The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the virtual Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), from 2 to 17 November 2020. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
***
>> Hi. We replaced the original moderator Chan. So we will start the webinar.
(No audio).
>> CHIH-LIN I: I have a question. Can I share my screen for the PPT later?
>> MING YAN: Yes, you can share your PPT.
>> CHIH-LIN I: Okay. Great.
>> DANIEL SCHIEN: When sharing the PowerPoint presentation from a local computer, will presenter notes not be visible?
>> PIOTR MIECZKOWSKI: No, I don't think so. So you are covered.
>> DANIEL SCHIEN: Okay. That's fine. Thank you.
>> Professor Thas, your mic is muted.
>> THAS NIRMALATHAS: Can you play the video?
Ming Yan, no audio.
>> ROBERTO ZAMBRANA: You can try to restart the video and in the section that you have for sharing the screen, there is an option, there is a check box that says sharing the audio. You need to start again the video.
>> THAS NIRMALATHAS: Yan Ming. I think we might try to stop the video.
Yan Ming, can we stop the video and we'll just try to send it out.
>> Mr. Yan, you can stop the video.
>> Mr. Yan, can you please stop the video? Can you please answer the video? Okay. Now Professor Thas can take over, right?
>> THAS NIRMALATHAS: I think the video, we will see whether we can play it later, but let's ‑‑ because we are about to waste time.
So welcome to the workshop, and we have an exciting panel and we have a tight schedule. So we have seven minutes each and five speakers and then let's hold the questions until all the panelists have shared their views, and then we will come back to question and discussion at the end.
So in that, we have the first presentation is by Dr. Chih‑Lin I from Chinese Mobile Research Institute, and Dr. I is well‑known around the world as a key speaker on this topic and she earned a Ph.D. from Stanford and had major awards and accolades within the industry. So I don't think we need much introduction to Dr. I. Please Dr. I. You have seven minutes, ma'am.
(No audio).
>> PIOTR MIECZKOWSKI: You have to unmute.
>> CHIH-LIN I: All right.
>> THAS NIRMALATHAS: All right. You can share your slides.
>> CHIH-LIN I: Okay. Can you see my slides?
>> THAS NIRMALATHAS: Not yet.
>> CHIH-LIN I: So it's not being shared?
Okay. Sorry.
Okay. So this is fine?
>> THAS NIRMALATHAS: Yes, great. Take it to the slide show.
>> CHIH-LIN I: I guess I would like to share about the greener era that 5G is leading us into or will address. So very quickly. Next page.
Certainly, we are all on here, because we all have a vision for the green future, and China certainly shares this vision, and view as a great national priority, you can see that in both the recent four and five‑year plan being drafted and they are about to complete 13 years. Green has been a key word and also, you probably have heard President Xi has also promised about meeting the carbon neutral ‑‑ sorry, not 2016, 2020 ‑‑ 2016 it's a typo. Not 2016. The carbon neutral by 2016. So green development mode is a national plan. And also globally in terms of the traffic roads is well‑known. Typically, it's set ‑‑ it's around maybe close to double every year. And the expectation is that we have a massive increase in terms of the terminals from the Internet of things development, as well as vast increasing the massive data centers as well as the data center across the globe would go to a great power consumption issue going forward, but it's good to see that major operators across the globe have all promised very aggressive emission target on their part, and also very, I think ‑‑ I think very responsive approach to making use of the renewable energy together.
And in China Mobile aspect of that, you can see that we have, I think, right now, honestly we have the world's largest 4G network, as well as up to now, in terms of the scale and size, we are the largest 5G network as well. And the power consumption has always been very important consideration in all of our deployment operations and just last year, our energy consumption was 26.7 billion‑kilowatt hours, but this is still, I think, a good result after years of dedication into our green action plan.
