Empowering Sustainability: Energy Efficient Trends and Innovations in the Telecom Sector

Patrick Moorhead:
Welcome back to the Six Five Summit 2024. It’s been a wonderful summit. I hope you’ve all been enjoying it. The headliner here, we’re talking all about AI. And it’s not just the increased implementation of AI into the infrastructure, but also the real benefits that consumers and also businesses can internalize and experience, because that does make everything go around.

Now, one of the important topics though, about AI, and quite frankly, all of technology, has been around the sustainability of that and the desire to use less energy to do more things. I know it’s easier said than done. This is also very key on the network side, the network that connects our cell phones, our tablets, our PCs, the networks that connects other networks together. And I can’t think of a better person to dive in this than Ciricia with Ericsson. Great to see you again.

Ciricia Proulx:
Great to see you, Pat, again. Yeah, welcome back to New York.

Patrick Moorhead:
We are back in New York in the big city. I love it here and I love talking sustainability with you. And I want to dive right in here. Last year, you and I discussed this, a new way of looking at sustainability. And I would say from going from a feel-good, okay, which we can still feel good, but the conversation has shifted slightly. Can you talk us through that?

Ciricia Proulx:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, on a personal level, yeah, I’ll wave a green flag any day of the week. But it’s a business, and this is about business. And as you were talking about the larger technology, there’s always been a trade-off between computing, and processing, and networks, and power. But to set context right now, our tier ones in the US, they use about 35,000 gigawatt hours per year.

Patrick Moorhead:
I mean, that sounds like a lot.

Ciricia Proulx:
It’s huge. It’s about 3.3 million households, think Chicago or somewhere between the City of Chicago and LA. This is absolutely-

Patrick Moorhead:
That’s enormous.

Ciricia Proulx:
Massive. Right. So if you can pull back on that, it’s a huge cost saving. It changes your business. And the good news, for all the bad news of how much power that is, the good news is that there’ve been massive gains. Our tier ones, their emissions have gone down 30%, their powers increased 6%, but that’s with 100% data increase. So we’ve shifted the curve, effectively.

Patrick Moorhead:
Right. Well, and that is important and just the amount of different steps that it takes to do this. And actually, I’ll ask you, what are some of the core elements, some of the variables that go into a strategy, a sustainability strategy that can help communication service providers out there?

Ciricia Proulx:
Right. So I mean, that’s kind of like three different areas. One is taking a more holistic approach, where you’re really balancing CapEx and OpEx performance and your sustainability costs. I mean, that’s key. Number two is modernizing it, modernizing your sites. There’s a massive impact you can have with modernization, especially with heavy duty traffic that we’re seeing more and more. With our new massive MIMO portfolios, you can get 12x the capacity at 15% less power, so that’s huge as well.

And then, of course, wait for it, big shock, operate intelligently, right? Start deploying AI, and then you change network management from reactive to predictive, and that really changes the scenario in terms of your sustainability, which means it changes your costs. Ultimately, we’re talking about energy, its cost. And energy now, at some CSPs, it’s 5% of revenue and it’s growing faster than sales.

Patrick Moorhead:
Yeah. I mean, I remember when we first talked about 5G, it was more than just a speed play, it was a density play. And what you just outlined is density also sounds like it’s more sustainable. Am I looking at that correctly?

Ciricia Proulx:
Well, I mean, it depends. Because you can look at things differently for different kinds of sites. If you’re more dense, you would deploy a different kind of solution, something that’s going to really learn from the traffic and use the traffic to train itself and change the vector of how it uses energy. If you’re looking at a less dense area, maybe you’re going to use a power solution. And low power sites, we can save as much as, with our software solutions, as much as 97% on power. So really, it’s not one size fits all, but there’s a lot of solutions you can use across. Yeah.

Patrick Moorhead:
I heard you say AI. And this year, Six Five Summit is about AI, not only the increased build out on the infrastructure side, but also people getting real benefits. I’m curious, what are your thoughts about AI? How is it part of your strategy to help the CSPs who can then help those businesses and consumers?

Ciricia Proulx:
I mean, AI is going to have a massive impact on networks. It’s out there everywhere. It’s on devices, it’s in the cloud, it’s at the edge. And of course, the network runs amongst all of us, right?

Patrick Moorhead:
Well, and some solutions are pervasive. It’s literally always on the network.

Ciricia Proulx:
Exactly, exactly. So I mean, ultimately, the way I would think we need to think about it is we have to use AI to enable AI. We have to use AI to heal AI, because AI is so intensive in terms of demands for power and network capacity. So we’ve got some real-world solutions today. We use AI to identify, diagnose, and remediate network issues. So huge savings there.

We use it in our service continuity app. And what that does is we really predict what the network components can be closed by using the traffic. By modeling and using that traffic modeling, we can predict where we can rebalance resources, and that results in huge savings. We’ve had real-world customers, they’re getting 25% savings on the RAN energy consumption, which is massive. So there’s AI fixing AI without the massive overconsumption.

Where I think it gets really exciting is when we move into what we’re talking about as intent-based networks. And exactly what it sounds like, it’s your intention. You set goals and it dynamically adapts the network in real time to changing demands and conditions. The cool part about it is that it does it with natural language. You can use natural language.

Because we can’t manually operate these networks anymore. We can’t… Even beyond that, it’s so complex and we need to say let’s balance it with the user experience, the performance, and the energy. And being able to do that with natural language really changes the vector of the kinds of management. So this is really where we’re headed to, and we can use those intent-based network solutions to say, “This is what I want to achieve,” and the system will figure out the how. So I want to meet this performance with this power envelope, and the system will drive that and say, “This is how we’re going to do it.”

