Report pegs global ICT carbon emission at two per cent

IN furtherance to the positive contributions of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to global economic development, a new report has also revealed that the ICT sector contributes two per cent of global carbon emission.The report, which is Ericsson's yearly sustainability and corporate responsibility report disclosed that ICT could potentially offset a significant portion of the remaining 98 per cent from other industries, indicating that the increase in overall energy consumption from ICT would be moderate, due to gains in network energy efficiency, through 2020.Ericsson's report entitled 'Technology for Good', confirmed the company's belief in the transformational power of ICT to spur socio-economic development and put the world on the path of a low-carbon economy has never been greater.Ericsson President/CEO, Hans Vestberg said: 'We anchor our approach to sustainability and corporate responsibility in the triple bottom line of responsible social, economic and environmental development. We continuously raise the bar on our own sustainability performance and seek to deepen our understanding of stakeholders' top concerns. This way of doing business is essential to our success.'Vestberg said that efforts made on the networks included increasing its 3G/4G energy efficiency by 85 per cent in base stations over the last decade, while continuing to meet the bandwidth demands of the networked society, without increasing energy consumption per subscriber, providing 'Psi' -Coverage solution for mobile broadband (3G) coverage of 45 per cent energy savings compared to traditional solutions. He added that the 'Psi'-Coverage uses new Ericsson technology to boost coverage while enabling significant energy and cost savings by using just one standard radio.Recognising the increasingly important role of cities in future sustainable development, Ericsson reasoned that by 2016, densely populated urban areas representing less than one per cent of the earth's total land area would generate around 60 per cent of mobile traffic. To increase network capacity in such areas, the report said that there would be the need to build heterogeneous networks, whereby powerful macro-radio base stations were complemented by smaller pico and micro base stations, which provided extra capacity for areas with high demand, adding that with a nearby low power node, they could off-load the high power nodes, thus saving energy.
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