Category: Product News

Going green: energy efficiency in telecoms

Join our energy efficiency project to get invaluable insights to support your energy efficiency strategy and help drive your energy costs down

Join our 2022 project

Sustained cost pressures and commitments to net zero in support of the 2015 Paris Agreement have made energy efficiency a strategic priority for many telecoms operators around the world, as the telecoms industry currently accounts for 2-3% of global energy consumption.

This is a long-term story. As mobile data traffic continues to grow dramatically with the rise of LTE smartphones and the expansion of 5G, energy consumption is consequently increasing. To date, energy represents between 15 and 40% of operators’ OPEX, and this is forecast to increase in the coming years.

It comes as no surprise that 92% of the operators we surveyed in 2021 see sustainability and energy efficiency as very or extremely important to their network transformation strategy:

To help provide an evidence base for measuring the industry’s progress in reducing network energy emissions, GSMA and GSMA Intelligence partnered with a group of seven operators to develop an Energy Efficiency Benchmarking tool, and a detailed report.

Get involved

We will launch the next edition of our Energy Efficiency Benchmarking project in January 2022, and you have the opportunity to get involved!

Insights from our project and research will uncover:

  • Energy efficiency ratios
  • Fuel sources (renewables, diesel, traditional grid)
  • Distribution of electricity consumption (RAN/core/datacentres)

Why join?

  • Our data and report will support your energy strategy and help drive your energy costs down
  • This will provide you with an industry benchmark
  • You will benefit from the industry visibility linked to the promotion of the report and insights

What do you have to do?

Attend monthly meetings with our GSMA Intelligence analysts. The data collected from these meetings will be fully anonymous and will provide a basis to build a detailed report.

Fill the form below to get in touch!

This opportunity has now ended, contact [email protected] with any questions!

Radar report: Green networks: the energy efficiency imperative

November 2021 Radar

GSMA Intelligence and Mobile World Live partnered to bring a new Radar series to the industry, focusing on the impact of new technologies in the mobile and wider TMT sectors. The series includes a full in-depth report and live events, to offer our partners the opportunity to position themselves as thought-leaders.

The November edition will focus on the telecoms industry imperative to reduce energy emissions
The telecoms industry accounts for 2-3% of total global energy consumption; its own path to net zero will play a significant role in helping nations do the same at a country, and ultimately global, level. There is also a financial rationale. Energy takes up 20-40% of opex and as data traffic rises in the 5G era, costs will increase further short of interventions and large-scale shift to renewables.

Numerous telcos have already announced energy efficiency programmes and publicly reported-on targets to become carbon neutral. Various measures and innovations in network equipment from vendors are fast emerging to aid this transition by optimising RAN performance, such as smarter cooling systems, AI-driven sleep states, and lithium ion batteries.

With this context, we will explore several key questions:

  • How has the strategic and economic logic to become more energy efficient changed for operators?
  • How can today’s networks be upgraded to become more energy efficient?
  • How are new innovations allowing tomorrow’s networks to be the most efficient ever?
  • What is the importance and role of “data pipelines” and real-time analytics for optimising networks’ energy consumption?
  • Which mobile and digital technologies have the most viability to spur decarbonisation for other industries at scale
    over the next 10 years to 2030?
  • What are the delivery and implementation models for telcos, vendors, and other suppliers to vertical sector partners?
  • What are the key barriers still to overcome and what immediate steps can the industry take?

Answering these questions (and more), GSMA Intelligence will deliver a comprehensive assessment and body of insights.

Sponsorship opportunities

In partnership with our sponsors, GSMA Intelligence and Mobile World Live will produce and promote an in-depth report in conjunction with a series of live events, allowing 3 sponsors to benefit from the combined strength of the GSMA’s media and research arms, receiving global exposure to and engagement with business decision makers from across the mobile ecosystem:

Interested in partnering with us? Fill the form below to contact our team!

This opportunity has now ended, thank you for your interest! You can contact info@gsmaintelligence if you are interested in our next Radar edition!

New Radar report: Mobile roaming in a post-Covid world

New Radar series

GSMA Intelligence and Mobile World Live partnered to bring a new Radar series to the industry, focusing on the impact of new technologies in the mobile and wider TMT sectors. The series includes a full in-depth report and live events, to offer our partners the opportunity to position themselves as thought-leaders.

