Tackling energy consumption in telecoms
EIT InnoEnergy recently welcomed start-up Wupatec to its ecosystem. The company’s technology WETT reduces energy consumption from wireless telecoms by up to 40%.
Driven by a steep increase in the use of mobile broadband for data transfer and the deployment of new wireless standards, society is experiencing an unprecedented increase in energy demand to power wireless communication system transmitters globally.
The complexity of the latest communication protocols (e.g. 5G-3GPP Release 15-16) requires improvements to network capacity by adding radio frequency transmitters, increasing signal bandwidth and lowering latency. The additional transmitters will significantly increase energy consumption. Furthermore, the new standards have stringent requirements such as signal linearity and bandwidth, necessitating the use of more powerful baseband digital processing to ensure compliance.
To solve this challenge, WETT will almost halve energy waste in front end wireless communications by
implementing a patented Envelope Tracking technique – reducing telecom operators’ energy bills. If the technology was applied industry-wide, these energy savings could reach up to $2 billion USD and 42 million tons of CO2 equivalent annually.