Green Telecom Part XII: NSN aims high on green effort

Just as importantly, the NSN equipment can run at 40 degrees Celsius or 104 degrees Fahrenheit, so it requires much less air conditioning, which is a major contributor to energy consumption and CO2 emissions in the telecom equipment world. At night time, the unit is trained to go into sleep mode when traffic tails off, to consume less energy, but will “wake up” should traffic spike, as in the case of an emergency.

“Most systems can run at 20 degrees [Celsius, 68 degrees Fahrenheit],” Larilahti said. “There are very few countries where you would need air conditioning to run the Flexi Base Station.”

Because of its low energy consumption, it is possible to explore alternative energy devices for the Flexi Base Station, which helps NSN fulfill its second goal of helping other businesses become more efficient in energy usage.

“You don’t need as big a solar panel when you don’t need as much energy,” Larilahti said. “Interest in this is picking up in places like Africa, India and China, where telecom is being deployed more quickly than electricity. The building sites are far from the grid and need to run autonomously. Traditionally, they have been using diesel generators – two per site. Not only are they not very environmentally friendly to have machines running there nonstop, but it’s not very opex-friendly either.”

Zain, a Pan-African operator, was burning 350 liters of fuel every minute in Nigeria, and spending heavily to refuel the generators, which often were the targets of theft. “We have base station sites in India where the roads disappear twice a year during the monsoons,” Larilahti said.

NSN’s solution uses a hybrid solar-wind approach, she said, customized for the operators. “Every site is different and complicated,” she said. Wind in particular is tricky because it varies even within very short distances.

NSN also points to its selection by China Mobile, the official telecom provider for the Olympics, as a base station supplier, given that the Chinese wanted to make the networks it built for the Olympics as environmentally friendly as possible.

“China Mobile has everyone’s gear in their network, so they knew what they were doing when they chose us,” Larilahti said.

On the third leg of the initiative, maximizing what telecom technology can do, NSN is involved on a number of fronts.