Empowering Sustainability: Energy Efficient Trends and Innovations in the Telecom Sector | The Six Five Summit

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, it's, 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, and experience. 'cause 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 easier said than done. And this is also very key on the network side, the network that connects our cell phones, our tablets, our PCs, the network, the networks that connects other networks together. And I can't think of a better person to dive in this than Sarissa with Erickson.

Great to see you again. Great to see you, pat again. Yeah, welcome back to New York.

We are back in New York, in the big city. Uh, I love it here and I love talking sustainability, uh, with you. And I want to dive, uh, right in here.

Last year, uh, you and I discussed this kind of 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, uh, uh, slightly c can you talk us through that?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, um, on, on a personal level, yeah, I'll, I'll wave a green flag any day of the week. Uh, but it's a business, and this is about business.

And as you were talking about the larger technology, you know, there's always been a trade off between computing and processing and networks and power, right? But to set context right now, our tier ones in the us, they use about 35,000 gigawatt hours per Year. I mean, that sound, that sounds like a lot.

It, it, it's huge. It's about right. 3 million households, think Chicago or somewhere between the city of Chicago and la.

This is absolutely, that's enormous massive, right? So if you can pull back on that, uh, it's a huge cost saving. It's, it's, it's, it's changes your business.

And, you know, the good news for all the bad news of how much power that is, the good news is that, you know, there have been massive gains. Our tier ones, their emissions have gone down 30%, their powers increased 6%, but that's with a hundred percent data increase. So we've shifted the curve effectively, right?

Yeah. Right. Well, and that is important and just, just the amount of different steps that it takes, uh, to do this.

And actually I'll ask you, what are some of the core elements, some of the variables that go into, uh, a strategy, right? A sustainability strategy, uh, that can help communication service providers out there? Right?

So I mean, that's kind of like three different areas. One is taking a more holistic approach, um, where you're really balancing CapEx and opex, um, performance and your sustainability costs. I mean, that's key.

Number two is modernizing it. Um, modernizing your sites. Um, you know, there's a massive impact you can have with modernization, especially with heavy duty traffic that we're seeing more and more, you know, with our new massive Pneumo portfolios, you can get 12 x 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. Um, you know, ultimately we're talking about energy.

It's cost. Yeah. And energy.

Now at some CSPs it's 5% of revenue and it's growing faster than sales. Yeah. You know, I mean, I remember when we first talked about, uh, 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. Yeah.

Am I looking at that correctly? Well, I mean, you know, it depends because you can look at things differently for different kinds of sites. If you're more dense, um, you know, you would deploy a different kind of solution.

Something that's going to really, um, 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, you know, with our software solutions as much as 97% on power.

So it really, you know, it's not one size fits all, but there's a lot of solutions you can use across. Yeah. I I heard you say AI and, and this year six five summit is about ai, uh, not only the increased build out on the infrastructure side, but also people getting real benefits.

I'm curious, what, what are your thoughts about ai? How is it part of, of your strategy to help the CSPs who that can then help those businesses and consumers? So, I mean, AI is gonna 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?

Well, when some solutions are pervasive, it's literally always on the network. Exactly. Exactly.

So, I mean, ultimately the way I'm, 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. 'cause AI is so intensive in terms of demands for power and network capacity.

So, you know, we've got some real world solutions today. Um, we use AI to identify, diagnose and, you know, remediate network issues, right? So huge savings there.

Um, we use it in our service continuity, uh, app. And what that does is we really predict what the network components can be closed by using the, the, the traffic by modeling and using that traffic modeling we can predict where we can, you know, 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, right? Right. So there's AI fixing AI without the massive over consumption.

Where I think it gets really exciting is when we move into, um, you know, what we're talking about as intent based networks and Right. Kind of 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.

'cause 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. Right?

And the system will figure out the how. Right? So I want to meet this performance with this power envelope and the system will drive that and say, this is how we're gonna do it.

So I like the way you painted the picture of almost like, you know, AI is, is putting strain and we'll put more strain on the network and, And opportunity. Yes. There we go.

And, and you're gonna use AI to make that more efficient. Yes. And you know, for those out there who, who don't follow this, it's classic if, if I know what a user is doing and I know how to prioritize that packet mm-Hmm.

Um, 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, uh, lower speed and higher latency and we're good with that.

Yeah. Like, you know, my Kindle used to do. Yeah.

