Sustainability

Sustainability in telecom focuses on reducing the energy use, carbon footprint, and environmental impact of networks, which consume significant power — much of it in the radio access network. As traffic grows and operators deploy denser 5G and future networks, energy efficiency has become both an environmental and a financial priority, since power is a major operating cost. Approaches range from more efficient radio hardware and AI-driven energy optimization to renewable power, equipment recycling, and lifecycle management. For operators and enterprises, sustainability increasingly intersects with cost, regulation, and procurement decisions. This channel covers sustainability across networks — energy-efficient RAN, AI-driven power savings, renewable strategies, and circular-economy practices — with analysis of where green initiatives deliver genuine reductions alongside cost savings, and how sustainability is reshaping how networks are built and run.

Deutsche Telekom Switches to Mavenir for 5G Standalone Core

Deutsche Telekom made cloud jump from Ericsson to Mavenir in 5G
Deutsche Telekom's transition from Ericsson to Mavenir as its primary 5G standalone core provider represents a fundamental rethinking of how Tier 1 operators architect and operate networks in the cloud-native era. Mavenir now carries all standalone 5G traffic in Germany, while Ericsson handles legacy 4G and non-standalone 5G. Driven by the Horizontal TelCo Cloud initiative, the shift has already produced measurable results including 65% energy savings in live testing and three commercial network slicing deployments, with Apple FaceTime set to leverage these capabilities at consumer scale via iOS 26.

5G SA in Action: T-Mobile Prague Demos Enterprise-Ready Use Cases

5G SA in Action: T-Mobile Prague Demos Enterprise-Ready Use Cases
T-Mobile Czech Republic's Technology Innovations Day 2026 delivered live operational proof that 5G Standalone architecture is no longer a roadmap item. Running entirely on 5G SA infrastructure at the Magenta Experience Center in Prague, demonstrations spanned autonomous robotics, tele-surgery with military hospitals, AI-powered AR wearables, live field broadcasting, and quantum state transfer over existing fiber. For enterprise decision-makers evaluating private network investments or industrial automation strategies, the event confirmed that 5G SA now meets the reliability, latency, and isolation requirements of mission-critical operations across multiple verticals.

Deutsche Telekom telco cloud cuts 5G core energy by up to 65%

Deutsche Telekom telco cloud cuts 5G core energy by up to 65%
Deutsche Telekom’s early live results showing up to 65% energy savings in its 5G core spotlight a pragmatic path to cut opex and carbon as traffic surges and standalone 5G scales. Operators have wrung out much of the easy efficiency from hardware refreshes; the next gains come from software-driven, demand-aware control. DT is applying that logic to the core, shifting components to run only when needed rather than idling at full power. The results are enabled by DT’s “Horizontal Telco Cloud,” a unified, standards-based platform that replaces fragmented stacks with one common layer for core services. Initial live-network tests have been completed, with broader rollout planned and further detail expected at MWC Barcelona 2026.

KDDI & Nokia: Quantum-Safe Optical Transport for AI DCI

KDDI & Nokia: Quantum-Safe Optical Transport for AI DCI
KDDI and Nokia validated quantum-safe optical transport at KDDI’s new Sakai Data Center, a facility built to support real-time AI training, inference, and analytics. The demonstration used Nokia’s 1830 Photonic Service Switch with C+L band capabilities for capacity scaling and the 1830 Security Management Server for centralized key and policy control. The goal is clear: deliver high-throughput, low-latency, and line-rate encrypted data center interconnect (DCI) that is resilient against both today’s threats and tomorrow’s quantum-era risks. Encrypting at the optical layer removes the performance penalties of application or IP-layer encryption and avoids fragmenting security by workload.

Blackstone backs Neysa with $1.2B for India AI infrastructure

Blackstone backs Neysa with $1.2B for India AI infrastructure
Blackstone will take a majority stake in Neysa through up to $600 million in primary equity, alongside Teachers’ Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Asset, and Nexus Venture Partners; the company also plans up to $600 million in debt to accelerate buildout. The raise is a step change from Neysa’s earlier $50 million and positions the Mumbai-headquartered startup to scale domestic GPU clusters for enterprises, public sector agencies, and AI developers.

