or containers, thus enabling efficient use of the common server resources.

Despite the fact that operators are already increasing the use of energy saving features, forecasts point to a significant rise in energy consumption over the next couple of years due to considerable increase in traffic across a vast range of use cases, new technologies and spectrum, a great deal of connections, and network densification. Here, AI could play an important role. By predicting and learning the traffic behaviour, AI algorithms define the activation/deactivation of sleep mode functionality and site energy management without impacting the overall performance including Quality of Experience (QoE). AI is still in an early phase and more development and research is needed to reach its full potential. AI based energy saving solutions can greatly increase the energy performance of cellular networks.

The NGMN Alliance emphasises the importance for all vendors and operators to continue the implementation and activation of advanced energy saving features supported by the 5G standard. In a next step, NGMN will look at further opportunities in phase 2 of its Green Future Networks project. Interested parties are invited to contact the NGMN Office for further information and how to join the Alliance.

The present publication is the third deliverable of the NGMN Green Future Networks project following two publications in July 2021. The first, “Sustainability Challenges and Initiatives in Mobile Networks” introduces the subject of sustainability in mobile networks and provides context of this broad and complex topic, the second, “Network Equipment Eco-Design and End to End Service Footprint” gives an overview of the existing procedures and visions for eco-design of Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) network equipment. The next publication in this context will be published later this month and will focus on ”Metering for Sustainable Networks”.

NGMN Sustainable Trust

Security Competence Team: Sustainable Trust

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Trust is a unique property in a human society, and has been implicitly existed in telecommunication system. Properly, managing Trust in telecommunication system would become a norm. Sustainable Trust Model puts telecommunication system into a new era. It provides a runtime evaluation of trustworthiness to all network functions and stakeholders via standard interactions. It also gives a complementary to all standardization development organizations (SDO) Trust Models.

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NGMN Green Future Networks Project Demands Network Equipment Circularity and Increased Efforts in Global Sustainability Standardization

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In two White Papers, the Alliance emphasizes the necessity of Life Cycle Assessment methodology and a collaborate approach for ICT industry players.

 

Frankfurt, Germany, July 20, 2021: Today, the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance has released two new White Papers: “Green Future Networks: Sustainability Challenges and Initiatives in Mobile Networks” and “Green Future Networks: Network Equipment Eco-Design and End to End Service Footprint” – of which the first is exploring the data-driven assessments and research of the environmental footprint of digital goods and services, while the second focuses on eco-design and its implications.

In its White Papers, developed by 24 companies working jointly on the Alliance’s Green Future Networks project, NGMN requires to put the focus on assessing the environmental footprint of the Information and Communication Technologies’ (ICT) sector. This should be done at the different levels of the supply chain and with emphasis on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method as the basis of circularity. The overall goal is to reduce the use of materials with high environmental impact – i.e. critical raw materials – in order to achieve a significant reduction of the environmental impacts and align with a 1.5°C trajectory in line with the ITU recommendation L.1470. NGMN encourages operators, vendors, research institutions and other ecosystem players to participate in standardization efforts on the equipment environmental footprint reduction in order to share knowledge, develop and adopt common approaches. For further details see here and here.

Further, NGMN sees a strong need for the industry to increase the efforts in developing common methodologies to bring solutions to the complex question of assessing services’ environmental footprint. This might be realized for example through collaborative partnerships between actors with different expertise.

Anita Döhler, CEO at the NGMN Alliance, says: “In order to succeed in the implementation of real circular economy in the ICT sector, different sectors need to work together with global optimization goals as a common strategy. We at NGMN invite operators, vendors, research institutions and other interested ecosystem players to take part in our Green Future Networks project to help further enlarging its global impact – for the benefit of human.”

With its White Papers, the Green Future Networks project presents the method of Life Cycle Assessment, which allows to more accurately assess the network equipment’s environmental footprint – among others providing a view on the materials’ footprint and the role of critical raw materials as part of the products’ sustainable design (eco-design). Furthermore, the benefits of network equipment re-manufacturing and refurbishment as well as innovation in packaging inspired by eco-design principles are exemplified. Also, the White Papers present a list of recommendations for operators and vendors on how to expand their activities regarding the eco-design of products – showing how measures in different areas help reducing the environmental footprint.

Jeroen Cox, Strategic Lead Energy & Environment at KPN, says: “Critical raw materials are significant in the design of network equipment. Circular economy strategies like reducing, refurbishing or recycling should be considered to lower the supply risk of the materials in collaboration with partners in the value chain.”

Arash Ashouriha, SVP at Deutsche Telekom and Chairman of the NGMN Board, stresses: “At Deutsche Telekom, we lay a great deal of emphasis on reducing waste and recycling of resources. Our approach of ‘sharing instead of owning’ contributes to resource conservation which is not only good for the environment but also brings along cost savings, and reduced waste of material. We are very excited to be a part of NGMN’s eco-design initiative and we further encourage the industry to keep circular economy as a central focus point in all the activities.”

The NGNM Green Future Networks project was launched in October 2020. It works actively with standardization organizations related to sustainability efforts relevant for telecom networks and issues new recommendations focusing on metrics, eco-design and energy efficiency – to provide guidance to the telecommunication industry in order to significantly reduce the environmental impacts and align with a 1.5°C trajectory in line with the ITU recommendation L.1470.

 

Further Information

The NGNM Alliance recommendations include:

  • Companies are recommended to develop and increase awareness of the challenges related to Green House Gas emissions and resources depletion (scarce or critical materials) of network equipment. To this end, the technical skills on eco-design and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) need to be expanded, specially from vendor side.
  • NGMN strongly recommends all mobile network operators and equipment manufacturers to use circular economy principles (for instance, according to ITU-T L.1023) and environmental footprint assessment (using LCA method, for instance with ITU-T L.1410) and to integrate them in the procurement process.
  • Investigating new business models related to circular economy paradigm is advised. For instance, switching to Product-Service-System (PSS) could reduce the environmental footprint, leading to different hardware design strategies, considerations about product life expectancy, modularity and upgradeability. There is evidence that applying this kind of business model can lead to significant improvements and we encourage companies to look for this kind of solutions.
  • In order to continue advancing in the networks environmental footprint reduction, NGMN calls the industry to increase the efforts to collaborate in order to develop common methodologies to bring solutions to the complex question of assessing services environmental footprint. Collaborative partnerships between actors with different expertise will also help to overcome a lack of skilled experts to this end.
  • NGMN recommends that vendors, operators, research institutions and other ecosystem players participate in standardization efforts on the equipment environmental footprint reduction to share knowledge and to develop and adopt common approaches.
  • Also, NGMN strongly encourages vendors to expand their activities regarding eco-design of products, taking the environmental footprint into account as well as critical materials usage, refurbishing and re-manufacturing.

 

NGMN Green Future Networks Network Equipment Eco-Design and End to End Service Footprint

Green Future Networks: Network Equipment Eco-Design and End to End Service Footprint

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The main goal of the present White Paper is to give an overview of the existent procedures and visions for eco-design of Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) network equipment. In order to introduce network equipment eco-design principles, this White Paper investigates the strategy to reduce the environmental footprint and then presents the basis of circularity. It presents a method called Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which allows to assess the network equipment environmental footprint with an accurate level of precision and completeness. A view on the materials footprint and the role of critical raw materials as part of product’s eco-design is given considering the associated supply risks. Other important topics dealt in this White Paper are network equipment re-manufacturing and refurbish benefits as well as innovation in packaging inspired in eco-design principles. To finalize, the status of work on the development of a methodology to measure the end-to-end services footprint is presented.

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