Telecommunications service providers are seeking to cut costs and reduce their environmental footprint by increasing their overall efficiency. At the recent Telco Sustainability Forum virtual event, Shazia Zeb Sobani, VP of fiber networks at Telus, shared some of the operator’s strategies around sustainability.
Sobani shared three areas of particular focus for Telus when it comes to sustainability efforts related to its network. Those included:
Implementing circular economy concepts. Sobani defined a circular economy as an economic system that has the aim of eliminating waste and continually reusing resources that are already available.
At Telus, she said, this concept is being applied to the company’s view of its legacy, copper-based network as a resource to be mined for material that can be sold and re-used by other industries.
“When you really think about the telecom industry, most of our networks were copper-based networks, and we have tons—like thousands and millions of tons—of copper, either hanging up in the air or buried somewhere in the ground,” she explained. “As we started to transition the technology evolution towards fiber-fed connectivity, all that copper, which was creating a duality of the network … also became a great, great source for the supply of copper.”
Telus calls this product “green copper,” Sobani said, on the basis that “the emissions that this entire process is generating is a fraction of what you will get in a regular mining process.” She said that Telus has mined more than 1,000 tons of this “green copper” in the last two years, and its additional fiber network investments over the coming years will make available up to another 2,000 tons to be used in other industries.
Energy-efficiency increases via fiber network investment and customer migration. One of telecom operators’ biggest challenges to efficiency is legacy technology debt, Sobani said. The nature of telecom services mean that multiple network technologies often run side-by-side, using power to essentially provide the same services, with capacity needed on each network because of the period of technological overlap and slow customer migration. That long period of overlap is where many inefficiencies lie, she pointed out.
Older networks also tend to be less energy-efficient. Sobani said that having customers on fiber versus copper network uses about 85% less power. Telus is migrating customers aggressively onto the newer network technology, she added, which translates not only to more copper being available for reclamation, but also significant energy savings. Telus has migrated than 600,000 customers to fiber so far, and fewer than 1% of customers within its fiber footprint are still being served by copper, she said.
Artificial intelligence-driven energy optimization. Telus is also using artificial intelligence to help optimize its energy usage. Sobani discussed its work with the Vector Institute to develop an Energy Optimization System (EOS) that uses model-based reinforcement learning to optimize HVAC operations at Telus’ data centers.
Pilots of the system have achieved a nearly 12% reduction in energy use, Sobani said, by combining information such as weather forecasts, equipment performance, and information about on-site spaces in order to choose the most efficient means of temperature control. Telus is working to expand the pilots of the EOS to a number of locations, according to Sobani, and has also made the algorithm open-source so that other companies and organization can make use of it.
Reducing truck-rolls for service. The ability to help customers remotely, and provide accurate, helpful self-service options, also is part of Telus’ efforts that both reduce operational costs and reduce carbon emissions. It not only helps the company to meet customers where they are and provide flexible service options that they can use at their own convenience, but it helps to keep service trucks off the roads.
To hear more details about Telus’ sustainability strategy, listen to this full session and more on-demand from Telco Sustainability Forum.
