Huawei: going green globally

Huawei is on a mission to make the planet green. The company says that energy efficiency is an important part of operators' commitment to environment protection and cost reduction and that energy efficiency design for networks needs to be integrated with the assessment of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) as financial feasibility is an important indicator of a good energy saving solution. Huawei conducts a lifecycle assessment (LCA) on its own equipment from the carbon emission perspective during the equipment's lifecycle, with focus on mobile base stations (BTSs) and fixed broadband access products. It concludes that a typical BTS discharges the most carbons during its operation stage, which takes up 60 percent of all the emission during the whole lifecycle. 

Based on its energy consumption analysis for a number of its customers, Huawei has found that electricity is the major energy consumed, mainly on access networks. For mobile operators, wireless sites account for 70 percent of the energy consumption; even in the case of fixed operators, energy consumed by the access part goes as high as 40 percent of the total consumption or more. Therefore, Huawei believes that energy savings on access networks come first, then on core equipment rooms, and lastly on transmission networks and that packaging and logistics can be carried out in a green way. Always innovative in its energy efficiency approaches, Huawei has developed such end-to-end solutions as: Green Site, Green Equipment Room, Green Transmission, Green Energy, and Green Packing.

• Green Site: Huawei has substantially helped reduce BTS energy consumption and carbon emissions through a series of innovative techniques such as improving power amplification, adopting smart power control, increasing the maximum temperature for the BTS, and employing distributed or integrated equipment rooms.
  
  
• Core Equipment Room: Huawei has replaced blade servers for traditional servers so as to drastically reduce energy consumption in the core equipment room. Employing All-IP, MSC Pool and ngHLR, Huawei helps operators save on energy by streamlining the network and reducing the amount of equipment. The cooling efficiency in the existing equipment room can be improved by using intelligent applications and equipment thermal management techniques.
  
  
• Green Transmission: Smart networking is the best way to reduce energy consumption as far as green transmission is concerned. As for the network, Huawei's ASON is a good solution for optimizing the network and cutting the number of sites and equipment rooms, while in terms of equipment, the back-to-back router configuration and large-capacity OTN/OCS are innovative techniques for equipment energy savings.
  
  
• Green Energy: The coming five years will see new subscribers come from emerging markets, where power supplies for BTSs are often compromised by the lack of grid power or unstable power, poor infrastructure, difficulty in getting fuel for diesel generators and maintaining BTSs regularly in remote areas. This often results in high costs. To help operator overcome these challenges, Huawei has come up with the Solar Energy Solution, Wind and Solar Hybrid Power Solution, and Solar and Diesel Power Solution.
  
  
• Green Packaging: Practicing 6R1D, Huawei uses recyclable timber and visualized packaging techniques and promotes assembly packaging, standardization, and appropriate design. It has developed various green packaging techniques, which, in combination with its recycling logistics platform, form a suite of green packaging solutions.

Green is mainstream

The creation of our digital world comes at a cost, and that cost is increased energy usage. Based on analyst projections and current cost and consumption models, the growth of energy consumption in ICT is unsustainable — something has to give. Operators, consumers, businesses, nations, and the planet will suffer if we can’t kick the coal habit.

The industry could save billions of dollars by transforming to an all-IP infrastructure. Base stations can be powered by alternative energy sources, dramatically reducing the total cost of ownership throughout the lifecycle, and the carbon impact. Data centers and central offices can be powered by clean solar and wind energy, which is sustainable and cost effective. Green is no longer a passing fad — it is mainstream, and should be an integral part of every strategy for vendors and service providers in the Communications and Entertainment Technology market.