Sustainability has progressed from a nice-to-have in business to a fundamental requirement. Consumers demand it, investors expect it, and regulators increasingly mandate it.
For communications service providers (CSPs), much of this effort has focused on reducing the environmental impact of producing, shipping, and deploying hardware. But much of the energy efficiency of network solutions depends on their use in the field. Industry surveys suggest networks and data centers are extremely significant contributors to emissions and energy costs, representing as much as 85% of a Tier-1 operator's Scope 1 and 2 emissions.
CSPs must be able to do more than reduce emissions and energy usage: They must prove to regulators and consumers that operations have become more sustainable. Fortunately, the same methods that enable CSPs to prove they've reduced their carbon footprint can also help them improve their operational efficiency.
Integrated, cloud-based operational support systems (OSS) give CSPs the holistic visibility and access they need to optimize operations and energy usage, tackling the energy efficiency challenges of their networks, equipment, and data centers. And they enhance reporting by providing the structured data CSPs need to demonstrate their sustainability efforts.
There's a classic axiom that you don't know what you don't know. This is a major issue for many CSPs attempting to reduce their emissions and, crucially, be able to demonstrate this fact to consumers, investors, and regulators.
Many of these organizations are looking to AI, ML, and other advanced technologies to try to optimize network operations. In a recent survey by Analysys Mason, 35% of respondents identified AI-enhanced power management tools as a top priority for energy efficiency, and 31% said the same about cloud-based traffic management.
But the siloed structure of most systems CSPs operate is proving to be a challenge. Nearly 40% of survey respondents cited a lack of consistent data and analytics from across their entire operation as a major obstacle to adopting advanced technologies.
This is one of the reasons it's so crucial for CSPs to monitor and manage operations with an OSS that is built using industry standards such as the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture (ODA) principles. Open APIs built on standards-based technologies ensure the broadest possible OSS system integration, helping eliminate operational silos. These APIs allow CSPs to gather and analyze data from across their entire operation for the most accurate possible assessments and most efficient power management.
Overprovisioning or underusing hardware is another carbon footprint cost CSPs must address from multiple angles. Considering that as much as 90% of carbon emissions from network equipment can come from device usage, according to one industry report, unnecessary device deployment and operation can add operational costs while also making it that much harder to achieve sustainability goals. But without accurate data, it's difficult to assess how many devices are needed at a given location.
Gathering operational data across devices and effectively analyzing it allows CSPs to accurately assess usage rates, improving the efficiency of device lifecycle management and enabling more intelligent allocation of network resources. With this data, CSPs can reduce their energy usage by:
Combining this data and analysis with intelligent automation further improves the efficiency of this process, allowing for automated assessment and reporting, in real time, of hardware usage by location. Service providers can continually adjust hardware deployment based on need, ensuring provisioning remains proportionate to need to comply with service level agreements (SLAs) while minimizing emissions.
But hardware is only part of the story. Software must also support sustainability, and it can play a significant role. By optimizing the use of network computing resources and enabling virtualization, the right OSS can contribute significantly to sustainability goals.
By gathering and synchronizing operational data while moving computation to the cloud, CSPs open the door to use more advanced technologies that can further enhance their operational efficiency and improve sustainability and reporting.
Accurate, real-time data can be used to power real-time analytics on device behavior and subscriber usage. Service providers can leverage this information to more accurately monitor and manage network congestion, optimize bandwidth allocation, and reduce network load and energy consumption. This not only improves the end user experience but allows service providers to reduce costs by making the most efficient use of existing network resources.
Automation can be used to take these improvements even further. Automating critical processes based on accurate, up-to-date data streamlines service delivery and even time-to-market for advanced connectivity services. IPv4 address exhaustion, for example, is a difficult challenge to tackle manually. Leveraging a cost-effective Mapping of Address and Port Using Translation (MAP-T) solution reduces hardware dependency but requires complex configuration, such as of the DHCPv6 settings required for deployment. Automating deployment and configuration can simultaneously reduce operational costs and hardware dependence while enabling service providers to tackle a significant industry challenge and effectively transition to IPv6.
Improved sustainability and improved operational efficiency are flip sides of the same coin. Service providers benefit from both but need an OSS that can seamlessly connect their entire network and enable intelligent use of all the data it gathers to achieve this.
Incognito's cloud-based OSS solutions are designed using industry standards, aligned with ODA principles, and container technologies to guarantee maximum interoperability, eliminating network silos and integrating with every other system. These cloud-deployable solutions push computation away from the network edge, enabling virtualization that makes more efficient use of energy to lower costs and waste.
Real-time analytics and advanced automation allow Incognito's solutions to make the best possible decisions on network resource allocation as quickly as possible without requiring manual inputs, while also providing the comprehensive information needed for data-driven decision-making by technical and operational teams.
And Incognito's Broadband Command Center (BCC) supports the specialized configuration required to deploy a DHCP server at scale. Automated MAP-T configurations reduce hardware dependency and power consumption while supporting a transition to IPv6. And combining stateless MAP-T with Incognito automation makes network management efficient and scalable.
By deploying an Incognito OSS solution, service providers can eliminate siloed systems, reduce manual processes, and avoid vendor lock-in, driving operations that make more sustainable use of energy, time, and money.