I wrote this Insight Note for two reasons: 1. The rise in cost of energy threatens to stress the financial performance of service providers; and 2. I want to provide context for potential investments in power saving technologies to help investors decide which would be worthwhile. Energy consumption in telecom networks has become a confounding issue because of misleading statements by different industry lobbying groups. Operators have also been silent, preferring to speak in terms of meaningless ratios. Thus, I aim to share my view on the depth of the energy challenge that 5G raises and provide guidelines as to which areas one needs to consider investing in.
This paper is only a part of much larger work we did to evaluate new solutions – both hardware and software – to manage and/or reduce the power consumption of 5G networks. This is of interest to certain types of corporate and financial investors, especially those looking to push the technology envelop. The Insight Note does not expand on the technical aspects: only so much can fit into a 4-page paper! But I hope I succeeded in my main objective which is to share some important facts to have the right context, and to share the framework to simplify how one needs to address the energy challenge.
Note that I had earlier published a brief report on energy consumption in mobile networks which has complementary data to this Insight Note. See here to download that report; and check here for our other reports and Insight Notes.