In this vignette of The 5G Factor, Ron Westfall and Steven Dickens provide their perspective on why sustainability missions are taking center stage across the decision making of the major CSPs.
The discussion highlighted:
Sustainability Takes Center Stage in Major CSP Decision Making. Communication service providers (or CSPs) are now better positioned to fulfill their sustainability missions, including ESG objectives, by actively managing a diverse range of ESG matters, including providing equitable access to connectivity. From our view, key to meeting sustainability goals is the ongoing commitment by CSPs to prioritize responsible business practices that promote accountability, transparency, and ethical conduct including broader adoption of cloud native and digital capabilities. For example, Capgemini’s Research Institute Report—Networks on Cloud: A Clear Advantage—claims that almost half of telecom networks’ capacity will be totally cloud-native in the next three to five years as 5G-driven sustainability progress requires digital operations platforms that support cloud-enabled agility and flexibility.
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Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Transcript:
Ron Westfall: A major issue I’m seeing for the global 5G market is sustainability and how the 5G ecosystem players are advancing sustainability as well as their environmental, social and governance goals. Also, as we commonly see it as ESG. Now, from my viewpoint, communication service providers, or CSPs, are now better positioned to fulfill their sustainability goals and missions, and that includes naturally those ESG objectives. And that is through actively managing a diverse range of ESG matters, including providing equitable access to connectivity. Obviously, bridging the digital divide is a huge objective for all of society. And integral to fulfilling these sustainability goals is the ongoing commitment by CSPs to prioritize responsible business practices that promote accountability, transparency, and ethical conduct, and meeting these sustainability goals. Now, so for 2023 and beyond, I see mobile operator 5G sustainability initiatives hitting their full stride. And the potential of the 5G standalone networks that are expanding can deliver even more of the network wide and ecosystem support needed to innovate 5G networks and spur 5G driven sustainability.
I also find that mobile operators, their executive teams and their decision makers are expanding oversight on the execution and fulfilling these sustainability goals. And that includes a promotion of cross-functional collaboration between technical and sales and marketing units. Now the top 5G sustainability market shapers I see include energy management, and that is the administering of power consumption and its impact on the sustainability goals. Energy management frequently requires automated management techniques, so automation is definitely going to play a major role in all this. And the goal here is to minimize output of energy requirements while also assuring service level agreements, or SLA, compliant, which is all important. This is how the operators definitely monetize 5G services. And that’s, again, particularly related to mission-critical 5G enterprise applications. Plus, I see AI enabled energy management platforms that are designed to decrease mobile operator energy consumption and costs by up to 30%.
And this is important, without diminishing network performance becoming increasingly deployed throughout the highly distributed 5G infrastructure, is again 5G standalone. Such decreases can approach fivefold savings over legacy pre-AI systems that also require scheduled shutdowns. And that obviously costs the operators money. We need to get away from that. For example, T-Mobile is committed to reducing its energy consumption by 95% per petabyte of data traffic by 2030, and that’s from a 2019 baseline, so that’s very impressive. And from my view, T-Mobile’s identification of sustainable and responsible supply as well as greenhouse gas reduction, energy and natural resource management, and also waste and recycling improvements as well as product lifecycle management aligns with the top most sustainability goals of the mobile ecosystem. In essence, all these things really have to come together to advance 5G sustainability.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
T-Mobile Q2 2023: Breakthrough Growth in Customers and Profitability
Cisco Live 2023: Cisco and AT&T Join Forces to Elevate Mobile Experience for Hybrid Workforces
Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
He is a recognized authority at tracking the evolution of and identifying the key disruptive trends within the service enablement ecosystem, including a wide range of topics across software and services, infrastructure, 5G communications, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), analytics, security, cloud computing, revenue management, and regulatory issues.
Prior to his work with The Futurum Group, Ron worked with GlobalData Technology creating syndicated and custom research across a wide variety of technical fields. His work with Current Analysis focused on the broadband and service provider infrastructure markets.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
Regarded as a luminary at the intersection of technology and business transformation, Steven Dickens is the Vice President and Practice Leader for Hybrid Cloud, Infrastructure, and Operations at The Futurum Group. With a distinguished track record as a Forbes contributor and a ranking among the Top 10 Analysts by ARInsights, Steven's unique vantage point enables him to chart the nexus between emergent technologies and disruptive innovation, offering unparalleled insights for global enterprises.
Steven's expertise spans a broad spectrum of technologies that drive modern enterprises. Notable among these are open source, hybrid cloud, mission-critical infrastructure, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and FinTech innovation. His work is foundational in aligning the strategic imperatives of C-suite executives with the practical needs of end users and technology practitioners, serving as a catalyst for optimizing the return on technology investments.
Over the years, Steven has been an integral part of industry behemoths including Broadcom, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and IBM. His exceptional ability to pioneer multi-hundred-million-dollar products and to lead global sales teams with revenues in the same echelon has consistently demonstrated his capability for high-impact leadership.
Steven serves as a thought leader in various technology consortiums. He was a founding board member and former Chairperson of the Open Mainframe Project, under the aegis of the Linux Foundation. His role as a Board Advisor continues to shape the advocacy for open source implementations of mainframe technologies.
