Vodafone goes green in Germany

To emphasise its green credentials, and cut its electricity costs, Vodafone Germany has implemented Ericsson's new Base Transceiver Station (BTS) power savings feature that is claimed to significantly reduce energy consumption in mobile networks.

The company, which is the first to install the Ericsson upgrade, said that it planned to deploy the technology in all of its base stations in Germany by the end of this year. The new feature is claimed to save between 10 and 20 percent of the energy per BTS when a base station is in use, while still providing the same services and QoS to end users. This it achieves, according to Ericsson, by switching the BTS into standby mode during periods of low network traffic.

Ericsson said that, if this feature was installed across the one million GSM Ericsson base stations in use around the world, it could result in a reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions of one million tons. However, to put this into context, global CO2 emissions from human activity are currently about 25 billion tons.

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