The next generation of operator sustainability: greener edge and open RAN

How will rising enterprise data traffic and workloads affect overall energy usage and efficiency? How should we think about the differences between processing data at the edge versus the cloud? And what can operators, vendors and others in the infrastructure value chain do to mitigate energy consumption? To answer these questions, GSMA Intelligence surveyed 100 operators and developed a model to simulate the impact of changing enterprise traffic flows across a range of industries.

Factoring in backhaul-related energy and the energy associated with datacentre cooling and running high compute workloads, there is a potential energy-saving impact by retaining more data at the edge versus the cloud. In this report with Dell and Intel, GSMA Intelligence explains how this energy ‘dividend’ – by making more use of efficient processing at the edge – is important for operators and enterprise IT partners.

Sustainability efforts are also heavily targeting the RAN. Within this arena, the issue of virtualisation is an important consideration when it comes to energy. This research therefore also assesses the attraction of vRAN and open RAN, to offer a rounded view of the next generation of operator sustainability.