And in this energy consumption, I think China Mobile is not alone, that together with all the major operators that it's very clear that the Wireless network RAN has represented the majority of that power consumption. That's something that we have to pay great attention to. And if you look at the kind of key technologies that we have been dedicating ourselves to focus on, for 5G, the power amplifier efficiency, the transceiver integrity, and also going from APGA to real ASIC implementation with much more aggressive technology loads. All of these are from hardware side. We are working with all of our partners and ecosystem players to ‑‑ to improve.
And in terms of software side, starting from the 5G standards, we actually have put in a lot of care in trying to maximize opportunity to save energies. And so not only the subframe shutdown and the channel shutdown will continue to be important methods to reduce unnecessary energy consumption according to the traffic loads at the time and the place, we also have been aggressively pursuing the deep dormancy that in certain locates and times we may be able to shut down the majority of the RF circuits which is the largest where the largest power consumption exists. And this is also thanks to our good, I think, design of 5G and frame structure in terms of the pilot and reference symbol placement that allowed this kind of opportunity.
And then in addition to this level, going unto the higher level across the network ‑‑ am I moving? I think ‑‑ there seems to be a latency.
>> THAS NIRMALATHAS: You are moving.
>> We side number four and probably slide number five if you click.
>> CHIH-LIN I: Okay. Good. Okay. So we actually pioneered a very important solution which goes above a single network. It goes across multiple network and we treat multiple network to this 3G as one system and jointly optimized its energy consumption dynamically across the day. We have the minimum resource and the power consumption is that needed to support the necessary traffic with its required PP I. performance. And this started very early on from 2011, to 2012, and by 2014, we first generations in the fields and we used the operation domain to perform the dynamic optimization of the power consumption. And then through second generation, third generation, gradually, we improved not only improved the scale originally at kind of perpetual county level and then it moves up to the provincial level and then finally we integrated a way to the provincial‑wide big data platform, and also brought in eventually machine learning and AI that we actually made use of the users' location prediction, as well as the user traffic and application type prediction to further enhance the capability.
And up until now, this particular system required a multi‑rate cellular energy savings system has been deployed across 19 provinces and annually, it brings up 230 million kilowatt power saving and building on that, we are now moving into incorporating 5G as well to this multi‑generation, multicellular network integrated energy saving platform called I‑green and it's still early phase for this particular phase, but we think it will help with the massive operation of our 5G network.
And all of that would be on the management plan. And in addition, together with partners in O‑RAN alliance, that some of you might have heard of, we are working on a major effort, what we call RAN intelligent controller, RIC, RIC is a control plan all the way down to scheduling and maybe even physical layer platform, that is hierarchical by nature, and it will actually further enhance even more fine grain and more realtime opportunity of highest energy efficiency of the 5G network.
And that is about how we strive to enhance energy efficiency of the 5G network itself. But I think in other important perspective, is how 5G network in the 5G era will help us to enable various verticals to have a green transformation.
And actually, one very important experience we all shared, think across the globe this year, is on the one hand, we have the unfortunate epidemic of COVID‑19 across the globe. On the other hand, because of this, did this pandemic, through our fight globally, and particularly I'm sharing here is our experience in China, how 5G has helped us in many different aspect of our life, being enabled because of 5G connectivity and its capability of offering not only extremely broadband connection, but also large number of collections, as well as very low latency services. In many ways, it is a new opportunity and new mode of the way we live, the learn and work, and even govern and heal ourselves.
And so my summary, quickly, that we have the joint vision, I think all of us on this conference, as well as lots of, I think, colleagues across the world, that carbon neutral 2060 is definitely a shared goal and I understand there's some even more aggressive enterprise have promised to reach carbon neutral way before 2060. Some are talking about 2030 or plus or minus five years.
And in terms of 5G, many are concerned about the high energy consumption, but I have to explain something that is, yes, the energy consumption of 5G, for example, base station is about three or four times of 4G base station. Yes, the 5G network because of its potentially higher density due to the higher spectrum being used, that overall for the same kind of nationwide or Regionwide full coverage of 5G network, the energy consumption is many fold, compared to the previous generations, but I think we can still take in comfort the actual energy efficiency in terms of bit her joule or bit per hertz ‑‑ no. Bit per joule or bit per second per watts in comparison to the previous generation is four or five times higher.
