Huawei becomes eco-friendly with 'green communications, green world'

Experts expect the 'Green Strategy' trend to one of the most important issues in the coming decade.

Communications turned into a crucial service for many consumers. Networks are ever-expanding and covering more parts of the world. Consequently, communication equipment's share of global energy consumption is growing larger.

This made updating ICT products to become more eco-friendly at the top of global interest and the main issues in environmental forums and conferences looking for the best strategies to ward off the dark future the world will face in the coming five decades, according to optimistic estimations of specialists and experts.

According to statistics from the International Energy Agency 2007, in 30 years from 1973 to 2005, the increased energy consumption resulted in a rise of pollutant emission by 68% and that of CO2 emission by 73%.

After the pollution caused by excessive energy consumption turned a serious environmental problem, Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) was created in 2001 within a context of awareness of the risks of pollution and gas emissions in the ICT industry. GeSI turned into the most influential NGO in protecting the environment in the ICT industry.

By officially joining GeSI, Huawei Technologies, a leader in providing next generation telecommunications network solutions for operators around the world, took an important step, since it is the only Asian member in this initiative. This gives Huawei the chance to play a leading and strategic role in the region for promoting environmental protection strategies and implementing technical measures and standards and public policies that influence ICT industry development.

"At Huawei we always recognise the importance of environmental protection and have taken an active role in advancing green technologies. By using innovative technologies our new-generation green mobile network solution helps telecom operators to reduce power consumption, material usage, room occupancy and manpower needed. This solution can reduce the discharge of carbon dioxide by 60% and total operation cost by 30%, helping to achieve goals of both environment protection and economic benefit,"

said Ihab Ghattas, Assistant President, Middle East Region, Huawei Technologies.

"Huawei is approaching its 'Green Huawei, Green communication, Green world' goal," he added.

The use of new technologies in the main equipment (base station) and introduction of distributed base stations make it possible to realize lower power consumption, more flexible deployment and smooth evolution. The equipment can support various modes through software upgrade, so as to maximize the repeated use of the hardware and reduce the long-term investment of the telecom operator.

Since the use of intelligent ventilation, direct ventilation and natural heat dissipation, the requirement for air conditioning in the equipment room is lowered and the power consumption reduced. Furthermore, as new energy sources like solar energy and wind power are used to power the base station, the discharge of carbon dioxide decreases.

Matt Walker, principal analyst at global advisory and consulting firm Ovum, and author of the report Surfing the green wave in telecom, said, "Huawei is one of a number of vendors seriously attacking the problem of energy efficiency in telecom networks. Joining GeSI is a positive move for Huawei given its rising importance in Europe's telecom industry."

Joe McGarvey, principal analyst from Current Analysis, agrees with Walker saying, "Huawei has shown a long-term commitment to building a sustainable and environmentally friendly business. The thinking and resulting processes are embedded into all aspects of Huawei's business."

"Huawei's Green Energy Solutions make good green business sense. By bringing state-of the art products and software together with our services portfolio for operators, we can reduce adverse environmental impact while also generating considerable cost savings for our operator customers. This creates a huge difference for a company the size of Huawei, which serves 36 of the world's top 50 operators, along with over one billion users worldwide,"

added Ghattas.