The News: Nokia used Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 to showcase how the company’s energy efficiency thinking is embedded across its entire product portfolio. Nokia is focused on holistic solutions in which all the portfolio ingredients contribute to sustainability. Read the Nokia blog here.
Nokia Elevates Energy Efficiency as Essential to Entire Portfolio Vision
Analyst Take: Nokia adroitly introduced a full range of energy efficiency improvements across its radio access network products at MWC 2023. The improvements incorporated the latest ReefShark System-on-Chips (SoCs), plus its microwave transport products as well as digital services portfolio, that together enable one third lower energy consumption compared to earlier generations of products and services.
In stimulating ReefShark innovation, I commend Nokia for using customized Marvell OCTEON silicon to enhance its ReefShark chipset family across vital capabilities, such as multi-RAT RAN and transport. Looking ahead, I expect L1 processing demands increasing substantially due to higher radio capacity needs and lower latency demands in the concatenation from 5G to 5G-Advanced and eventually 6G throughout vDU/vCU, multi-sector macrocell base stations, microcell base stations, and intelligent radio head environments.
The show debut of the AirScale Habrok radios definitively reinforced Nokia’s strategic commitment to making radio energy efficiency an integral pillar in fulfilling both the company’s and industry-wide decarbonization goals. The new AirScale Habrok radios are designed to decrease energy consumption across all traffic conditions. When combined with the Digital Design for Energy Efficiency services and the new deep sleep mode software feature, significant energy savings are attainable during both demanding intervals and at zero traffic conditions, augmenting the mobile user experience by enabling higher throughput during peak traffic.
Nokia further demonstrated its energy efficiency credentials with new portfolio-wide enhancements advances that include:
- Integrating traffic-aware sleep mode software and embedded power metering into its Wavence microwave radio transport solution, extending a highly sought feature already found in the AirScale base station products. Now operators can measure power consumption in the live network and bolster overall transport network energy efficiency.
- Through ML-enabled automation capabilities, Nokia SON can decrease energy consumption across the radio network by an additional 15%, especially in supporting greater cell site densities as operators aim to improve coverage and capacity during peak hours while conserving resources during low traffic load periods (i.e., when up to 70% resources can be idle).
- New generation liquid-cooled AirScale subrack that targets decreasing baseband cooling system energy consumption, particularly across baseband hotel use cases by up to ninefold.
- All-in-One cabinet site solution assists reducing overall energy consumption at the base station site by 30%, due in great part to cooling system innovations.
At MWC 2023, President and CEO Pekke Lundmark shared and refreshed Nokia’s big picture vision, emphasizing making Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors themselves a driver of value creation with the debut of a new ESG strategy underpinned by five focus areas and accompanying goals. The five areas consist of Environment, Industrial Digitalization, Security & Privacy, Bridging the Digital Divide, and Responsible Business.
Nokia’s environmental focus area is especially salient to ongoing portfolio-wide energy efficiency initiatives as it stresses the company becoming an industry pacesetter in energy efficiency and circular practices. Nokia has set the bold science-based target to reduce the company’s Scope 1, 2, and 3 GHG emissions by 50% between 2019 and 2030. Moreover, Nokia has also set the target of 100% renewable electricity in all its facilities by 2025 in the journey to attaining net zero status.
I view People & Planet, Nokia’s sustainability report, as integral to boosting the profile of its 5G energy efficiency and overall ESG credentials by demonstrating the company’s accord with GRI standards and support for key sustainability reporting frameworks such as the Sustainability Accounting Standard Board (SASB), the UN Global Compact, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Key Takeaways: Nokia Fully Commits to Cloud RAN In-Line Acceleration
From my perspective, 5G RANs will increasingly use wider bandwidths, triggering torrential demand for high throughput microcells and full macro cell capabilities. As such, with the energy efficiency breakthroughs, in accord with silicon design approaches such as In-Line acceleration, Nokia advocates will become increasingly essential to delivering optimal 5G energy efficiency, capacity, cloud nativeness, and time-to-market advantages throughout O-RAN and vRAN implementations.
Taken together, Nokia’s portfolio-wide energy efficiency improvements are making a positive contribution toward improving the telecommunications industry’s overall environmental performance. In light of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) release of the Synthesis report, which found worldwide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continuing to increase, taking steps to motivate the telecommunications industry to up its game takes on paramount importance.
Disclosure: Futurum Research 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 Futurum Research as a whole.
Other insights from Futurum Research:
MWC 2023: Nokia Goes All-In with In-Line Acceleration for Cloud RAN
The Six Five In the Booth with Nokia at Mobile World Congress 2023
Image Credit: Nokia
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.
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.