And the reason we had much higher energy consumption in the base station is because 5G peak data rate compared to 4G is about 15 times. So it carries much more traffic with the increased power consumption.
Okay. And then certainly, if we have time, we can discuss in more detail that all kinds of effort we have put in together with all the ecosystem partners to improve our 5G networks, the future power consumption aspect and also that we have ‑‑ we are all expecting that 5G will enable, facilitate low carbon or green transformation of wide array of vertical industries. That's important in our life.
Okay. Thank you.
>> THAS NIRMALATHAS: Thank you, Dr. I for the taking us through the China Mobile carbon footprint.
Now we have the second panelist, Dr. Dan Schien from the University of Bristol and how do we assess and evaluate the impact of mobile Internet.
Dan, the podium is yours. You need to unmute yourself. We can see your slides and you have not unmuted yourself.
>> PIOTR MIECZKOWSKI: I think if you are moving to presenter mode, in the PowerPoint, wherever, you have to share it presenter mode, because when you open up PowerPoint, you have like two views, one is view with slides, like professor just presented and then the other is just, you know, the presenter view. So you have to open up the presenter mode and then look at the Zoom in the share screen option.
>> DANIEL SCHIEN: Let's try this.
>> PIOTR MIECZKOWSKI: Now this works.
>> DANIEL SCHIEN: Okay. Thank you very much for the support. It's not that I'm not using online tools all the time, but okay. Fantastic.
Thank you very much for the invite, my name is Daniel Schien. I want to talk about the environmental assessments of digital services and 5G. And the environmental assessments talking about the consuming and the delivering services and the associated carbon emissions.
Digital services are those delivered over information and communication technology in this conception and focused by deliver specifically by those on delivery centers and delivered further for networks nor the devices.
Okay.
So let me first talk about green commitments. 2020 has been a very strong year for the sector with many organizations announcing plans to become carbon neutral. Many organizations have made such green commitments. The headlines have been grabbed by Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft all pledging to be carbon neutral by 2030 or 2040. The environmental impact is a business risk, as well as an opportunity.
Organizations US as green peace have been calling out big cloud organizations for a while on the energy sources, and more frequently now, the mainstream media is also paying attention due to an absence of robust information open the energy consumption and carbon emissions for services and some of these reports have been exaggerating the actual energy consumption, sadly.
But we see a new development and that is organizations are now ‑‑ such as The Climate Pledge or the Science Based Targeted they require strict emissions of scope one, two, and three emissions for the organizations who joined these initiatives and that will hopefully help somewhat with organizational reporting.
Though it doesn't completely solve the questions when it comes to assessing specific services, so I will talk about that in a moment more.
Now, why is that ‑‑ why is that challenging? So if we look the supply chains of digital services, these are complex. Digital systems are not the only systems with complex supply chains, but what we are ‑‑ what we are observing is that those sensationalistic ports of alarming energy consumption and streaming that have emerged is due to this absence of robust data, and mainly borne out of the fact that no single organization associated to the delivery of the service has oversight of the entire system.
Digital service systems are provided for many organizations working together. I have a screen shot of the delivery system from a recent white paper that we coauthored with the BBC and although the BBC is providing the service, they on infrastructure provided by many organizations such as cloud providers and network providers and sadly at the moment, they don't provide the data that is necessary for the sustainability professionals within the media organizations to carry out the assessments themselves.
These are the ‑‑ the four building blocks here that need to be taken into account. The datacenter service, the wired networks, cellular networks and user devices.
And that's why our team at the university of Bristol is supporting a new initiative called Dimpact. We are academics in this effort and we are supporting sustainability practitioners in industry by creating a reporting tool for scope, one, two, and three. And this tool is compatible with the greenhouse gas protocol for the protocol and the Science Based Targeted and dimpact.org.