Our September edition will focus on the changing business models and marketplace for mobile roaming.
Roaming revenues were down 10-20% in 2020 as global travel volumes declined due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but indicators suggest a gradual recovery in 2021. This, coupled with underlying technology shifts such as 2G/3G network sunsets and the growth of eSIM, explains why setting up global connectivity agreements is a priority for many businesses now more than ever.

With this context, our Radar report will explore several key questions: 

  • What does a staggered relaxation of international travel rules in 2021/2022 mean for the roaming outlook in different regions?
  • How can operators best set up and manage roaming agreements given the sunsetting of 2G and 3G networks with the parallel rise in LTE and 5G in the customer base?
  • If the model is moving towards a consolidated scale play (so-called ‘hubbing’), does this imply a 5G first mover advantage?
  • What are the trade-offs involved in eSIM use and how can telco operators make best use of it for roaming services?
  • How can roaming models manage IoT connection footprints across multiple countries?

Sponsorship opportunities

In partnership with our sponsor, GSMA Intelligence and Mobile World Live will produce and promote an in-depth report and a series of live events.  An exclusive opportunity for a sponsor to benefit from the combined strength of the GSMA’s media and research arms to reach global senior audiences:

Interested in partnering with us? Contact our team via the form below!

This opportunity has now ended, thank you for your interest! You can contact info@gsmaintelligence if you are interested in our next Radar edition!

New Radar report: Mobile roaming in a post-Covid world

New Radar series

GSMA Intelligence and Mobile World Live partnered to bring a new Radar series to the industry, focusing on the impact of new technologies in the mobile and wider TMT sectors. The series includes a full in-depth report and live events, to offer our partners the opportunity to position themselves as thought-leaders.

Our September edition will focus on the changing business models and marketplace for mobile roaming.
Roaming revenues were down 10-20% in 2020 as global travel volumes declined due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but indicators suggest a gradual recovery in 2021. This, coupled with underlying technology shifts such as 2G/3G network sunsets and the growth of eSIM, explains why setting up global connectivity agreements is a priority for many businesses now more than ever.

With this context, our Radar report will explore several key questions: 

  • What does a staggered relaxation of international travel rules in 2021/2022 mean for the roaming outlook in different regions?
  • How can operators best set up and manage roaming agreements given the sunsetting of 2G and 3G networks with the parallel rise in LTE and 5G in the customer base?
  • If the model is moving towards a consolidated scale play (so-called ‘hubbing’), does this imply a 5G first mover advantage?
  • What are the trade-offs involved in eSIM use and how can telco operators make best use of it for roaming services?
  • How can roaming models manage IoT connection footprints across multiple countries?

Sponsorship opportunities

In partnership with our sponsor, GSMA Intelligence and Mobile World Live will produce and promote an in-depth report and a series of live events.  An exclusive opportunity for a sponsor to benefit from the combined strength of the GSMA’s media and research arms to reach global senior audiences:

Interested in partnering with us? Contact our team via the form below!

This opportunity has now ended, thank you for your interest! You can contact info@gsmaintelligence if you are interested in our next Radar edition!

State of the IoT market: Survey Dashboard

State of the IoT market:

Discover our Survey Dashboard

In 2020, GSMA Intelligence launched a survey to 2,800 enterprises, across 18 markets and 8 verticals, to measure their IoT deployments and future adoption plans, their technology and partnership requirements, their challenges to deploying new IoT solutions, and their measures of success.

Following from an in-depth analysis of our survey results, we developed an interactive dashboard, allowing users to easily navigate our granular survey data, broken down by country and vertical.

In this short video demo, Sylwia Kechiche, Principal Analyst for GSMA Intelligence, walks you through some of the interesting findings and data snippets you can uncover from our survey dashboard, from the impact of Covid-19 on IoT deployments plans, to the status of already deployed IoT devices:

Click here for the full “State of the IoT market” survey dashboard

Any question or feedback? Contact Us!

Spectrum Navigator: a new tool to inform your spectrum decisions

Spectrum insights are more important than ever:

Spectrum is the lifeblood of mobile services. Getting detailed, comprehensive and timely insights on spectrum developments is critical to:

  • Keep abreast of the latest trends shaping the future of network launches and network technology
  • Inform your mobile network and device product development
  • Size your market opportunity and gain a competitive edge

Why is this important now?

With 5G gathering momentum, the spectrum landscape is more dynamic than ever before.

