Stephen Temple

Mobile radio is more of a solution than a problem in regard of the climate change agenda. Mobile radio is used to make more efficient use of transport. It has been estimated that the annual CO2 footprint of the average mobile subscriber is around 25kg – which is comparable to driving an average car on the motorway for one hour (Source: Eriksson). That said a typical UK mobile radio operator’s network consumers over 400 GW-h per years and produces 200,000 tons of carbon emission per year (Source O2 2005) and no sector of the economy can be allowed to consider itself off-limits in seeking out ways to make radical reductions in energy consumption.

So what drives energy consumption in the mobile radio industry? The two biggest single drivers of energy consumption in the mobile radio industry are the number of base stations in a network and the amount of active equipment in each base stations. This drives around 70% of the energy consumption of mobile radio (Source: Ericsson). There are around 55,000 base stations in the UK (Source: Ofcom and includes a few thousand Tetra base stations)

The list of what drives the number of base stations is quite long and includes: Providing near universal coverage to deliver mobility; enhancing capacity from a given amount of spectrum (cell splitting); using higher ranges of frequencies (eg 2.6 GHz versus 900 MHz or DDR spectrum); having more competing mobile radio network operators and providing a high degree of fast response resilience (equipment on hot standby). These are all desirable things.

Individual mobile radio operators already have cost cutting incentives to seek out energy saving strategies for their own individual networks including: more efficiency equipment; moving equipment closer to the mast aerials to reduce feeder losses; more intelligent powering-down of unused equipment; more resilient equipment not needing air conditioning and not forgetting using more renewable energy at base stations (in the future). It is not that a solar panel could run a base stations but it could take a serious bite out of the annual demand from the grid.

But there are counter pressures moving things in the wrong direction in respect of carbon emissions . Increasing broadband data rates needing shorter transmission distances,  equipment operating at higher data rates tends to consumer more power and the 4^th generation technology is coming in much faster than expected and the 2^nd generation will take much longer to take out of service, leaving mobile operator with the burden of three networks (duplicative in part) to manage over many years. Unfortunately most new spectrum is only likely to be available at high frequencies (2.6 GHz) and this will add new demands for more base stations for a given coverage

Therefore for big carbon reductions governments and regulators may need to consider radical new ways of regulating the mobile radio market.

The shopping list for consideration might include (1) moving away from “engineering” new market entry and even allowing a greater degree of market consolidation (2) ensuring national mobile operators have enough spectrum below 1 GHz so they can provide the widest coverage with lowest carbon emission – (as well as being able to intelligently switch on capacity in urban areas using higher frequency spectrum) and significantly relaxing regulatory constraints on infrastructure sharing.

The area of infrastructure sharing is where there is scope to be radical for example mandating inter-system roaming between competing operators within countries to permit each operator to gracefully allow more holes in their coverage where they have little demand without damaging a mobile universal service and allowing the market to consolidate down to a single “thin” national GSM network from the point in time when the 4^th generation mobile networks are being rolled out.

Less radical would be to allow a single shared broadband rural (last 10% of the population) mobile network and why not a single “night mode” broadband and/or GSM network between 00.30 to 06.30? After all, if there are few people using the networks late at night, there seems little point in not allowing the mobile operator competitors to rotate around their networks as “the duty night network”.

Mobiles themselves have come on in leaps and bounds in terms of low energy consumption but the new wizzy phones with big screens, like the i-phone, are taking a much bigger bite of energy. For the individual phone this is still paltry but in a world of 4 billion mobile phones – it all adds up to considerable global energy consumption. This is not something that is sensibly addressed by individual countries but the means needs to be found to guide a global industry to place energy consumption not just of mobile phones but battery chargers higher on the list of priorities – and why not make solar battery chargers VAT free!

Some of these proposals might seem radical and even controversial but the world will blow well off track with its ambitions to reduce carbon emissions if it allows any industry or regulator to escape radical new approaches – and that must include the regulation of an already greenish mobile radio industry.