Being cleaner than many traditional industries, telecommunications has been generally perceived as environment friendly but when it comes to green initiatives, Indian service providers are yet to meet global standards. There is a growing need for mobile operators to control the construction and operation costs of infrastructure and services in an end-to-end manner while taking up the social responsibility of environmental protection through energy savings and emission reductions. With decreasing ARPU and increased opex, operators need a future-oriented wireless network solution to handle the challenges and boost profits.

According to a report by Lehman Brothers, cold-weather countries such as Russia will actually benefit (receiving a GDP boost of 0.5%), while the regions to suffer the most will be India, Africa, and Europe. Critically, the poor regions, including India, will also lack resources to help their populations adapt to changes.

India Vulnerable
Given the inevitability of global warming and that India will bear a disproportionate cost of that change, India's policy objectives need to be reversed. Under the Kyoto Protocol, developing countries, unlike rich ones, do not have emissions-reduction targets. But India, growing at 9% annually and expected to double its energy consumption between 2005 and 2030, is under pressure to take action.

In the mid-1990s, the first generation BTS with analog power amplifier (PA) enabled people to have fun with mobile communications. In 2000, the second generation BTS with digital PA greatly accelerated the development of mobile networks. In 2005, the distributed BTS, which represents the third generation BTS, brought substantial changes to network construction. With the application of the wideband RF and IP technologies, the fourth generation BTS has now become the highlight in the industry, and is fully displaying its features of “convergence, integration, all-IP and green”. This has resulted in global telecom equipment suppliers rolling out their own green BTS solutions, since currently there is no defined standard in the industry. A major drive behind the development of the fourth generation BTS is to reduce resources like equipment room and energy. Highly-integrated BTS's with low power consumption are the key to green communications.

The year 2008 will be characterized by network transformation. An innovative and quick-response partner is needed in operators' efforts to explore the “blue ocean”. Green BTS should incorporate environmental protection into product design and production to significantly lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) while saving energy. The green BTS benefits mobile operators mainly in three key areas: auxiliary equipment, network deployment, environmental protection, and resources utilization.

In general, the cost of BTS is around 30% of capex for a site. Reducing the site-related auxiliary equipment will decrease capex. A GSM site with typical S12/12/12 configuration in dense urban areas will have a footprint over 1.5 sq mts with a traditional BTS. If the footprint can be decreased to 0.5 sq mt, acquisition of 10,000 sites will save significant money of the operators.

The Power Push
Environment friendly products generally feature lower power consumption, less noise and electromagnetic radiation, and lower environmental impact. That is precisely what green BTS aims to achieve.

It is well known that a traditional BTS is composed of many modules, including base-band, RF, combiner, transmission, operation and management. This results in very complicated wiring and rigid installation mode, making site construction and expansion difficult. The modular design is an innovative and new type of BTS, which simplifies wiring between different modules and enables the BTS to be stacked or assembled in different ways like a building block. This makes site construction simpler, expansion smoother, and civil works costs related to site lower.

Green BTS is an effective means of ensuring profitability and assisting operators to rapidly lower the TCO in an increasingly competitive environment. As a leading telecom equipment provider, Huawei is making persistent efforts to innovate based on customer demands. Its series of green BTSs will bridge standards gap to realize multi-system integration, and help operators to lower TCO through a green way.

Internationally, operators are certainly aware of their environmental commitments, however, currently some smaller operators may need help in seeing the link between financial performance and good environmental practice.

In new growth markets like India, operators have increased their focus in this area and are working with the likes of Nokia Siemens Networks to evaluate green products. “We are conducting pilots with a few leading Indian operators using hybrid energy to power base stations,” says Juha-Erkki Mantyniemi, head of environmental affairs, Nokia Siemens Networks.

“We have committed to ambitious steps to cut our emissions of carbon dioxide. For example, BT consumes 0.7% of the UK's entire electricity, so we think we can make an important difference. We have pledged to reduce the amount of carbon we emit as a business and help others to do the same. We also believe that communications technology can be harnessed to help address climate change,” says Sudhir Narang, MD, BT India.

“Our plan commits us to: Reduce our own carbon footprint; influence our suppliers to produce products that emit fewer emissions; influence our customers by providing lower carbon solutions; and engage our employees to reduce their personal carbon emissions,” Narang adds.

