INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Green Technology

According to the 2022 Climate Action Survey Report by Telecoms . com , the reduction of energy consumption was recently flagged as telcos ’ most urgent operational challenge , 64 % of respondents .

In other recent study , 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 .

The report also indicates that operators will spend $ 206 million annually on that cloud transformation over the next five years . Organisations getting in early on a shift to cloud-native are likely to realise the most value in terms of economics and towers ’ power consumption using AI and machine learning .

This is why Cloud-Native Functions , CNF will increasingly come into play . Or at least they should ! CNFs are software-implementations of a function , or application , traditionally performed on a physical device .

Purpose-built for moving workloads to cloudnative architectures , the technology can eliminate telcos ’ heavy legacy virtualisation software layers , as well as automate and

Across the world , thoughts of service consolidation and alternative , modern deployment models are clearly gaining traction throughout the industry as decisionmakers search for ways to improve efficiency with minimal disruption and incremental cost .

Indeed , in Heavy Reading ’ s 2023 5G global survey of network strategists , respondents ’ top approach to reducing power consumption focused on moving as many functions as possible to a common infrastructure platform , 52 %. This was followed by reducing infrastructure footprints and increasing power efficiency with edge computing , 45 %, and consolidating functions and vendors for tighter energy management and cost efficiency , 40 %.

Disaggregation and multi-vendor by nature introduces some inefficiencies , so thinking about how to address this is clearly important . Consolidating core workloads onto a common cloud platform appears to be the most consequential move operators can make to reduce energy consumption in the 5G mobile core .

However , the overall spread in responses indicates that operators will combine multiple approaches in their power reduction strategy . environmental sustainability . For the latter , the research suggests that those embracing telco cloud are expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5 % in the next three to five years .

Telco cloud is also set to yield sustainability benefits from lower facility emissions , example , reduced physical hardware footprints , less power usage , auto-scaling of network on demand , and managing mobile orchestrate operations for maximum efficiency . All while scaling their networks .

“ By curbing complexity , consolidation can enable telcos to take full advantage of the flexibility , scalability and portability of 5G CNFs – the key advantages over running the same functions on dedicated hardware or virtual network functions , VNFs ,” says Alix Leconte , VP for Service Providers , EMEA at F5 . p

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