Sustainability in the Telecommunications Industry

How does telecommunications industry affect the environment? Over the past 50 years, annual carbon dioxide emissions have almost doubled. The natural environment needs even more interest from both companies and individuals. How can you ensure you are using only the right green solutions? What is the purpose of implementing the assumptions of sustainability in telecoms? You will find the answers to these questions below.

Sustainability reporting is becoming an important pro-market activity, indirectly raising awareness in corporations. It introduces monitoring and control systems for parameters affecting the achieved values. This is not only an act of corporate good will, but is also becoming a legal requirement of many governments. States introduce regulations on reducing greenhouse gas emissions for energy-intensive corporations such as communication and IT (C&I), giving rise to the need to report parameters affecting energy consumption and sources. This new area requires adequate support to address the challenges created by the need for reporting and control requirements for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives. Of course, by optimizing energy consumption, companies also increase their competitiveness by reducing costs.

Do customers want to buy from green telecoms?

Among the priorities of governments and corporations, energy management will become one of the most important. It is also important to take into account pressure from increasingly aware societies (and therefore consumers and customers) on decision-makers to save energy and reduce the carbon footprint of commercial activities. More and more environment-conscious customers will be guided by green economic factors to an even greater extent in their choices. Since markets, especially in the telecommunications sector, are mature, even small groups of consumers can gain advantages in this respect.

The cloud environment as a solution

Many service providers have systems in place to optimize the use of resources at the level of service utilization by customers. Most often, these systems are static. They operate in accordance with the rules resulting from analysis of statistical measurements, turning on or off a specific resource in places or at times when customers use services built on these resources to a greater or lesser extent. More advanced systems work with sophisticated analysis containing predictions, and use virtual systems based on cloud environments. The use of elements in the cloud allows companies to move elements between data centers and take advantage of differences in places and periods of maximum use of services in telecommunications and IT networks.

The popularization of this trend seems to be increasingly necessary, especially in 5G networks. Of course, the cloud environment should be understood not only as public networks offered by large and small players on the market. In this sense, the network of a communication operator or IT network provider, where virtualized elements can be implemented in many of its data centers close to other centers, is also such an environment. It gives the most opportunities to obtain an energy-efficient system, due to control over the entire infrastructure (including virtual resources) and the ability to reduce energy consumption.

How can Comarch support sustainability in the telecommunications industry?

One of Comarch's solutions goes even further, allowing you to change resource allocation and parameters based on artificial intelligence. This gives a wide range of optimization possibilities. The importance of this is evidenced by the fact that, according to reports from 2022, energy consumption in data centers, due to our digitized societies, already accounts for 1% of total global energy consumption. In the past, optimization activities were limited to disabling or switching on resources according to usage requirements.