Patrick Moorhead:
So I like the way you painted the picture of almost like AI is putting strain, and will put more strain on the network and-

Ciricia Proulx:
And opportunity.

Patrick Moorhead:
Yes, there we go. And you’re going to use AI to make that more efficient. For those out there who don’t follow this, it’s classic. If I know what a user is doing and I know how to prioritize that packet, then I might put it on a different track, which could be more efficient. Not everybody needs the fastest performance with the lowest latency. Some people need… And by the way, they only want to pay for lower speed and higher latency. And we’re good with that, like my Kindle used to do.

But for other things, let’s talk… We talk about these 2 trillion endpoints in the IoT and that intelligence on when to connect, when not to connect, and then how to take the packets through the network. This is all the ability to save energy, or could be the result to save energy, increase efficiency.

Ciricia Proulx:
Yes. And again, given the kinds of massive ramp up we’re seeing in energy usage, it’s imperative we do it, because it will make it unaffordable. I mean, ultimately, it comes down to it will be unaffordable. And so implementing these things and implementing them in a way that is intelligent for the device.

Patrick Moorhead:
Right.

Ciricia Proulx:
Right? Because there’s a reason why your device, your phone lasts forever in airplane mode. Right?

Patrick Moorhead:
Exactly. I love that. By the way, I’m going to steal that phrase and give you no credit for it when I use it everywhere.

Ciricia Proulx:
Absolutely.

Patrick Moorhead:
I’m just kidding.

Ciricia Proulx:
I mean, 5G, it implemented various functions and capabilities so that you weren’t constantly pinging for data. But the way we were talking about this morning, if you’re going to have always on stuff, we’re going to have to change how we do that, so that you still deliver a great experience to the end user.

Patrick Moorhead:
Right.

Ciricia Proulx:
Right?

Patrick Moorhead:
I heard you talk about the RAN. I have to ask you about Open RAN and implications to sustainability.

Ciricia Proulx:
Yeah. I mean, a lot of sustainability gains we have had have been through what we’ve developed, which was Ericsson, and it was our system. And quite frankly, from our ASICs solutions, our silicon solutions. And now we’re taking a lot of that, plus the software and the apps, all over to the Open RAN environment. We’re also collaborating across the environment, so Intel, AMD on the CPU side, server sides with HP, and Dell, and so on. And if you look at it, so for example, our collaboration with Intel, the core network takes about 20% of the energy overall. And so, we implemented our dual mode 5G core with them, with our cloud infrastructure running on Intel Xeon solutions. We got 3.2 improvement, three times, triple the improvement in performance, and 40% in energy savings.

Patrick Moorhead:
That’s impressive, particularly because-

Ciricia Proulx:
The Open RAN, we’re implementing. Yeah.

Patrick Moorhead:
Well, it’s impressive, particularly when a lot of people talk about Open RAN as not being efficient. So that is impressive. The combination of kind of a general purpose CPU, you mentioned Xeon, and then your very hardened ASIC, which by the way, all the cool kids are doing in AI these days.

Ciricia Proulx:
I mean, of course. I mean ASICs is going to deliver it. And there’s going to be so many different kinds of silicon that we need to use for these things. Absolutely. So, yes.

Patrick Moorhead:
So great conversation of where we were in the past and what you’re doing now. Talk to us about the future in terms of the way that you’re framing sustainability, the way that you’re looking at this challenge.

Ciricia Proulx:
Yeah, it is holistic. I mean, like we’ve been talking about, it runs across hardware, it runs across software. You have to look at it in terms of trade-offs, of course. I mean, when you were talking about not every trillion devices, or not everything on at once. I mean, to scale up the use of AI across these networks to hundreds of millions of users on something that is considered critical infrastructure, this is not a small thing, but it is moving us forward. And so we’re going to have to focus on really deploying AI in a way that is going to work and isn’t going to over consume. Because we have to have that fine balance.

And again, it’s a business case. It’s not feel good sustainability, it’s a business case. So I mean, we have had fairly obvious multi-billion dollar deals recently that were predicated on also delivering massive OpEx savings due to being far more energy efficient. So it’s guiding multi-billion dollar deals, also, as a huge contributor. So that’s one. The other is to build native, right? 6G is going to be native sustainable effectively and native to AI. Or AI native really, I guess, is what I want to say. So both of those things are going to be critical. And we have to use AI to make AI successful.

Patrick Moorhead:
Now, I appreciate that. And I hope maybe on future conversations we can talk about exactly what you talked about, which was this rapid, this continued build out of 5G, and then what it means going into 6G. Definitely a provocative statement around 6G being native. That was good. I’m going to do the double click on that with my research team. But thanks for coming on the show.

Ciricia Proulx:
Thank you for having me.

Patrick Moorhead:
Absolutely. Second year in a row. Maybe it was the third year. I need to go back and check the notes. But second time definitely here in person. I really appreciate your time and I really love the maturity that you bring to this conversation, which is really a breath of fresh air.

Ciricia Proulx:
It’s about doing the right thing for the business and everything, right? It’s not… There’s no sides.

Patrick Moorhead:
The two can cohabit.

Ciricia Proulx:
They can. Yeah.

Patrick Moorhead:
I believe they can.

Ciricia Proulx:
And cohabiting is the right solution.

Patrick Moorhead:
I agree. I agree. Thank you.

Ciricia Proulx:
Absolutely. Thank you so much.

Patrick Moorhead:
So this is a sustainability talk. We are talking about how to get more efficient networks, talk a little bit about the past, the present, and what Ericsson is doing in the future. Hang in there for more sustainability talk. And hey, the great thing is you can hit all of our days if you sign up, and I recommend that you do that. So this is Patrick Moorhead with more insights and strategy for the Six Five Summit. Take care.