Sustainability is quickly morphing from a compliance issue to a strategic advantage for companies across industries, including wireless. Employees, customers, and shareholders are all telling corporations to protect the planet, and they’re choosing to do business with those that listen.
The home page of Verizon’s investor relations site features a 50-minute video on the company’s climate action focus, presented by CFO Matt Ellis. AT&T CEO John Stankey named sustainability ahead of equity, education and universal internet access when listing AT&T focus areas in his annual letter to shareholders. And T-Mobile US recently announced it has already offset 100 percent of its annual electricity use with investments in renewable energy.
Vertical Bridge, which says it was the first telecom tower company in the world to reach net zero emissions, has been certified carbon neutral for two years in a row by the CarbonNeutral Protocol, which was developed by consultancy Natural Capital Partners.
MD7 was recently certified as carbon neutral in Europe by Climate Partners. The company’s international president Mark Christenson said the impetus came from within, with the firm’s European employees highlighting sustainability as “the right thing to do.” He added the COVID-19 pandemic also helped the company reduce its carbon footprint, as more customers abandoned requirements for paper documents with physical signatures. MD7, which helps clients with site acquisition, lease optimization and data management, is one of several companies in the wireless space that is helping customers go green by enabling digital transformation.
Fundamental change
Offsetting electricity use and avoiding paper documents are important steps, but in the years ahead, the wireless industry may make a much more fundamental contribution to sustainability through more power efficient systems and standards.
The title of this spring’s Brooklyn 6G Summit, set for April 27, is Path Towards a Sustainable 6G World. Executives from Nokia, Ericsson, AT&T, Qualcomm, HPE, Toyota, VMware and Schneider Electric will join NYU Wireless founder Dr. Ted Rappaport and other academics to discuss ways to make the next generation of wireless hardware more energy efficient.
Sustainability discussions were also part of last fall’s Brooklyn 6G Summit. “We’re really, really focusing on power efficiency at NYU Wireless,” Rappaport told the audience during a panel discussion. “It turns out if you can run transistors, semiconductors, in a non-linear region, and go to single bit [analog to digital converters] and go to saturation as much as possible, you get so much more power efficiency, so designing that kind of non-linear off-on efficiency is vital in all future architectures.” Rappaport said he has helped develop a theory which researchers can use to analyze power consumption using a method that is somewhat similar to the way they currently analyze signal and noise.
“If you think about power, it’s very much like a noise problem,” Rappaport said. “You have power that you want to do the work that you need for the application, and then you have ancillary power that basically gets wasted.”
During the same panel, Dr. Andrea Goldsmith, Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton, noted energy efficiency is a huge cost driver for operators and is particularly critical in parts of the world that lack reliable access to power. She added standards bodies have recently focused more on energy efficiency in end-user devices than in networks.
But that may be shifting. For 5G Release 18, 3GPP is considering sleep modes to help base stations conserve power when not transmitting, and power amplifier improvements to boost efficiency when they are transmitting. So even before 6G, sustainability may make its way onto the agenda for wireless standards bodies.
Veteran telecom industry editor and journalist Martha DeGrasse is an Inside Towers Contributing Analyst. DeGrasse owns Network Builder Reports and contributes regularly to several publications. She was formerly a writer and editor with RCR Wireless and a TV business news producer.
By Martha DeGrasse, Inside Towers Contributing Analyst
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