5G FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS
The fifth generation of mobile technology will bring gains in energy efficiency, which is good news for the first generations of people to care about climate change
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f you have a working internet connection, you will have seen a barrage of headlines over the past year about the fifth generation of mobile communications. You may have been wondering: Do I really need to take a break from scrolling Instagram, listening to Spotify and mining Bitcoin on my 4G-connected devices to pay attention to all this? If you care about climate, as the European Investment Bank does, the answer is yes. Which is why last year we signed a second €250 million loan backed by the European Fund for Strategic Investments with Ericsson for research and development on the company’s systems for the next generation of mobile communications. Reduced energy cost for networks EIB experts classified 23% of that loan as climate action, based on the investments into the development of 5G energy efficiency features. A recent research paper demonstrates that, depending on whether the mobile station is in a low, medium or high data traffic area and its specific configuration, migrating all that traffic to a 5G network could bring about a 50% to 95% reduction in its energy consumption. “Energy cost, together with the site rental cost, are the two largest operating expenses for these mobile network base stations, so this is a big deal for the operators,” says Anders Bohlin, the EIB’s lead economist in the digital infrastructure division. “So 5G provides operators with an economic incentive, as well as a climate incentive. That’s important for them, since a lot of customers are giving their operators quite a bit of stick for all these deals encouraging you to switch phones every two years, which is not considered very sustainable. Operators are trying to improve on their environmental conscience.” Lower phone bills? Put that idea on hold So will customers also see their phone bills decrease with 5G? Probably not, Bohlin predicts. Customers will simply get a faster, better service, and end up using more data. That’s because improved energy efficiency is not the only improvement 5G will bring over 4G. The International Telecommunication Union’s performance requirements for next generation communications see a 10 to 100-fold improvement over 4G technology. For example, the number of devices that can connect to a network within a square kilometre should increase from 100 000 to one million. That translates to one device per square metre. Peak data speeds should increase to 20 Gigabytes per second.
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2019 ACTIVITY REPORT
