As 6G network planning ramps up, Nokia sees chance to help the next mobile evolution go greener

With 5G rollouts still underway, it might feel too early to start talking about 6G.

Not so, according to Subho Mukherjee, VP and global head of sustainability at Nokia, who sees the current planning stage as the perfect opportunity to make the next generation of mobile technology more energy-efficient.

Tech Brew recently chatted with Mukherjee about how advances in AI and visibility into real-time network traffic can make mobile networks more responsive and less resource-hungry.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How will 6G differ from 5G on the technology side, and how do those differences play into energy consumption?

The objective of the 6G world is to bring the digital and the physical world into fusion. 2G was about voice, 3G was about mobile internet, 4G was about videos and social media, 5G has been about video uploads. It is expected that the second half of 5G, around 2025 to 2026, is going to be about industrial automation.

6G is expected to bring these things together for a digital-physical fusion. Think about augmented reality [being] really seamless, without headache…We are really focused on getting 6G to what we call zero watt, and zero bits. So if there is no traffic in the network, we do not want that network, in the 6G era, to consume any amount of energy.

What are the biggest energy demands associated with 5G? And what are the pain points the industry would like to solve for in 6G?

The main energy demands for 5G are twofold. The first part of that is sort of a no-brainer…the traffic of the network is growing faster than ever before, fueled by various applications, including the advent of mixed realities, and AR devices, and so on…The energy demand is driven by the unprecedented traffic growth in the network from around the world. It’s no longer just the traffic in South Africa, South Korea, Finland, Japan, and the US, like the 4G time. Now, it’s around the world…The other topic is low-load optimization.

The world is pretty much covered to a large extent by 4G networks. At any given point in time, roughly about 19%–20% of 4G networks around the world are utilized on a 24-hour average period. That figure is always much lower in 5G…it’s about 7%.

But the world of networks is not in a place where, just because there is no traffic, there is no energy consumption. The networks are still consuming energy with zero traffic. That, for an operator, is cost. That, for the climate, is not great news.

Nokia’s focus today is…on making sure we are driving toward less energy consumed per gigabit.

What are the main opportunities Nokia sees to make networks more sustainable as we move toward 6G?

The biggest opportunity that we see is the use of AI/ML intelligence into networks to monitor and take actions to conserve network energy.

We have a solution called Nokia AVA Energy Efficiency. It can today reduce energy cost and carbon footprint by 30% without having any negative impact on the performance of the customer experience.

There is another solution called [a] self-optimizing network. Our brand name for that is MantaRay. And that supports a very intelligent and efficient and cognitive radio network operation by sensing whether, let’s say, at 12 o’clock in the afternoon in Manhattan, there is going to be enough traffic. If not, [it can] automatically start switching off a cell.

A cell switch off and switch on, by the way, takes about eight minutes. So if you’re not smart enough, and you switch off a cell and suddenly there is a lot of traffic, those users will not be able to connect. A lot of these things are actually today based on the advent of AI. In the 5G Advanced era, these are planned to further accelerate.

So overall, the 5G Advanced era is expected to reduce, for the same amount of traffic, between 15% to 30% of energy consumption without compromising any of the end-user performance. 6G will then take it to another significant level to get close to zero bits.

Are there any other opportunities to make 6G more sustainable, including through using renewable energy?

Apart from energy efficiency, one of the things not to forget…[is that] sustainable network architecture also means the usage of materials that goes into building those networks.

We at Nokia are very focused on recyclability and circularity of the industry, including in network architecture. We have a public target of how much recycled aluminum and other minerals and materials and plastics we want to have by 2030.

What about solar-panel solutions? Is that something that we are going to see more of down the road?

We are already offering solutions in the market, like the Nokia Rural Connect solution that is solar-powered, off-grid solutions for rural markets in Africa and the Middle East. That’s a key direction we’re going, but it has to be a mix of multiple renewable energy [sources]. I don’t think solar is the only solution we need to go after.

The trick will be to dynamically use solar, wind, nuclear—other sorts of off-grid energy that you can use to have 24-7 network connectivity—where the network is smart enough to know, at what juncture, with what traffic, what energy source should be used. And that’s the direction we’re going after.