IP routing provider Ribbon Communications recently put out its 2022 sustainability report, which highlighted the company has more than halfway reached its goal to reduce direct carbon emissions by 30% by 2030.
Emission reduction is a major sustainability goal among telcos, with many providers aiming to become carbon neutral by 2035.
For Ribbon’s part, Patrick Macken, Ribbon’s EVP and chief legal officer, said the company is trying to determine which suppliers are “going to have the most impact to us” from an environmental, social and governance (ESG) perspective.
Ribbon in its annual sustainability report stated 35% of its “Tier One suppliers” have been audited with “zero major non-conformances” against the company’s Supplier Audit Protocol.
Macken explained to Fierce a lot of these suppliers provide “major components” for most Ribbon products – “all of the electronics, all the PCBs [printed circuit boards]…the chips and memory and everything else that goes in there.”
Measuring the environmental impact of the supply chain is critical. Optera, for instance, is a company focused on helping organizations cut indirect emissions from activities outside their operational boundaries, such as supply chains, transportation and product usage and disposal.
“Ideally, we want to get to everybody. But when you’ve got thousands of vendors, that’s just not realistic,” said Macken. “So we said for us, the approach is let’s figure out who those top ones are, start there, and then continue to progress from there.”
Ribbon is also striving to set ESG goals that are challenging yet at the same time reasonable.
“It has to be realistic, you can’t just say, ‘hey look, we’re going to go zero emissions in five years.' You’ll never achieve it,” he said.
The company’s sustainability report noted Ribbon’s new XDR routers – which collect and analyze data across endpoints, email, cloud computing and other systems – have delivered “an 80% improvement in power consumption in Gigabit per second capacity,” compared to earlier models.
Macken said the XDR routers are part of Ribbon’s IP optical portfolio, which typically deals with “a lot of data transfer.”
“If you think about it, in data centers or customer data centers there used to be huge racks of equipment right? And a lot of those were routers that are routing network traffic to various places within the network,” he explained. “They’re exceptionally power hungry.”
From an ESG standpoint, Ribbon looks at how much traffic these routers can handle for customers and the cost per speed to do so, thus “it becomes something easy for us to look at.”
Road to sustainability for telcos
Macken thinks the telco industry has “made good progress” in sustainability efforts, especially as providers address where high-speed internet is most needed.
“Naturally if you think about telephone service, it’s very power intensive and it takes up a lot of real estate,” he said. “I think [telcos] have done a nice job of saying how can they innovate to sort of reduce that footprint overall, so that they’re using less electricity, using less real estate, opening it up for other things.”
He added sustainability is one factor of the push towards fiber and 5G networks. But more importantly, those technologies are “giving more access to information to more people in an easier way.”
In an interview with Fierce earlier this year, Ribbon CEO Bruce McClelland said growing demand for 5G and fiber will likely boost its IP routing business.
Fiber has a tendency to be “more low cost” than copper lines, Macken said, hence it’s “much more faster and it’s much more efficient with less energy loss.”
In the case of 5G, it can transmit data in places where “it’s just harder to build out the infrastructure for maybe laying fiber.”
But what telcos need to keep in mind, when thinking about how to make their infrastructure more sustainable, is “regulations to provide landline service haven’t gone away,” said Macken, despite more people using mobile devices.
“There are still a lot of people in this country who do rely on a landline you know, they don’t use a mobile phone. [Telcos] have to be cognizant of that.”