Leveraging advances in mobile broadband technology to improve environmental sustainability

Advances in mobile access broadband technology have a high potential to improve environmental sustainability both directly by enabling novel network deployment concepts and indirectly by changing the way people live and work. In this paper, improvements of the network topology enabled by ubiquitous broadband access are investigated. It is shown that a joint deployment of macro- and publicly accessible residential picocells can reduce the total energy consumption by up to 70% in urban areas. In addition the high potential of indirect effects of improving telecommunication networks, such as enabling teleworking and replacing business travel through video conferencing, is demonstrated and compared with the direct effects. Copyright 2008 Holger Claussen, Lester T. W. Ho, and Florian Pivit. No part of this article may be reproduced by any means without the written consent of the publisher.