India AI data city: Vizag 6GW compute hub

India AI data city: Vizag 6GW compute hub
The plan centers on Visakhapatnam, a port city on India’s east coast, as a tightly coupled zone for data centers, subsea cable landings, power, water, and the digital supply chain. State leadership wants the cluster to be more than rack space. It aims to bring in server assemblers, power and cooling vendors, and specialized logistics to create end-to-end capability. The city is also being pitched as a landing point for new subsea systems toward Singapore, which would diversify India’s international connectivity beyond Chennai and Mumbai and lower latency into Southeast Asia.

Virgin Media O2 & Zinworks Uses AI for Mobile Network Monitoring

Virgin Media O2 Uses AI for Mobile Network Monitoring
Virgin Media O2 has broadened its partnership with Zinkworks to deploy AI-driven monitoring and automation across its mobile footprint, designed to spot anomalies earlier, resolve incidents faster, and prevent customer-impacting outages. The rollout targets multiple network domains and operational workflows, advancing the operator’s move toward autonomous operations with engineers maintaining full oversight. The capabilities span radio access, core network systems, and network operations centers, combining real-time telemetry with intelligent automation. The stack runs on Google Cloud and taps services such as Vertex AI and Gemini to analyze patterns, orchestrate responses, and augment decision-making for operations teams.

Deutsche Telekom Industrial AI Cloud in Munich

Deutsche Telekom Industrial AI Cloud in Munich
Deutsche Telekom and T-Systems have switched on a sovereign, NVIDIA-powered AI factory in Munich’s Tucherpark, positioning Germany as a serious contender in industrial AI infrastructure. The new facility brings nearly 10,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs online, including DGX B200 systems and NVIDIA RTX Pro Server GPUs, delivering up to 0.5 exaFLOPS of AI compute for training, fine-tuning, and large-scale inference. Operated by T-Systems on German soil, the platform targets industry, research, startups, and the public sector with strict controls for data protection, security, and availability. Early customers include Agile Robots, which is combining vision, robotics, and foundation models, and PhysicsX, which applies AI to technical simulation.

NGMN’s 5G Network Simplification Framework

NGMN’s 5G Network Simplification Framework
NGMN’s latest operator-led guidance frames simplification as a precondition for 5G efficiency, sustainability and service agility—not an optional clean-up exercise. NGMN’s new Framework for Network Simplification – An Operator View argues for targeted simplification across radio, core and transport to contain this sprawl while preserving the ability to launch differentiated services. The alliance places cloud‑native design, federated service exposure and AI‑driven operations at the center of that shift, supported by agile ways of working. Simplification is how operators square the circle—cut carbon and cost, while accelerating innovation. The publication offers a practical, non-prescriptive method to decide where simplification delivers the most benefit, and when complexity risk outweighs near-term gains.

