Wireless network operators must reduce their operating costs and carbon footprint, while extending operations to areas beyond electricity grids.
In mature countries, lowering an operator’s energy bill helps it support data growth despite flat revenues, and finances strategic goals of innovation and differentiation. In emerging countries, alternative energy solutions are necessary to connect the next billion subscribers located in areas off the electricity grids—without wasting revenues in diesel generators.
In all markets, end-user purchasing behaviours are changing to take eco-sustainability criteria into account, and operators must set aggressive targets to reduce the carbon footprint of their operations. Alcatel-Lucent wireless solutions meet these challenges with a comprehensive approach to eco-sustainable communications, enabling operators to seize the full business potential of green.
Alcatel-Lucent addresses energy efficiency at all layers of the network, provides alternative energies at true industrial scale, reduces land and civil works impact thanks to zero footprint solutions, and minimizes materials production through converged RAN software-only upgrades.

Information and Communication Technologies: a Key Role to Play towards a Greener World

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has a unique ability to help decrease the carbon footprint of many industrial sectors, with applications like tele-conferencing, smart transportation, smart buildings, and smart grid. However, it can only achieve this positive role if the network infrastructures that it provides are eco-efficient themselves; that's what Alcatel-Lucent offers with Green Wireless Network solutions.

Building a Green Wireless Infrastructure: Life-cycle Analysis

Reducing the carbon footprint of a network requires an analysis of the carbon footprint across an entire life-cycle. For instance, through energy consumption, the highest carbon emissions are linked to the usage phase of equipment. Next is the land and civil works impact of the equipment—and its ability to be easily dismantled and recycled (which is linked to the design, manufacturing and end-of-life phases of the equipment).

The Priority: Energy Efficiency

Our early presence in emerging markets—where electricity grids are often scarce and unreliable— led us to develop a robust and holistic approach to decrease the power consumption of our equipment, without any compromise on the coverage provided and traffic carried. This power performance is offered at hardware, software, site and full network levels—reducing the main source of the carbon footprints of our equipment, and bringing significant OPEX savings.

Leveraging Alternative Energies

Diesel generators have proven to be an expensive and unreliable solution to power wireless base stations in areas of emerging markets beyond the electricity grids. Alcatel-Lucent Alternative Energy Program provides the first industrial solution for large-scale deployments of base stations powered with alternative energies, such as solar, wind, and fuel cells. This enables large-scale deployments of energy-autonomous and green wireless networks. Beyond helping to connect the unconnected, these solutions also assist operators in mature countries to reduce their energy bills, using the electricity grid only as a backup.

Zero Footprint Solutions

The production of concrete and steel results in high carbon emissions. Therefore, reducing the size and weight of concrete bases and steel towers of base stations sites greatly lowers their carbon footprint. Alcatel-Lucent offers a complete product range of zero-footprint solutions that not only decrease floor space and civil works impact of wireless networks, but also greatly reduce their CAPEX.

Eco-design and End-of-life Solutions

Choosing the right materials, minimizing transportation, designing electronic boards and racks to ease their dismantling, and offering recycling services are all among Alcatel-Lucent eco-design and end-of life solutions. However, the best option to manage end-of-life is to postpone the end-of-life! The Alcatel-Lucent Converged RAN solution ensures full backward compatibility of the equipment, with transition to new technologies by software upgrades only. With more than 500,000 multi-standard base stations currently in the field, Alcatel-Lucent already greatly contributes to reducing the carbon footprint impact of manufacturing new hardware.