Weaver Labs said it is currently working on a 6G project funded by the U.K. government with universities and vendors
The telecommunications industry is in a good track in order to deliver its really ambitious objective of reaching sustainability in the whole sector, according to Maria Lema, co-founder of Weaver Labs.
During a presentation at the recent RCR Wireless News’ Telco Sustainability Forum (available on demand here), Lema said she went on to chatGPT and asked what is sustainability in telecommunications. “The answer that I got was practices, strategies and considerations aimed at minimizing environmental impact while maximizing resource efficiency, promoting social responsibility, ensure long term economic viability, and all of that, while providing connectivity and technology advancement. So it seems like a very, very difficult task, the one that we have ahead of us, building networks that actually deliver all of this,” Lema said.
Weaver Labs is working to create an open and shared marketplace of connectivity assets, with an extensive focus on security, with the aim of accelerating innovation by enabling connectivity. Its innovative software layer called Cell-Stack aggregates all the necessary components to build networks and access connectivity on-demand, according to Weaver Labs.
“There is a large number of applications that are demanding a lot from networks. And that means that those charged with the very demanding task of building networks need to invest in new hardware and spectrum. And also, operators need to multiply the revenues at the same time. So we’re building these networks, we need to create a business case out of it. And each operator, at least in the U.K. is required to invest close to £20 billion ($25 billion) only in equipment. That is a lot. And we ended up over building in some areas, and we end up under building in some other areas. So this is, this is a very big challenge that we have,” Lema said.
“But fortunately, there is a lot being done in the context of 5G already. We all know that the most energy hungry part of the network is the radio access network and it is responsible for almost 80% of the energy consumed there. And the fact that 5G has allowed us to migrate into open architectures allow us to bring in new technology and the ability to solve some of the biggest issues we had with hardware but also brings new challenges in terms of how can we run this very demanding network component which is a radio access network in commercial off the shelf hardware,” the executive added.
However, Lema noted that companies like Dell, Intel, Qualcomm are actually looking at how can they provide better frequency alignment, better processing efficiency as well as performance improvement in their chipsets.
“And then the other element that I believe has opened the door to what is the game changer in 5G has been virtualization and the fact that now, we are no longer bound to be a vertically integrated network,” she said.
The executive also highlighted that some of the technology advancements already seen in the 5G era have been specifically in the context of virtualization but also in the context of Open RAN. “And the fact that all these open interfaces are sharing information with each other, we are able to put intelligence in the network and that intelligence can be used in order to reduce the power consumption of some of the components such as the radio access network,” said Lema.
Commenting on future 6G systems, Lema said that Weaver Labs is currently woking on a 6G project funded by the U.K. government with partners including universities and vendors such as Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and Parallel Wireless, among others.
“We are creating a blueprint architecture of what 6G is going to be. And the good news is that based on all of these technologies that allow us to be a lot more sustainable in the telecoms industry, I’m much more aware of the efficiency of our network, because it is based on open and disaggregated architectures, which is what allows us to actually share information and be more aware of where we can take action,” Lema said, adding that the main aim would be to build an end-to-end architecture, that that can change based on the use case. “So we build a platform, not a vertically integrated network,” she added.
