Prashanth Bhushan is a distinguished thought leader in the Engineering and Internet of Things (IoT) sector, bringing over 25 years of extensive industry experience. His expertise spans the digital solutions driving convergence across devices, telemetry, gateways, cloud, and analytics. He has collaborated with leading organizations in Telecom, Technology, Utilities, Energy, and CPG industries, providing strategic insights into areas such as 5G network modernization, Enterprise IoT, Industry 4.0, and grid modernization. Mr. Bhushan has held leadership roles, including Assistant Vice President of IoT Business at Cognizant, and made significant contributions at Symphony Teleca and Sasken Technologies. Beyond his corporate engagements, he is a sought-after speaker at industry forums and a contributor to thought leadership publications.
Technology sector is rapidly expanding owing to the growing needs of data centers (with the rise of GenAI), cell towers (with the advent of 5G) and entertainment equipment (with the rise of more advanced content delivery and consumption end-points).
As the ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) business has been growing significantly over the past few decades, global sales of ICT products are expected to skyrocket in the future. For example, global laptop and mobile phone sales are expected to rise from roughly 3 billion to more than 4 billion units per year. Currently, the ICT sector (which is much broader than Telecom Service Providers alone) contributes to around 8% of worldwide electricity consumption (before the GenAI boom started) and nearly 2% of total global carbon emissions. [1] [2]
GESI (Global enabling Sustainability Initiative), in their detailed report in collaboration with BCG, “The Role of ICT in Driving a Sustainable Future” estimate that the ICT industry overall has the potential to save almost $1.9 Trillion in savings over a period of time, and reduce the total GHG emissions by almost 16.5%.
A 5G network is expected to consume 3.5 times more power than 4G, owing to MIMO, legacy protocols across multiple bands and higher density of small cells. A single LTE cell site today consumes an average of 6 kilowatts (kW) in power. Compare that with 5G deployment – Average of 4 receivers, will take 14 KW + supporting all the legacy 3G / 4G that will consumer 6 KW + higher density of small cells per sq mile. [3]
To take first mover advantage, operators across the globe are being pushed beyond their boundaries, to deploy and manage denser networks for ubiquitous coverage, integrate new fiber based Fronthaul, Midhaul & backhaul technologies to handle terabytes of data, virtualize their access and core network assets for greater agility and manage hundreds applications on edge and cloud (phew ! that’s a handful now)
Assets within a Telecom Service Provider
Service Providers have some of the largest collection of assets, which are very diverse, physically spread across a country and logically separated as they typically would be managed by different systems. They are broadly segmented into three main categories – Outside Plant, Inside Plant and Facilities.
| Outside Plant | Tower, Radio Units (RU), Baseband Units (BBU), Routers, Power Distribution Units, Battery Banks/UPS, Cooling Units (HVAC), beacon lights on towers etc.
Physical cabling and other supporting infrastructure (such as conduit, cabinets, tower or poles), any associated hardware (such as repeaters) | Sample data point:
Mobile operators invest an average of $109 Bn / year in mobile Internet infrastructure [3] |
| Inside Plant | Data centers, Central office stations, Main distribution frame (MDF), Servers /Switching units, Racks, AC/DC power distribution units, Air handling units, Cooling units, Battery Banks/UPS, grounding systems, DSLAMs, passive optical equipment
| |
| Facilities | Office Buildings, Retail outlets (and all assets supporting them such as HVAC, Lighting, etc ) | |
| Wet Plant | All under-sea cabling equipment and associated power, switches, routers, etc | Applicable few TSPs only |
The challenge (and the opportunity) is to devise an alternate management plane that can cover such diverse assets, which are physically distributed and logically separated. The opportunity is in enabling continuous monitoring of the health, performance, energy consumption, uptime and other critical KPIs. These KPIs would directly give TSPs the ability to accurately track the usage, KPIs and assess areas for ensuring operational efficiencies.
To give a perspective of the complexity involved in achieving the required goals, consider the total funding from NTIA just to improving the quality of RUs/DUs and BBUs in a 5G RAN. NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration) allocated up to $420 Mn under the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) 2 in 2024. This funding was towards Open Radio Unit (RU) Commercialization and Open RU Innovation with a significant portion of the fund allocated for sustainability initiatives.
There is considerable work involved to get all these pieces together on one single system. Several heterogenous KPIs are to be tracked. In a follow-on paper, we will look at the best practices, KPIs and the building blocks to achieve of the Unified Smart Asst Management system.
Conclusion
Multi-fold rise in data consumption, advanced AI applications, and large data center expansions are leading to increased opportunities and challenges to Service providers in maintaining the required level of operational efficiencies and tracking their enterprise-wide sustainability goals.
As suggested earlier, a distinct and a separate management plane can be a plausible approach to be adopted. The sole purpose of this management plane is to not only manage monitor the assets but also track energy consumption and related sustainability goals, without interfering with the ongoing operations of the TSP through those assets.
Operators across the globe will need a paradigm shift in their planning and implementation an approach of building and managing all the assets through an “Unified Smart Asset Management” – a sure shot way to manage the assets, track energy consumption and achieve Sustainability KPIs.
Needless to say, IoT has also opened up an exciting avenue where in a concept of Unified Smart Asset Management can be achieved. It will help the TSPs maximize RoA, extend asset life, reduce life-cycle costs, lower maintenance costs and hit their KPIs faster.
References
[1] G. Shapiro. America’s comeback starts with American innovators soapbox. IEEE Consumer Electronic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 19–24.
[2] A.S.G. Andrae, T. Edler. On Global Electricity Usage of Communication Technology: Trends to 2030. Challenges, Vol.6, No.1, 2015, pp.117-157.
[3] https://www.lightreading.com/5g/operators-starting-to-face-up-to-5g-power-cost
[4] Mobile operators moan about $109 billion investment burden