The telecommunications industry is a vital part of the global digital economy, connecting billions of people and applications to the cloud and each other every day. But service providers must balance competing objectives – coping with growing bandwidth demands while also pursuing ambitious environmental sustainability goals, including lowering carbon emissions. While the initial focus was on lowering direct emissions, increasingly service providers are looking more broadly to drive carbon reductions across the entire supply chain and the vendor ecosystem
By Christian Uremovic, Senior Director, Solution Marketing, Infinera
The telecommunications industry has a huge appetite for power. According to new research from the Electric Power Research institute (29 May 2024), data centers alone could consume as much as 9% of the total electricity produced in the U.S. by 2030. Artificial intelligence (AI), and the GPU infrastructure that underpins it, is a rapidly growing contributor to data center power consumption. With plans to build 1-gigawatt data centers, it’s no wonder Amazon Web Services recently acquired a 1,200-acre campus immediately adjacent to a 2.5-gigawatt nuclear power station in Pennsylvania.
Telecoms’ Carbon Reduction Commitments
Service providers have set ambitious targets to become carbon neutral within the next five to 10 years. This commitment includes reducing direct emissions (Scope 1) and indirect emissions from purchased electricity (Scope 2). For instance, companies like AT&T, Vodafone, Telefónica, and Verizon have made public commitments to achieve net zero carbon emissions. Telefónica and Deutsche Telekom have set the target of achieving net zero emissions by 2040, with the interim goal of neutralizing Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 2025. Vodafone and BT Group aim to eliminate all carbon emissions from their operations by 2030/2031 and from their respective value chains by 2040/2041. Similarly, Verizon has committed to net zero operational emissions (Scope 1 and 2) by 2035 and a 40% reduction in Scope 3 emissions by 2035 (baseline 2019).
Scope 3 emissions encompass all other indirect emissions that occur in a company’s value chain, including both upstream and downstream activities. These can represent a significant portion of a service provider’s total carbon footprint. Addressing Scope 3 emissions requires operators to engage deeply with their suppliers and partners to implement sustainable practices across the entire lifecycle of their products and services.
It is obvious that we can’t continue building networks as we did in the past – there is a need for game-changing innovations.
The Role of Optical Transport Networks
Optical transport networks are critical to telecom infrastructure, providing the backbone for data transmission across the globe. Optical networks support every data center, business, and household with high-capacity, low-latency connectivity, and they are important in the quest to reduce the telecom industry’s carbon footprint. Optical transmission technology enables the highest capacities to be transported with the lowest power consumption and at the lowest cost, which is essential in helping to reduce both Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. Advancements in optical technologies, such as coherent optics and dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM), enable significant energy savings by maximizing the transmission capacity per fiber and reducing the need for additional physical infrastructure. Within 20 years, optical transport technology enabled a power-per-bit reduction of about 99.7% – from 15 watts (W) per gigabit (G) down to 0.05 W/G. And the journey continues with each new technology generation.
Innovations in Networking
To meet sustainability goals, service providers and vendors must adopt several innovative architectural shifts and technological advancements. Here are some examples:
• Eliminate network layers: As an example, OTN switching is a technology that entered the network more than 15 years ago, supporting a mix of multi-protocol services such as TDM Ethernet and SONET/SDH. But today, high-speed services are growing faster than low-speed ones, IP and transparent/wave services dominate, and connectivity is to the cloud or data center. In parallel, merchant switch silicon has gone from 640 gigabits per second to 51.2 terabits per second, and coherent optical transmission has entered the terabit per wave era. In short, OTN switching is becoming obsolete. In a 2023 Heavy Reading research report, fully 82% of service provider respondents expect to cap their centralized OTN investments by the end of 2025, and 67% plan to remove such equipment in the same timeframe. Eliminating the legacy OTN switching layer can drive significant power and space savings.
• Energy-efficient equipment: Deploying next-generation routing and optical transmission equipment consumes less power. For example, Infinera’s ICE7 optical engine for data center interconnect, core, long-haul, and subsea networks can deliver up to 2.4T of transmission capacity with 30% less power consumption and 30% more fiber capacity compared to the previous generation that is only three years old.
• Network optimization: Software and automation provide the ability to optimize traffic flows and reduce energy consumption by dynamically adjusting network resources to traffic demands. Network optimization begins by deploying networking equipment with common standards-based open APIs to enable, simpler, faster, and unified management and operations of multi-vendor networks. Implementing network automation on top of open, programmatic infrastructure reduces errors, improves traffic aggregation, restores services, and improves network efficiency. Paradoxically, while AI drives power consumption and data growth, it also offers tools for optimizing network operations and reducing energy consumption. BT Group is using AI to predict equipment failures and optimize maintenance schedules, reducing unnecessary truck rolls and the associated carbon emissions that come with them.
• New architectures and innovations: New optical innovations such as point-to-multipoint coherent optics enable simplified high-capacity network architectures with less equipment. Additionally, innovations like linear-drive pluggable optics (LPO), and co-packaged optics (CPO) are changing the way we build optical transceivers with reduced power consumption, specifically inside data centers where we are interconnecting large clusters of GPUs for AI. Expansion into additional fiber spectrum and fiber bands, such as Super C-band, Super L-band, and potentially S-band and O-band, enable more efficient use of existing fiber resources, reducing the cost and power associated with trenching and lighting additional fiber pairs.
• Green energy: Transitioning to renewable energy sources for powering network infrastructure is critical. Several service providers are investing in renewable energy projects to offset their carbon emissions and encouraging their suppliers to do the same. For instance, BT Group hit the milestone of 100% renewable electricity worldwide already in 2020.
• Lifecycle Management: By implementing consistent and comprehensive lifecycle management practices for network equipment, service providers can ensure efficient use of existing equipment and recycling of materials, thereby reducing overall environmental impact and promoting a circular economy. Service providers are also focusing on reducing electronics waste through device recycling programs and extending equipment lifespans. Vodafone, for example, aims to reuse, resell, or recycle its network waste.
Collaborative Efforts
Reducing our carbon footprint and achieving Scope 1, 2, and 3 goals requires a concerted effort across the telecommunications industry. Service providers need to collaborate further and deeper with equipment vendors to develop and deploy energy-efficient technologies. As an example, Telefónica and Meta have both implemented Supplier Engagement Programs to help vendor partners reduce their carbon footprints. Furthermore, industry standards bodies and regulatory frameworks play a critical role in setting benchmarks and guidelines for sustainability practices.
Conclusion
The path to carbon neutrality in the telecom sector is complex but achievable. The industry is already well on its way to net zero carbon emissions. Focusing on both immediate emissions reductions and long-term sustainability through innovative optical transport network solutions, telecom service providers can make significant strides in reducing their carbon footprints. As the industry moves toward addressing Scope 3 emissions, the collaborative effort among operators, vendors, and regulatory bodies will be crucial in creating a sustainable and resilient digital future. The race to net zero is not just an environmental imperative. Getting there is also a competitive advantage in an increasingly eco-conscious market.
Above, Christian Uremovic, Senior Director, Solution Marketing, Infinera
