Erik Søe-Pedersen, Product Line Director for PRISME proactive service assurance
How smarter network operations can lower emissions as they cut costs and improve customer experience.
Sustainability has become a board-level priority for telecom operators. Most initiatives focus on infrastructure, energy sourcing, and large-scale network investments.
But there is a less visible part of the network that rarely features in these conversations: excessive in-home power consumption.
While behaviours vary across countries and cultures, millions of households leave their gateways and Wi-Fi networks running continuously, often without adapting to real usage patterns. They are designed to deliver reliable connectivity at all times. In practice, that often means running at full capacity when it isn’t needed – for example, overnight or during low activity if all residents are out at work.
This “always-on” behaviour creates a form of inefficiency that is easy to overlook at the level of a single household but has a significant environmental impact when multiplied across the full subscriber base.
In previous blogs, we’ve looked at how proactive service assurance for in-home Wi-Fi networks can reduce support costs and improve customer experience. In this article, we look at how it can also reduce energy consumption and emissions, without requiring new infrastructure or major network changes.
Why this matters now for operators
Sustainability targets for telecom operators are becoming more specific and more closely monitored. At the same time, expectations from regulators, investors, and customers continue to rise.
Most efforts focus on infrastructure and energy sourcing. These are important, but they often require significant investment. By contrast, the home network is rarely part of this conversation, despite being a large and continuously active part of the service footprint.
This creates an opportunity to address sustainability through operational improvements, not just infrastructure investment.
When cost efficiency, broadband customer experience, and sustainability align
Historically, reducing support costs, improving customer experience, and lowering emissions have been treated as separate priorities. In practice, they are driven by many of the same issues.
When home networks operate inefficiently, the result is instability, repeated troubleshooting, and avoidable support interactions. In some cases, this leads to engineer visits, adding both operational cost and additional emissions from truck rolls.
Proactive service assurance solutions, such as ADB’s PRISME, can intervene when they detect in-home performance issues, identify inefficiencies, and apply small, automated adjustments that both improve stability and optimise energy usage.
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How smarter network behaviour reduces energy consumption
So, how does this type of optimisation work in practice? It’s about identifying how the network is actually being used, and when full performance is not required. Then, you can automatically adapt the network accordingly.
For example, during periods of low or no activity, Wi-Fi networks can be instructed to operate at reduced transmission power or avoid maintaining excessive channel activity. Similarly, avoiding repeated reconfigurations or unnecessary corrective actions, and keeping the necessary changes to times of low network traffic, helps to reduce both instability and excess energy use. More advanced gateways may already have some of this functionality built-in, but remote optimization can help operators offer a similar level of service to customers with older or cheaper CPE, prolonging the life of existing hardware.
The key is not to make frequent or disruptive changes, but to apply measured modifications based on real usage patterns. Networks should respond when needed and deliberately avoid acting when conditions are already stable.
The result is fewer support calls, fewer truck rolls, and more efficient use of network resources — reducing both operational cost and energy consumption across the subscriber base.
From small adjustments to measurable impact at scale
The adjustments required to improve efficiency at the level of a single household are relatively small and context dependent.
Across a full subscriber base, even modest reductions in energy consumption per device translate into measurable savings. In practice, this can mean reducing energy usage per gateway by a small but significant margin. With PRISME, we find we can typically cut power consumption by 2–15%, depending on usage patterns and network conditions.
Across a network of 100,000 subscribers, this level of optimisation can translate into a reduction of hundreds of tonnes of CO₂ emissions per year.
With solutions like PRISME, operators can not only reduce energy consumption but also measure and track its impact over time, supporting both operational decisions and sustainability reporting.
Rethinking sustainability in broadband operations
How networks operate day to day, particularly in the home, plays a vital role in energy consumption and should not be ignored in sustainability/ESG reporting. Small inefficiencies, repeated across large subscriber bases, create a measurable impact over time.
By improving how networks behave in these everyday conditions, operators can reduce costs, improve customer experience, and lower emissions at the same time.
If you’re exploring how to reduce the environmental impact of your network operations, our experts would be happy to share what we’re seeing in practice and how solutions like PRISME can help quantify and reduce energy consumption at scale.
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