The ecosystem must contend with:

  • New spectrum allocation and deployment models
  • New enterprise competition for spectrum resources
  • New demand on existing 2G and 3G resources

Understanding these dynamics is key to driving any successful business in the telecoms space.

Our new Spectrum Navigator tool 

At GSMA Intelligence, our team tracks operators’ spectrum assignments, license duration and obligations on an ongoing basis. Our spectrum data covers 200 countries and 1120 operators worldwide, from 1980 to today.

Our new Spectrum Navigator tool provides users with endless possibilities to interact with our spectrum data. This dashboard allows users to search for spectrum assigned by frequency band, per region, country and operator, and includes a dedicated section on current and future auctioning plans.

Visit our Spectrum Navigator page to find out more and book your demo!

IoT connections update: impact of Covid-19 on our forecast

In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, GSMA Intelligence has updated its forecast dataset, outlining the impact of the crisis on IoT connections growth, for the 2010-2021 period.

A few key findings:

GSMA Intelligence forecasts that total IoT connections will double between 2019 and 2025, reaching 24 billion, a slower rate growth compared to our December 2019 forecast, due to the contractions in IoT projects demand and funding.

But the crisis stressed a renewed dependency on digital tools, highlighting the greater need for automation to support business continuity. For operators, this trend resulted in an increased interest from enterprises customers for cloud and data analytics solutions.

Across consumer IoT, we expect connected vehicles to be the most impacted segment, with a forecasted growth of less than 2% in 2020, whilst smart city projects are put on hold and retail remains forever changed.

The hopeful side highlights that enterprises already embarked in their digital transformation journeys are coping much better, and, according to our 2019 IoT survey, 65% of these companies deployed IoT as part of their digitisation agendas.

Overall, these projects might be suffering delays in the short term, but we foresee that the crisis will accelerate the move to digital and companies adopting IoT, AI/ML and 5G to drive digital transformation in the longer term, as we settle into the new normal.

Click here to read our executive summary on the shape of the market.

Fill the form below to enquire for our full report and updated forecasts:










Latest Consumer Insights Survey: Mapping Mobile Internet Use

For developing and developed markets

The annual GSMA Intelligence Consumer Insights Survey measures how changing consumer behaviour and usage trends will shape the mobile industry of the future. The survey captures country-level nuance in four mobile internet use case categories: communications, entertainment, digital finance and information services.

Our developing market survey looks into 15 markets. Report and Excel can be accessed here.

Our developed market survey looks into 21 markets. Report and Excel can be accessed here.

Latest IoT Enterprise Survey Results Launched

GSMA Intelligence conducted an IoT Enterprise survey at the end of 2018, collecting insights from over 2,000 enterprises across 14 markets. The survey looked at companies of 20+ employees, in order to capture perspectives from both small and large enterprise.

The first survey results were featured in Mobile World Live’s Show Daily at MWC19 Barcelona. The infographic can be downloaded here. GSMA subscribers also have exclusive access to an in-depth analysis ‘IoT in business? The enterprise voice on the adoption choice’.

An interactive demo of a range of survey results is also publicly available on Tableau and was demoed at the 8th Mobile IoT Summit in Barcelona. Please email us for more information.

2018 Consumer Survey Results Launched

The 2018 Global Consumer Survey has built on previous surveys to uncover and validate changes in consumer behaviour patterns, with a particular focus on mobile ownership, usage and engagement.

The Survey supports the creation of proprietary industry indicators by the GSMA and the production of a wide range of reports across several GSMA departments/programmes, including the annual Mobile Gender Gap and the Mobile Economy report. 

The survey fieldwork took place between July and October 2018 across 34 countries worldwide, representing around 75% of the global population. The sample size included 1,000 respondents per country, with the exception of China and India where the sample size was 2000. Of the 34 countries, the 18 developing countries were surveyed face to-face while the 16 developed countries were surveyed online. To ensure a nationally representative distribution of interview subjects quotas set included age, gender, urban vs rural, region/ state, and socio-economic classifications.

Publications featuring the consumer survey results:

  • The Mobile Economy China 2019
  • The mobile gender gap report 2019
  •  eSIM: the road ahead
  • The Mobile Economy 2019
  • Chatterbox: the changing face of smart speakers (Spotlight)
  • Infographic: What will 5G deliver?
  • Infographic: All eyes on mobile content 
  • Infographic: The rise of smart home 
  • Future of Devices: smartphones, AI, immersion and beyond (Deep Dive)
  • Global 5G Landscape (Q4 2018)