People don’t usually see mobile networks as big electricity users – after all, they’re not car factories, petrochemical plants or aluminium smelters. But they are globally widespread and growing as the world runs more and more of its business online and on the move.

Although it’s true that each base station represents only a small load compared to other types of industrial or commercial facilities, combine them in the hundreds, thousands and even hundreds of thousands and they start to have a real effect on a country’s electricity demand.

Take South Korea. Not a country you might associate with an electricity grid being put under strain. Yet the nation has seen a number of blackouts recently, so much so that the government has launched an energy saving campaign to reduce power consumption at peak times. Measures include restricting building temperatures to 18-20°C in the winter and to not less than 26°C in the summer.

Korea Telecom (KT) responded to the challenge. The company invited Nokia Networks to optimize KT’s network energy usage so that it would occur automatically. The idea is simple: The network should use no more energy than is absolutely needed to provide good quality services for customers. A new centralized SON (self-organizing network) solution, Nokia iSON Manager provides an energy-saving function to minimize energy consumption of LTE networks. In a pilot project, Nokia iSON Manager helped Korea Telecom save 40 % on its consumption by shutting down particular frequencies when they weren’t needed.

“The results of this trial represent Nokia’s initiative, Green to Gold, in practice. By deploying intelligent energy efficiency solutions as part of KT’s network management portfolio, they are able to create significant savings without sacrificing customer experience,” says Seung Tack (Sean) Lee, head of KT customer team, Nokia Networks, Korea.

With self-configuring, self-optimizing and self-healing capabilities, Nokia iSON Manager helps operators play their part, helping save energy one bit at a time.

Anh Tuan