Relying on customer-based innovation, Huawei positions its technical development on “Green, Convergence, Broadband and Evolution”. “Huawei has taken the lead in releasing the fourth generation BTS in the industry and will always be a partner in building a future-oriented network with operators,” says Max Yang, CEO, Huawei India.

“Local and global green initiatives are gaining serious commercial momentum in the marketplace. More and more customers are talking about environmental concerns and raising their priority on corporate agendas. As a result, service providers are also demanding green products,” says Rajesh Chainani, senior vice president, Service Provider, Cisco, India and SAARC. Cisco offers energy efficient data center (EEDC) solutions, and it has implemented these solutions to slow the growth of power consumption by data center operations.

More power is consumed in a data center than in any other IT environment, and the emissions that result from generating this power are a serious threat to the global ecosystem. IT and facilities professionals need to collaborate in approaching the issues of anthropogenic environmental impacts of a given business operation.

How Telecom Players can Help
Telecommunications can play a major role in achieving the EU targets. They have a possibility to help other industries reduce carbon dioxide emissions. For example, through better use of telecommunications, travel can be reduced and efficiency of operations improved. Dematerialization of products can turn atoms to bits. For example, instead of buying CDs or DVDs, people can download entertainment content to their PCs or mobiles.

Nokia Siemens Networks puts a lot of focus on training employees to be more environmentally aware, by internal training programs, information sharing sessions and stakeholder events. The company has recently signed a collaboration agreement with WWF to work together to promote environmental awareness among our employees and other stakeholders. The Nokia Siemens Networks' environmentally sustainable business (ESB) program allows to work closely with operator customers to evaluate the performance of installed equipment and to implement the most environmentally sustainable solutions in the future.

National Instruments is actively working with EU members on the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive to encourage the reuse, recycling and recovery of equipment purchased for use in Europe. As these specifications continue to evolve, NI remains committed to meeting European waste reduction standards.

The limited awareness of green IT products among end-users is partly due to lack of adequate push by IT vendors in the region. While IT vendors are increasing their spending on green initiatives, IT end-users still have little awareness of what Green IT is and how it can help their businesses. Many end-users in Asia see green IT as just another additional cost, and they still need to be educated on how it can benefit their organization. This is where IT vendors have a big opportunity: those that can educate end users on how to be green without increasing their costs or even saving money will differentiate themselves and gain not only increased market share, but also more brand equity in the eyes of their customers.

BT has met its promise to reduce power consumption by 60% from 1996 to 2006. Their next goal is to get that number to 80% by 2016.

BT mandates affect major suppliers such as Cisco, HP, and Sun, but also smaller vendors. Equipment supporting BT's 21st Century Network must be able to operate effectively at up to 50ºC, well above the usual 22ºC data center. “BT examines all aspects of a product's lifecycle, from creation to disposal, in working with suppliers. The company is also currently checking all of its electric assets to ensure that anything which isn't actually doing something is switched off,” says Narang of BT India.

BT has undergone significant expansion in recent years and is currently assessing the carbon footprint of BT's global operations. This is a complex task to do accurately in a fast changing and growing business. They are in a good position and can learn from the efforts undertaken in their UK operations. Bt is now seeking to extend this to a comprehensive view on its energy consumption and resulting carbon emissions internationally. The work currently underway by BT includes measuring and developing tracking systems for carbon emissions with a view to developing a plan for managing environment and climate change which will include carbon reduction initiatives.

Huawei proposes its “Green Site” solution that integrates a range of innovative technologies to drastically reduce the number of cabinets required as compared with traditional BTSs. Meanwhile, the BTS capacity gets a three-fold to six-fold increase in the number of carriers, and the system power consumption gets halved.

The need for seamless integration of different network modes and technologies has inspired Huawei's fourth generation BTS platform. Breaking the system barrier, the integrated platform supports various network modes such as UMTS, CDMA, WCDMA and LTE. Software upgrades facilitate changes between different modes, and this greatly simplifies operators' cost structures in a way that protects long-term investment by ensuring smooth future evolution.

In terms of mobile broadband, Huawei has taken a leading step in IP transformation research and raised the IP BSS/RAN solution. This solution provides an end-to-end IP-based architecture, including kernels, interfaces, and service guarantee mechanisms, which enable operators to substantially reduce transmission cost, improve QoS, and expand bandwidth and throughput, thus allowing flexible mobile broadband service deployment and smooth service adaptation.