The data center industry might consume a significant amount of electricity, but telecom operator networks actually consume more power globally. As the effects of climate change continue to surface, semiconductor giant Intel claims to have taken on that issue of reducing telecom network power usage.

"It's definitely a problem statement that we're focused on helping our customers solve, whether we're talking about the fixed[-wireless access] (FWA) mobile network or legacy networks," Jeni Panhorst, VP and GM of network and edge compute at Intel, told SDxCentral.

While the globe's data center footprint is responsible for 0.9% to 1.3% of annual energy use, the telecom industry consumes between 2% and 3% of annual electricity demand. Considering the lip service given to data center sustainability, that reality was "something that, honestly, I was a bit surprised to learn – and I think most people are surprised to learn," Panhorst said.

It's true that advances inherent to 5G network technologies offer "significant opportunity for improved energy efficiency overall," but the reality is that legacy network infrastructure still exists in operation, and that energy consumption "has to be contended with as well," she noted. "When we talk to operators, they're focused on improving both the legacy network energy efficiency as well as the forward-looking deployments of 5G."

To that point, Intel touts its Infrastructure Power Manager, which launched at this year's MWC Barcelona 2023 event, as a tool integral in measuring, tracking and managing telco networks' power use. Traditionally, network systems utilize power in a consistent manner regardless of traffic patterns. "This does not make sense," Pallavi Mahajan, corporate VP and GM of Network and Edge at Intel, told SDxCentral. "What is the point of burning the same amount of power even in the middle of night?"

The energy manager tool boasts innovations on multiple fronts, Mahajan noted, starting with silicon that ensures "fine-grained telemetry is getting exported. Then we have software on top of it, which brings in this telemetry and derives meaningful insights. Then using artificial intelligence (AI), we look into patterns of the traffic" without needing to compromise on service quality. The tool also uses data traffic patterns to match real-time traffic with CPU utilization to put code "to sleep" if needed, she added.

Panhorst explained Intel's power manager is being applied today in 5G core user planes with plans to expand to 5G core control planes. The vendor is also applying that same power savings approach to the radio access network (RAN), which tends to be one of the more power-hungry mobile network components, "depending upon their their share of fixed versus mobile. It's a huge focus area for them to improve the RAN power consumption. The processor is a significant portion of that, but they're looking at overall ways to improve system level and infrastructure level power consumption," Panhorst said.

Inching toward decarbonization

Regardless of how efficiently 5G network technologies can use energy, the full environmental impact of telecom networks rests on the cleanliness of the electricity grids that supply that energy.

Intel claims to have "learned a lot" during its past decade of introducing virtualization and software-defined technologies to reduce network power consumption, and it hopes to spread that knowledge more broadly across the global economy. "We're applying a lot of those same technology learnings now to other industries, and energy is a really important industry to apply this to," Panhorst noted.

"When you look at new distributed energy models, incorporation of renewables, the need for two-way energy supplies, basically the entirety of the energy infrastructure needs to transform," she argued. "Whether you're talking about generation, transmission, storage [or] distribution, everything needs to transform." To that point, Intel said it partners directly with the energy industry and other ecosystem players to implement "forms of digital control and monitoring" that will equip "the grid itself with not just intelligent but also 5G-enabled connectivity capabilities" and "provide much more intelligence to deliver what's needed for next-generation infrastructure," she said.

Panhorst urged decarbonization across the board, noting specifically that a transformation of the energy industry will impact carbon emissions in all sectors. "Every industry consumes power and needs to make strides in this area," she said.