Hello everyone and welcome to ZDTech, ZDNet’s daily editorial podcast. I am Pierre Benhamou and today I will explain to you why the efforts made by operators to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions are struggling to bear fruit.
You are certainly aware that digital technology, like many industries, is today singled out for its contribution to global warming. While the sector currently accounts for 2% of the carbon footprint generated each year in France, this proportion could well rise to 6.7% by 2060, if nothing is done to contain it. Like the other players in this market, telecom operators are in a hurry to lower their environmental bills and have multiplied actions in recent years to clean up their activities.
At least that’s what Arcep, the sector regulator, finds in the first annual edition of its dedicated survey on the subject, published at the end of April. The Authority notes in particular that the greenhouse gas emissions of the four main French operators may have decreased to reach 362,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2020, this good performance is in reality akin to an “optical illusion”. .
Fiber, a less voracious technology?
And yes, as the telecoms policeman points out, the decrease observed in reality only concerns operators’ direct greenhouse gas emissions, that is to say those generated for example by their fleets of vehicles, the consumption of their building stock or their shops. Unfortunately, this is only a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of indirect emissions from operators, those linked to the electricity consumption of their fixed and mobile networks.
And this is where the shoe pinches. While the deployment of fiber on the fixed line and 5G on the mobile is accelerating, Arcep notes that the networks of the operators are proving to be more and more energy-intensive. This can be seen in practice: between 2016 and 2020 the energy consumption of fixed and mobile networks has continued to grow, by around 6% per year. Note that if fixed networks are much less voracious in energy than mobile networks, they owe it in particular to the generalization of fiber.
It is perhaps from this very high-speed technology that the light will come. To reduce the environmental bill of digital, Arcep thus recommends that end users – that is to say you and me – favor Wi-Fi over cellular networks and switch to fiber whenever possible.