Telecom providers can realize many business benefits by improving sustainability, including greater efficiency and cost savings. For example, replacing fossil fuels with clean, renewable energy not only reduces a provider’s carbon footprint, it also significantly reduces energy costs and ongoing OPEX.
While this may seem like a huge undertaking, providers can start small by simply limiting their use of fossil fuels and implementing the right tools to streamline their sustainability initiatives.
Accurate and Accessible Data is Key
The first step telecom providers must take to operate in a more sustainable manner is to ensure that all infrastructure data is up-to-date, well-maintained, and comprehensive. When relevant infrastructure is documented in this manner, it forms a complete inventory that providers can rely on to make knowledge-based decisions that contribute to their sustainability goals.
A unified resource management solution can help telco providers reduce energy usage, automate network processes, and also improve network sharing. Let’s look at each of these areas:
Reduced Energy Usage
FNT’s management solutions provide advanced planning capability that can identify hotspots and facilitate the redistribution of heat-generating equipment. With a graphical visualization of the temperature distribution in the data center, issues such as hot and cold spots can be quickly identified. Additionally, if concentrations of power usage or pockets of excessive temperature are identified, alternate connection scenarios can be run in planning mode so that managers can see exactly how the proposed changes will affect the data center. When the optimal arrangement is identified, the change can be implemented and energy use can be lowered.
Automated Network Processes
In the event that equipment is malfunctioning, a well-documented infrastructure and automation are crucial to find the problem, identify the services impacted, rectify the issue, and save unnecessary energy expenditure. FNT Command’s up-to-date resource management database provides accurate as-is and planning data to make automation possible.
Automation also requires accurate and consistent inventory data that is linked to the higher layer management and orchestration systems that are configuring, provisioning, restoring and implementing any other automated functions in the network. The inventory data must also be unified across domain and dynamically updated by the active network wherever possible.
Improved Network Sharing
Network sharing, when two or more communications service providers share network resources, either through joint ownership or by a third-party open network, effectively reduces energy consumption and radio emissions as there is less equipment in use. Software that can manage shared resources in combination with owned resources is required for network sharing in today’s complex and heterogeneous environments.
For complete transparency, a central system should easily integrate with third-party applications and provide an accurate, real-time view across all infrastructure and assets regardless of where they reside. Full visibility into physical assets, logical connections, virtual components, applications, and business services, as well as the relations and dependencies in between, can be achieved only when they documented and managed in one integrated system.
Learn More
Ulrich Schälling, VP Market Strategy at FNT Software, discusses this and more in Telecom Ramblings. Read the article here.
