Radio access network carbon footprint in France: historical trend and prospective scenarios
摘要
While the ITU has set ambitious CO2eq reduction targets for the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector, it is of upmost importance to estimate the carbon footprint of mobile networks at the country level. Indeed, mobile networks drive the dynamics of the sector, and several policies are implemented at the national level to stick to a decarbonization trajectory. In this paper, we adopt a bottom-up approach to estimate the carbon footprint of the Radio Access Network (RAN) in France based on public data sets, well-accepted models, and realistic figures. We show that the French mobile networks have been characterized by an almost constant growth in terms of the number of equipment, energy consumption, and carbon footprint since 2015. With our assumptions, the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of the total carbon footprint is estimated to be