NVIDIA and Dassault Systèmes Launch Industrial AI Platform

NVIDIA and Dassault Systèmes Launch Industrial AI Platform
A long-term partnership between NVIDIA and Dassault Systèmes aims to make physics-grounded “world models” and virtual twins a mission-critical system of record for engineering, manufacturing, and the sciences. This collaboration moves beyond today’s project-level twin pilots toward industry-scale models that capture both geometry and behavior, validated against real physics and trusted industrial knowledge. The goal: use virtual environments not just to visualize, but to design, verify, and operate products and factories before steel is cut or code is deployed. The companies outlined a shared architecture spanning design, simulation, and operations.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much energy do telecom networks actually use, and is it a big deal?
It’s significant enough that operators have set Net Zero targets, generally by no later than 2050, and energy is consistently one of the largest operating expenses for network operators, which is also why energy efficiency has become a financial priority, not just an environmental one. Telecom networks consume meaningful amounts of energy across cell towers, data centers, and the increasingly power-hungry equipment supporting AI workloads now running on shared telecom infrastructure, and that energy consumption tends to grow as networks add capacity and traffic continues increasing year over year. The combination of genuine environmental responsibility and the straightforward financial incentive to reduce a major operating expense has made energy efficiency one of the more consistently prioritized sustainability topics across telecom operators globally.
What’s the difference between Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions in telecom sustainability reporting?
Scope 1 and 2 emissions cover direct operations, like fuel burned in company vehicles or backup generators, and purchased electricity used to power network equipment, both of which many European operators have already substantially decarbonized through measures like switching to renewable electricity contracts. Scope 3 covers indirect emissions embedded in purchased equipment, like the manufacturing footprint of network hardware operators buy, and the use-phase of sold products, like the energy customers’ own devices consume while connected to the network, and that’s now the harder, bigger focus for the industry, since Scope 3 emissions are generally much larger in total but considerably more difficult for an operator to directly control.
How are operators actually cutting network energy use day to day?
Techniques include AI-driven sleep mode for radios during low-traffic periods, with some sites reporting power savings of up to 70 percent overnight by allowing radio equipment to enter an ultra-low energy hibernation state when traffic genuinely doesn’t require full capacity, power-efficiency heatmaps that help operators identify which specific sites offer the biggest potential efficiency gains, and newer radio hardware that draws substantially less power, in some cases 40 to 90 percent less, than older equipment while delivering equal or better performance. Operators are also increasingly focused on reducing kilowatt-hours consumed per gigabyte of data carried as a key efficiency metric, since this measure captures genuine efficiency improvement even as overall traffic and energy consumption continue growing in absolute terms.
Is reduced sustainability transparency a concern in telecom right now?
Yes. Some companies are quietly reducing public sustainability commitments and disclosure, sometimes called greenhushing, due to political sensitivity around ESG terminology in certain markets, even while continuing the underlying efficiency work behind the scenes. This creates a real disconnect where meaningful sustainability progress may continue happening operationally, but public communication about it becomes more cautious, making it genuinely harder for outside observers to accurately track real progress through public statements alone. Some major cloud and technology companies have specifically removed previously published net-zero targets from public-facing materials despite reportedly continuing to work toward those underlying goals internally, illustrating how political considerations are increasingly shaping how openly companies discuss sustainability work.
Are regulations forcing telecom sustainability progress, or is it voluntary?
Increasingly mandatory rather than purely voluntary. The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive now factors directly into vendor procurement scoring, meaning companies like Vodafone and Telefonica have begun scoring equipment bids partly based on documented life-cycle emissions data, creating a genuine commercial consequence for vendors lacking verified sustainability data. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has set its own emissions ceiling for the telecom sector, prompting concrete responses like China Mobile equipping over a million base stations with AI-driven energy management software within a single year. This regulatory pressure is pushing the industry toward verified, auditable emissions data rather than loosely defined, voluntary self-reporting.
How is AI specifically affecting telecom’s energy consumption and sustainability efforts?
AI workloads, particularly the more computationally intensive training and inference tasks increasingly run on shared telecom infrastructure, represent a genuinely significant new source of energy demand that’s complicating the industry’s broader sustainability efforts even as operators simultaneously work to improve overall network energy efficiency. This creates a somewhat paradoxical dynamic: AI itself is one of the key tools operators use to improve network energy efficiency, through things like AI-driven radio sleep modes, while also being a meaningful new driver of additional energy consumption through the data center and edge computing infrastructure needed to run AI models at scale. Sustainability planning increasingly needs to treat AI as both a genuine efficiency tool and a real additional energy demand driver.
What role does renewable energy actually play in powering telecom network infrastructure?
Renewable energy plays a meaningful and growing role in powering telecom infrastructure, though the specific approach varies considerably depending on location and facility type. Cell towers and network sites in some regions are increasingly powered by on-site solar and battery systems, particularly in remote locations without reliable grid access, where renewable power can also reduce the need for diesel generator backup. For larger facilities like data centers, operators increasingly purchase renewable electricity through power purchase agreements, effectively ensuring the electricity drawn from the broader grid is matched by an equivalent amount of renewable generation. Neutral host tower companies are also increasingly retrofitting sites with solar and battery systems, reducing tenants’ operating costs and supporting broader sustainability goals.
What happens to old, decommissioned network equipment from a sustainability perspective?
Decommissioned network equipment, when replaced by newer generations of hardware, raises genuine electronic waste and circular economy considerations that telecom sustainability efforts increasingly address directly. Some equipment vendors have made specific public commitments around recovering and recycling materials from decommissioned base station hardware, with some reporting recovery rates above 90 percent of decommissioned equipment mass through structured recycling and refurbishment programs. Compliance with international standards like ISO 14001 for environmental management has become an increasingly common requirement, particularly for European tenders, pushing equipment vendors and operators alike toward more structured, documented approaches to handling decommissioned hardware responsibly.
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