Falling telco energy use at odds with the victim narrative

Energy consumption should be a decent proxy for telco operating cost trends. Before the war in Ukraine, it accounted for only about 5% of total expenses at an average telco, which spends far more on its staff (representing about a quarter of costs). But even the most economically phrased text message needs electricity to leap from sender to receiver, and a data tsunami is crashing through networks, the industry is regularly told. If networks are being fortified with extra equipment of the “active” variety, energy use and costs are presumably rising like floodwater.

Right? Wrong, as it often turns out. An examination of figures for energy consumption in the annual reports of Europe’s biggest operators turned up some counterintuitive results. Three of the companies that operate both fixed and mobile networks – BT, Orange and Telefónica – consumed less energy last year than they did in 2016. Vodafone’s annual usage is up, but only by 3% between 2018 and 2021. Only Deutsche Telekom, the region’s largest telco, reported a big increase during this period, but that was probably due to its US takeover of Sprint in 2020, when energy use spiked.

Divestments could explain a substantial drop at Telefónica, whose annual energy consumption measured in gigawatt hours fell by 11% between 2016 and 2021. Various assets have been spun off during this period by the Spanish telecom incumbent, including operating companies in Central America and Europe. Orange has also changed shape, although less dramatically. Its methodology for calculating energy usage is different, too – which is partly why it fell by 6% between 2020 and 2021.

Even so, the trend is totally at odds with the inexorable surge in data traffic. Of the companies analyzed, Telefónica is the only one prepared to expose the full details to the public. Back in 2016, it reveals, about 26,700 petabytes flowed through its networks over the course of the year (Telefónica’s description is “total petabytes managed”). By 2021, the annual quantity had grown to a deluge of more than 113,500 petabytes.

Telefónica then goes one step further, putting energy consumption over traffic and working out the number of megawatt hours per petabyte, a measure of its energy efficiency. In 2016, each petabyte gobbled through 268 megawatt hours. Last year, however, the figure had fallen to just 54 (see graph below).

Vodafone did a similar thing last year in a presentation to investors. Without disclosing the numbers, Johan Wibergh, Vodafone’s departing chief technology officer, claimed its cost per gigabyte had dropped by 70% between 2017 and 2021. That rate of decline exceeded the increase in traffic Vodafone saw over this period, he said.

These are surprising admissions by the companies. Top executives are fond of portraying them as the victims of a data flood triggered by the Internet giants, struggling to remain afloat under waves of video traffic. Showing that power consumption has been relatively stable or dropping as they crest these waves does not help the victimhood cause. Nor does it neatly align with the remark in Ericsson’s latest mobility report, out today, that operators need “to break the trend of increasing energy usage in mobile networks” (by spending money on Ericsson’s energy-efficient radios, naturally).

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