At Huawei Win-Win Innovation Week, executives Ryan Ding, President of Huawei’s Carrier Business Group, and Dr. Philip Song, Huawei’s Carrier BG Chief Marketing Officer, discussed the role of sustainable ICT infrastructure in helping operators systematically build green network to simultaneously address traffic growth and support carbon emission reduction. This took place during the Green Development Solutions Launch, held on the second day of the event, followed by the launch of a new solution suite.
During his keynote speech titled “Green ICT for New Value”, Ryan Ding stressed the need for operators to prioritise energy efficiency and called for the establishment of a standard, industry-wide indicator system for energy efficiency. He explained, “Every major advancement in history has been accompanied by a significant improvement in the energy efficiency of information transmission. The increase in carbon emissions generated by exploding data traffic will become a global problem that must be tackled in the next five to ten years. Increasing energy efficiency will be the way forward.”
According to third-party research, data traffic generated by digital services is expected to grow by 13-fold over 2020 by 2030. This means that, if energy efficiency improvements are not made, the ICT industry’s energy consumption and carbon emissions will see a 2.3-fold increase. According to ITU, the ICT industry will need to reduce its carbon emissions by at least 45 per cent by 2030 to meet the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Paris Agreement’s goal.
Ding said, “We are now facing an unprecedented challenge: As more and more industries are going digital, the demand for data will rise sharply, which will result in a surge in energy consumption. In the meantime, the whole world is working to combat climate change, and the ICT industry must urgently achieve carbon peak and carbon neutrality.”
Improvements to energy efficiency will benefit operators in three ways. First, user migration, site upgrades, and network power reduction will bring them OPEX savings. Second, improved energy efficiency will support the migration of 2G and 3G users to 4G and 5G services. Third, operators’ efforts to reduce carbon footprint will positively impact the environment, helping them better fulfill their social responsibilities.
To help operators achieve these goals, Huawei has proposed a three-layer solution: green sites, green networks, and green operations. First, Huawei developed solutions to improve site energy efficiency by adopting a highly integrated design, using new materials, and moving main equipment and power supply units outdoors. Second, the company’s simplified network architecture makes forwarding faster and supports the construction of simplified, all-optical, and intelligent networks. Finally, at the operations level, Huawei offers a solution that generates and distributes optimisation policies while making energy efficiency more visualised and manageable.
Huawei and its operator partners are already working together to increase their “carbon handprint” by empowering carbon-intensive industries to boost energy efficiency using ICT solutions. The emissions reduction they enable can be 10 times their own emissions. Many success stories have already been seen in key carbon-intensive industries like ports, coal mining, and steel.
Dr. Philip Song announced the launch of a new suite of green development solution, and delivered a speech titled “Developing Green ICT Infrastructure with Optimal Energy Efficiency”. He explained how the solution is aimed at helping operators systematically improve network energy efficiency: “As ICT infrastructure continues to evolve from 5G and F5G to 5.5G and F5.5G, green networks, evaluated against the network carbon intensity (NCIe) index, will become a critical part of future target networks. The main objective of our solution launch today is to help operators systematically build green networks that simultaneously address traffic growth and carbon emission reduction.”
At the event, Song launched Huawei’s green development solution with innovations, as well as the new NCIe indicator system which supports this three-layer solution of green sites, green networks, and green operations. The NCIe energy efficiency indicator system proposed by Huawei has been approved by ITU-T SG5 and is now in the process of public consultation.
Closing out his speech, Song also announced the opening of the Evergreen Land engagement room, where Huawei will meet with global operators to discuss in-depth about green development and ways to build the most energy-efficient ICT infrastructure. He reiterated, “Huawei is committed to working with operators to improve the energy efficiency of ICT infrastructure and create value using green ICT technologies.”
