Huawei Technologies Co highlighted on Tuesday the need for telecom operators to prioritize energy efficiency while calling for the establishment of a industry-wide indicator system for energy efficiency in the information and communications, or ICT, sector.

Ding Yun, president of Huawei's carrier business group, said "Every major advancement in history has been accompanied by a significant improvement in the energy efficiency of information transmission. The increase in carbon emissions generated by exploding data traffic will become a global problem that must be tackled in the next five to 10 years. Increasing energy efficiency will be the way forward."

According to third-party research, data traffic generated by digital services is expected to grow by 13-fold over 2020 by 2030. This means that, if energy efficiency improvements are not made, the ICT industry's energy consumption and carbon emissions will see a 2.3-fold increase. According to International Telecommunication Union, the ICT industry will need to reduce its carbon emissions by at least 45 percent by 2030 to meet the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Paris Agreement's goal.

Huawei said improvements to energy efficiency will benefit telecom operators in three ways. First, user migration, site upgrades, and network power reduction will bring them savings. Second, improved energy efficiency will support the migration of 2G and 3G users to 4G and 5G services. Third, operators' efforts to reduce carbon footprint will positively impact the environment, helping them better fulfill their social responsibilities.

To help telecom operators achieve these goals, Huawei has proposed a three-layer solution: green sites, green networks, and green operations. First, they have developed solutions to improve site energy efficiency by adopting a highly integrated design, using new materials, and moving main equipment and power supply units outdoors. Second, the company's simplified network architecture makes forwarding faster and supports the construction of simplified, all-optical, and intelligent networks. Finally, at the operations level, Huawei offers a solution that generates and distributes optimization policies while making energy efficiency more visualized and manageable.

So far, these green development solutions have been deployed for operators in more than 100 countries. In Germany, for example, Huawei's PowerStar solution has helped realize minute-level energy efficiency self-optimization, improving energy efficiency greatly, the company said.