I listed some of the founding members of Dimpact that include media organizations as well as infrastructure providers, and in Dimpact, we offer service models and background data that these organizations can then use in a secure system to calculate their own footprints for reporting.
But importantly, we can also see that Dimpact provides a place for these organizations to share best practices and to learn about the ‑‑ the greening of their own organizations, for making optimizations in the delivery of services and that's the topic of my next slide.
The final ‑‑ yeah, the final element I want to talk about the sustainable design, this refers to considering sustainability alongside other criteria, such as user experience and cost when designing a service.
And this then allows to choose less energy intense options among the design alternatives. I want to briefly describe an example. And in this specific example, where we're talking about eliminating digital waste, digital waste is the ‑‑ is taking place when a service is provided, but part or the entirety of that service is not providing any value to the user.
And in the specific study, we first estimated the electricity footprint of YouTube and we see here the proportion of the different parts the delivery system ranked according to their contribution to the overall footprint but then we wanted to evaluate how such a footprint can be used in sustainable design, and the concrete intervention was here in some cases we ‑‑ we know from colleagues such as Caroline Lord that they observed YouTube sometimes being used as a radio service and the music is only being listened to but the video signal has not been consumed. So no one was looking at the screen. Maybe the phone was in the pocket.
And then we analyze how would a service that may be automatically detects that the screen is not being seen and then change the service that only the audio stream is being used. How would that contribute to the reduction of energy reduction and associated carbon emissions, and you can see that this is being substantial.
So in summary, what follows for the development of 5G? There are four things I would like to mention. The first is we would like to have as much renewable electricity sourced for the provision of cellular networks as possible. No doubt.
And secondly, it's important to comprehensively report on this energy consumption such that we can enable robust decision making by all parties, including designers and media organizations, consumers and the public sector.
And thirdly, we need transparency on the energy consumption by services. So what is happening when a service is delivered via a network and how much of the energy consumption is associated to this specific service.
And finally, we would like to see more cross‑sector collaboration between infrastructure providers and media organizations, such as those that we enable within the Dimpact project.
That is all. Thank you very much for your attention.
>> THAS NIRMALATHAS: Thank you for really sharing that perspective. And, again, please keep the questions coming and we will come back to Q&A. Let's move to the next panelist. We have Mr. Steven Moore, the head of climate action of GMSA, the podium is to you, Steven.
>> STEVEN MOORE: Hi. Held local. Can you hear me okay?
>> PIOTR MIECZKOWSKI: Yes, perfectly!
>> STEVEN MOORE: That's the first challenge. Let's see if I can share without problem.
>> THAS NIRMALATHAS: You can go to slide show.
>> STEVEN MOORE: That's true. I could go into slide show, couldn't I? Let's go to view. How about that?
>> THAS NIRMALATHAS: Yes, that's great.
>> STEVEN MOORE: Great. So good morning, everyone and good afternoon, wherever you are. It's good morning here in London. My name is Steven Moore and I'm from the GSMA. Sorry. So I will talk to you about the climate action program that we have at the GSMA that engages mobile operators on climate action.
Just before I does, I wanted to give you an overview of ‑‑ if I can click on to my next slide. Here we go. An overview of the electricity use and carbon emissions of ICT sector to put it in context.
So globally, around 4% of electricity is used by the ICT sector, with an additional 3% for entertainment and media. And in terms of the breakdown of carbon emissions, you can see on the right‑hand side it's important to understand that there is significant carbon emissions associated with both the customer use of devices, about 27%, as well as device manufacturer which is a similar amount. And then you can see over the top of the graph, the operations of running networks. So data centers, entertainment networks, mobile networks and fixed networks as well. And useful to bear in mind, because in looking at the environmental impact and tackling that, in particular carbon emissions, it's important to address all aspects of the supply chain.