And, but, but for other things, you know, let's talk, talk, uh, you know, we talk about these 2 trillion endpoints, right? In the iot and, uh, that intelligence on when to connect, when not to connect, and then how to take the packets through the network. Uh, this is all the ability to save energy.

Yes. Or, or can, could be the result to save energy. Yes.

Increase efficiency. And again, given the kinds of massive ramp up we're seeing in energy usage, um, you know, it's, it's imperative we do it right? 'cause it will make it unaffordable.

Yeah. Right? I mean ultimately it comes down to is is it will be unaffordable.

Um, and so, you know, implementing these things and implementing them in a way that is intelligent for the device, right? Right. Because there's a reason why your device, your phone lasts forever in airplane mode.

Right. Exactly. I love that.

By the way, I'm gonna, I'm gonna steal that phrase and give you no credit for it when I use it everywhere. Absolutely. I'm just kidding.

I mean 5G and our, it implemented various, uh, functions and capabilities so that you weren't constantly ping for data. But you know, the way we were talking about this morning, if you're gonna have always on stuff, we're gonna have to change how we, how we do that so that you still deliver a great experience to the end user. Right.

Right. Um, I heard you talk about the ran mm-Hmm. I have to ask you Mm-Hmm.

About open ran and implications to sustainability. Yeah. Um, I mean, you know, a lot of sustainability gains we have had have been through what we've developed.

Right, right. Which was Ericsson and it was our, our, our system and, and, and quite frankly from the, our ASIC solutions, our silicon solutions. Um, and now we're taking a lot of that plus the software and the apps all over to the open ran environment.

So, um, we're also collaborating across the environment. So, you know, Intel a MD on the CPU side, server side with HP and Dell and so on. Um, you know, and if you look at it, so for example, our collaboration with Intel, um, the, the core network takes about eight 20% of the energy overall.

And so, you know, we implemented our dual mode 5G core with them with our cloud infrastructure running on Intel Zion solutions. Right. 2 improvement, three times triple the improvement in performance and 40% in energy savings.

So That's impressive, particularly to Open implementing. Yeah. Well, it's impressive, particularly when a lot of people talk about open ran as not being efficient.

Right. Right. So that that is impressive.

Yep. The combination of kind of a general purpose. CPU, you mentioned Zon and then your very hardened asic.

Right. Which by the way, all the cool kids are doing in ai I know these days. I mean, you know, it's Yeah.

I mean, of course, right. I mean, asics is gonna deliver and, and there's gonna be so many different kinds of silicon that we need to use for these things. Absolutely.

So, yes. So great conversation of kind of where where we were in the past. Yep.

And what you're doing now, uh, what, talk to us about the future in terms of the way that you're framing sustainability, the, the way that you're looking at this, uh, at, at this challenge. Yeah. Um, it is, it, it is holistic.

I mean, like we've been talking about, it runs across hardware, it runs across software. Uh, you have to look at it in terms of trade-offs of course. I mean, when you were talking about not every, you know, a trillion devices or not everything on at once.

I mean, you know, to scale up, you know, the use of AI across these networks to hundreds of millions of users, right? Right. On something that is considered, you know, critical infrastructure.

This is not a, a small thing, but it is, it is moving us forward. And so we're gonna have to focus on really deploying AI in a way that is going to work and isn't gonna over consume because we have to have that fine balance. And again, it's a business case.

It's not, it 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.

Right. Also as a huge contributor. So that's one.

The other is to, to build native, right? Six G is gonna be native sustainable effectively and native to ai, um, you know, or AI native really, I guess is what I wanna say. So both of those things are, are gonna be critical.

Um, yeah. And we have to use AI to make AI successful. 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 six G.

Uh, definitely a provocative statement around six G being, uh, native. Uh, I, that was, that, that was good. I'm gonna do the double click on that with my research team.

But, uh, thanks for coming on the show. Thank You for having me. Absolutely.

Second, second year in a row. Maybe it was the third year. I need to go back and, uh, check the notes, but second time definitely here in person.

I really appreciate your time and I really love the maturity that, that you bring to this conversation, which is really a breath of, really a breath of fresh air. It's, uh, it's about doing the right thing for the business and everything, right? It's not, there's no sides.

The two can cohabitate. They can, I, I I Believe they can. And cohabiting is the right solution.

I Agree. I agree. Thank You.

Absolutely. Thank you so much. 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.

Um, and I recommend that you do that. So this is Patrick Morehead with more insights and strategy for the six five Summit. Take care.