Mobile operator EE (BT) has today announced that they’ve deployed “cell sleep” technology across their UK 4G (mobile broadband) network, which they “anticipate” could deliver total energy savings of up to 4.5m KWh per year – reducing both their demand on the local grid and helping to cut costs at a time of high electricity prices.
The announcement, which could be read as somewhat of a response to Three UK’s similar development (here), states that their new “cell sleep” software works by putting certain 4G (LTE) capacity carriers to sleep when the capacity is not needed – based on predicted periods of low traffic which have been established for each site through machine learning.
The system then automatically wakes up during busy periods, and is also configured to react to unexpected surges which might occur during scheduled sleep modes – in which event, the carriers wake up within a matter of seconds to serve demand without any interruption to customers.
The setup also supports an even lower power state, called “deep sleep“, which can be activated if required, such as during overnight periods of extremely low demand. According to BT, the technology is expected to deliver energy savings of up to 2 KWh per site per day, or 4.5m KWh per year across EE’s estate.
Greg McCall, Chief Networks Officer at BT Group, said:
“There is huge potential for energy savings across our networks by dynamically matching power consumption against network usage. The optimisation and roll-out of cell sleep technology to over 19,500 sites across the UK is a significant milestone in achieving this, and an important development in countering the massive growth in data consumption we’re seeing across our networks.”
The move complements the operator’s recent 3G switch-off, which is claimed to deliver energy savings of 17.44m KWh per year. Not to mention that EE has also been deploying more energy-efficient Radio Access Network (RAN) equipment, such as ultra-lightweight Massive MIMO technology, which they claim uses up to 40% less energy than the previous generation of radio equipment.