Will 5G improve or worsen our digital carbon footprint?

5G¹² is a new tech­no­lo­gic­al stand­ard that incor­por­ates 10 years of R&D in the field of tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions in terms of through­put, latency, con­nec­tion dens­ity, but also com­mu­nic­a­tion secur­ity and energy effi­ciency (less energy for a con­stant amount of data trans­por­ted). Improve­ments come from devel­op­ments in anten­nas and radio wave pro­cessing with new tech­no­lo­gies such as massive MIMO anten­nas³, which make it pos­sible to use radio fre­quen­cies with great­er capa­cit­ies in order to achieve high­er speeds, while main­tain­ing more sim­ul­tan­eous connections.

The con­ver­gence of tele­coms net­works with IT net­works is based on com­mon and stand­ard­ised soft­ware plat­forms, such as sli­cing and edge com­put­ing. Hence, 5G is a range of innov­a­tions for more reli­able and flex­ible uses. It brings import­ant advances for numer­ous applic­a­tions such as fact­ory or con­nec­ted cit­ies, pub­lic or indi­vidu­al trans­port, logist­ics, etc.

Although the arrival of 5G was accom­pan­ied by con­cerns regard­ing health (expos­ure to waves) and ques­tions about secur­ity and sov­er­eignty, here we will focus on the key issue. That of man­aging to the bene­fits of 5G while con­trolling its envir­on­ment­al impact. In oth­er words, mer­ging digit­al con­nectiv­ity and sus­tain­ab­il­ity. This leads us to con­sider the envir­on­ment­al effect of digit­al tech­no­logy in a more gen­er­al way.

What are the con­crete impacts of 5G on the envir­on­ment? A life cycle ana­lys­is leads us to con­sider three main phases: the man­u­fac­ture of equip­ment (with an impact on the con­sump­tion of raw mater­i­als such as water or rare resources and, to a cer­tain extent, a more or less car­bon-intens­ive energy con­sump­tion gen­er­at­ing green­house gases), its use (mainly con­sum­ing energy) and, lastly, the man­age­ment of its end-of-life (the pro­duc­tion of waste). For the sake of sim­pli­city, we will focus here mainly on energy con­sump­tion, but we should bear in mind that this is only one facet of the envir­on­ment­al foot­print of this tech­no­logy, and of digit­al tech­no­logy in general.

While the actu­al deploy­ment of 5G may lead to ques­tions regard­ing the non-deploy­ment rhet­or­ic­al, deploy­ment and non-deploy­ment stud­ies nev­er­the­less allow us to address key ques­tions. How will we con­tin­ue to devel­op this tech­no­logy? And how will we adapt it? These ques­tions are par­tic­u­larly rel­ev­ant while we are still faced with real dis­rup­tions such as stand-alone, sli­cing or edge com­put­ing, and the con­di­tions for deploy­ment in the 26 GHz band are still being studied.

Where are the envir­on­ment­al effects of con­cen­trated 5G?

• The deploy­ment of 5G leads to equip­ment changes. The pro­duc­tion costs of this equip­ment (espe­cially those of pre­ma­ture ter­min­al replace­ment) may weigh heav­ily on the envir­on­ment­al foot­print of the technology.
• On the oth­er hand, not deploy­ing 5G would have led to the dens­i­fic­a­tion of the 4G net­work, and there­fore also to the pro­duc­tion of more equip­ment, prob­ably in great­er num­bers for the net­works, and above all to addi­tion­al oper­at­ing energy costs, because, for a con­stant volume of data, 5G is more efficient.
• What com­plic­ates things is that the trans­ition to 5G could encour­age excess­ive use of data through a rebound effect that is dif­fi­cult to quantify.

Depend­ing on the assump­tions made, one gets rad­ic­ally dif­fer­ent results.

The report by the French High Coun­cil for the Cli­mate⁴ con­siders what the car­bon foot­print of the digit­al sec­tor could be accord­ing to sev­er­al vari­ants of deploy­ment and non-deploy­ment of 5G. While there is con­sid­er­able uncer­tainty, the scen­ari­os all con­clude that the deploy­ment of 5G will res­ult in a sig­ni­fic­ant increase in this foot­print, mainly due to the increase in the num­ber of objects con­nec­ted to the network.

A study con­duc­ted by a com­mit­tee of experts involving the main net­work equip­ment sup­pli­ers and the four met­ro­pol­it­an mobile oper­at­ors, for which Arcep provides the sec­ret­ari­at, sheds more light on this issue⁵. It was noted that the deploy­ment of 5G allows mobile net­works to be much less intense in dense areas. How­ever, in low-dens­ity areas, in the short and medi­um term, the oppos­ite effect is likely to occur.

It is dif­fi­cult to ana­lyse the effects of 5G in isol­a­tion from the rest of the digit­al eco­sys­tem because each tech­no­logy, wheth­er mobile or wired, is used in an ever-increas­ing inter­weav­ing of IT and net­works. It is the entire energy con­sump­tion of digit­al tech­no­logy that must be chal­lenged. The dif­fi­culty of estab­lish­ing cer­tain­ties in this area high­lights the great need for pre­cise assess­ments of energy con­sump­tion. Such assess­ments are essen­tial to guide pub­lic policies, but also the beha­viour of users and the choices of companies.

Arcep inves­ted in these sub­jects in 2020 by open­ing a plat­form “for a sus­tain­able digit­al future” and by organ­ising a pub­lic debate as part of a pro­cess of exchange and con­sulta­tion with industry play­ers. The main tools for car­ry­ing out such assess­ments are life cycle ana­lyses, which draw on all the sci­entif­ic know­ledge accu­mu­lated in a field to define robust meth­od­o­lo­gies, and the data col­lec­ted to feed the analyses.

With­in this frame­work, the author­ity has star­ted con­crete pro­grammes, includ­ing the following.

1. A study is being con­duc­ted with ADEME to quanti­fy the envir­on­ment­al foot­print of digit­al tech­no­logy today and in 2030 and 2050, with a first report to the gov­ern­ment expec­ted in 2022. The aim is to define a meth­od­o­logy and indic­at­ors that will enable such quantification.
2. Arcep has already been col­lect­ing envir­on­ment­al data from elec­tron­ic com­mu­nic­a­tions oper­at­ors since 2020. But data from all the play­ers in the digit­al world are needed: equip­ment man­u­fac­tur­ers, access pro­viders, data centre oper­at­ors, etc. It should also be noted that a law aimed at strength­en­ing envir­on­ment­al reg­u­la­tion of the digit­al sec­tor by Arcep, tabled by Sen­at­or Patrick Chaize, which broadens Arcep’s data col­lec­tion powers, has just been adopted.

Finally, the pos­it­ive effects of 5G must be con­sidered. Of course, some people insist on these “pos­it­ive extern­al­it­ies” so as not to have to worry too much about the neg­at­ive effects. But the ambi­tion of our green­house gas reduc­tion tar­gets is such that redu­cing the energy con­sump­tion of the tele­coms sec­tor is a neces­sity, how­ever import­ant the pos­it­ive effects may be. It is up to the author­it­ies to set less energy-intense object­ives without hold­ing back innov­a­tion that could lead to envir­on­ment­al gains in oth­er sec­tors that rely on digit­al tech­no­logy to achieve their eco­lo­gic­al transition.