So what is the mobile industry doing around climate action? And last year, in February of 2019, the GSMA, which is the industry association representing mobile operators, committed to move the mobile industry to net zero emissions by 2050. So this is in line with the highest ambition of the Paris climate change agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. So how are we looking to do this? Firstly, as mentioned by my previous speaker, disclosing your carbon emissions. So being transparent about your scope, one, two and three emissions. Secondly focus on what the path is to zero emissions for the segment. And it ideally aligns to net zero by 2050.
So CDP disclosure. So CDP is a global reporting system for carbon emissions and, it's important because transparency around this is necessary in order to start managing carbon emissions. Both to understand what the risks are of carbon intensive areas of your business, but also what the opportunities might be presented by shifting to lower or zero carbon products and services and that's particularly of relevance to the mobile sector because digitization enables ‑‑ (no audio).
Digitalization enables redirections in carbon emissions in other areas of the economy.
In total, more than 50 mobile operators covering more than two‑thirds of mobile connections disclose to the CDP last year, which was a really big up lift on the year before, and was as a result of us engaging with mobile operators around the world.
Also in climate disclosure, there is the TCFD framework, which is a framework to look to bring into your business an understanding of the financial risks and opportunities associated with climate change, to improve governance around it, across your business, to embed these considerations within the strategy of your business, to better understand and manage risk and use metrics and targets going forward as well.
So we also work with operators to help them understand the TCFD framework and a number of our members already use it.
So in terms of the progress so far, in these areas, I talked about member's climate disclosure. The mobile industry pathway to net zero emissions, this was something that we calculated and created and launched earlier this year, back in February: It was a consortium of the GSMA working with the ITU, working with the global esustainability initiative, to understand what this pathway would be so we could reach net zero emissions by 2050. And there's slightly different reduction pathways whether you have a mobile operator, whether you are a fixed line operator or whether you are a data center operator.
In terms of then aligning carbon reduction targets to the science, so 29 operators representing more than 30% of global connections have committed to science‑based targets. These actually represent just over 50% of the industry by revenue. So some of the previous presenters actually mention a few of the mobile operators such as the likes of Vodafone, Telefonica, et cetera. So big, global operators who set in some cases actually carbon reduction targets faster than the asset to pathway.
We engage with mobile operators around the world, through the climate action task force that's been set up. We have more than 40 members part of this task force. Representation from every part of the world, North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Europe, and Australia as well. And the purpose of the task force is to highlight best practice, to engage in thought leadership, to understand more about what we can do around climate action.
And one of the particular areas we focused on was updating a climate policy for the industry. And this is something that we updated and published over the summer. And this is because we wanted to reflect the increased amount of activity on climate action and leadership that's being shown across the industry, but also to highlight where a challenge is going forward.
So energy efficiency, as we are talking about, particularly in the context of the rollout of the 5G. which is putting pressure on the electric use. Digitalization reducing emissions, which is how you can use smart connective technologies in both ‑‑ both within the mobile sector and outside to reduce the emissions. And equipment sustainability is very important and more of a challenge, especially engaging with suppliers and supporting them improve their capacity in this space.
And then adapting to a changing climate. As an infrastructure business, we are at risk of exchanging climate, extreme weather events, flooding, et cetera. So this is something that's updated and published and available. Please do feel free to check it out on GSMA.com.
I will just run through a couple of projects that we are doing around particular areas of focus for climate action. Energy efficiency, and artificial intelligence for energy workshop, which we will be kicking off in energy. Energy efficiency benchmarking project which we'll be doing from January as well to understand how operators, network energy efficiency varies to understand how to improve their energy efficiency, and on renewable energy, we engage with the RE100, the global campaign, a number of the members of the task force are members of the RE100 campaign, they advocate for renewable energy mark and they also have a lot of information on how to source renewable electricity.
We have also just produced a report looking at renewable energy for mobile towers, particular interest in low, middle‑income countries where you are reliant on diesel generators where you don't necessarily have reliable grid and this report looks at renewable energy alternatives.
