CommScope looks to incrementally green the cellsite

A lot of green wireless initiatives have emerged in recent years targeted at cutting down the carbon footprint of mobile networks. Every vendor has a new low-power base station that drastically reduces the wattage of the old macro power suckers on which the industry built its network. New small footprint designs and remote radio cut down on cooling costs and power loss between amplifiers and antenna. Alternative energy technologies are emerging to replace power grid and diesel generator sources, ranging from solar to geothermal and even biofuels.

The problem: To access these new green technologies, carriers have to deploy new networks or make expensive—and often logistically impossible—upgrades to their base station sites. The cost of turning a cell site solar is not only many more times expensive than deploying a non-energy-optimized cell, but you can’t fit the required solar panels onto the typical cell sites limited real estate. Consequently, any operator wanting to take advantage of the newest advancements in green technology either has to wait until their next-generation network deployment, in the case of new low-power infrastructure, and limit their deployment of alternative power to a few sites where the financial and logistical circumstances merit.

So what of the million of cell sites already deployed, consuming electricity and spitting CO2 into the atmosphere either directly or indirectly? CommScope has started developing a portfolio technologies it hopes can make a dent in the energy footprint of the common cell site—even if individually they can’t deliver the wallop of new base station designs or alternate energy sources.

· Hydrogen fuel cells that can be used as a backup power source, replacing diesel generators. Fuel Cells only emit heat and water as waste products, reducing CO2 emissions when the primary grid power source is down. Also, because hydrogen by volume is much more efficient than diesel and a fuel cell has far fewer mechanical parts than a generator, operators can reduce truck rolls to refuel and maintain the cell.

· Remote monitoring and operations platforms that allow carriers to control their cell sites remotely. Such platforms can be used to adjust cabinet temperatures, adjust antenna tilts, perform basic automated repairs and even take a peek at the site through cameras to detect false alarms if the sites’ security system goes off. All of these operations would normally require a technician to show up in a utility truck.

· More efficient power amplifiers that server multiple carriers rather than a single carrier. As operators add capacity and turn on more 2G and 3G they tend to deploy new amps for each carrier. By replacing a single-carrier amp with a multi-carrier amp, carriers can reduce the power load of the combined system by 20% to 30%, according to CommScope.

· Replacing air-conditioning units with free-air filter cooling. Relying on fans to circulate air through a shelter rather than an AC unit to lower internal temperatures, operators can reduce power consumption from cooling by as much as 25%, according to CommScope.

None of these solutions may be as sexy as solar-powered cell site and individually they only account for moderate power savings and greenhouse reductions. The most significant impact is produced by shelter cooling, which could reduce CO2 emissions by 1365 kg annually, about 11% of the more than 12,000 kg produced by the typical 2 kW cell site. But taken together they can have a sizable impact on an operators green footprint, said Lindsay Allen, director of wireless solutions marketing at CommScope. Most importantly, Allen said, they’re all incremental upgrades that can be implemented across a carrier’s entire footprint without changing the fundamental design or power source of the network or necessitate a replacement of the base stations.

In total, those four technologies combined could lower the CO2 emissions of a site by about 25%, removing about 3000 kg of greenhouse emission from each site annually, which becomes a sizable amount when factored over thousands of sites. CommScope further estimates those techniques could cut an operators power bill per site by 24%.