Device and equipment sustainability, we work a lot through the joint audit corporation, which improves understanding and why it's important to measure carbon emissions and set the reduction targets. There's a new initiative which is called the eco rating which is being looked at for mobile handsets and engage a lot around that to ‑‑ there's a particular tool we actually have which is an ewaste policy tracker which is available on our website. So you can understand the ewaste legislation in different countries.
And I mentioned before enabling carbon reductions in the sector and I think this is important to bear in mind in the context of potential increase of 5G, which can actually be the savings, the carbon savings and efficiencies which are being realized in other sectors and everything is connected now. Really you can see from the graph that we are already seeing efficiencies in all sectors whether it's smart agriculture, whether it's smart buildings, whether it's the energy sector, which would rely on connectivity to make sure that the balance of renewal energy brought on maintains a stable energy grid and smart manufacturing, and the way we are living and working.
And obviously what has happened over the last six month has meant that we are all relying on digital connectivity a lot more and world traveling a lot less and there's some big savings associated with that.
Just to finish off, we have a number of resources on our website to help operators understand their carbon emissions. We produced the climate action handbook, which is kind of an introductory 101 and the climate policy. We also have a climate action toolkit and a guide to setting carbon reduction targets that's in line with the new sector pathway.
So apologies in I'm slightly over the time. Quite a lot of information to get through. That gives you a good overview of what we are doing in our sector.
>> THAS NIRMALATHAS: Thank you, Steven. It's nice to know the extent of climate action and energy efficiency improvements the GSMA is undertaking.
Let us move to the next panelist. We have Mr. Piotr Mieczkowski from the digital transformation of power to share on the impact or the upgrade that 5G is promising us across a number of applications.
>> PIOTR MIECZKOWSKI: Thank you for having me. So first, let me congratulate Steven for bringing the last slides, which presented the 5G impact. So this is exactly what I was talking about ‑‑ I would like to talk about. So I know even in total 5G network will consume more energy, because there is more data but we have to keep in mind that 5G is more efficient than 4G, 3G, and 2G, especially. And per bit, it's more efficient by four and five times as was mentioned at the beginning of this session, but we have to keep in mind that especially in EU, since we are talking about EU Green Deal, that EU Green Deal, which is about massive digitalization of energy sector, will not be possible without Smart Grid, IoT, and 5G connectivity. So in other words, 5G is a must. It's like electricity, to make the whole world much more greener.
In terms of current status, what is happening in terms of the 5G implementation scenarios in verticals so what is the potential? So first of all, there were more than 50, you know, 50 use cases already tested in the whole of Europe. Some of them in the UK, coordinated by the UK 5G association or alliance and some of them were Scandinavia and some were the in south part of Europe. Most of them were covered by grants from Horizon 2020 from EU funds dedicated for R&Ds. We have seen that there is a ‑‑ you know, a huge potential to make the whole world much more greener, especially in terms of, you know, intelligent networks and Smart Grids, which, you know, manage the ‑‑ the renewable energy.
We have to keep in mind that if you want to manage the whole new energy sector, then it's totally different than the old one, with call, et cetera, and you have to, you know, micromanage the flow of electricity within the whole system. You have to ‑‑ you have to manage also the ‑‑ the accumulators and other part of the ‑‑ of the whole network, which means it's not possible to have reliable green energy without huge connectivity.
So for example, in Poland, we are implementing LT450, but we are waiting for 5G to be implemented in order to manage the green energy.
In terms of the potential also, when we are in the middle of pandemic or maybe at the end, let's hope because of the advances that are coming, there are many use cases. You know, 5G is a huge connectivity provider and so it could be a good ‑‑ it could give reliable connection for ‑‑ for example, for the automated net necks of the testimony, for example, at airports or any place where people are moving.
Additionally, of course, there's a huge case which was presented in China that you can work ‑‑ that you could work remotely, and I'm not talking about our work, you know, let's say, office clerks or managers, whatever, but I'm talking about the ‑‑ the vecchios. Could you control the vecchios in mines, that's one case.
And their case is robotics. There's robots already implemented in several hospitals, which sterilize the rooms and, you know, they kill the virus with a special light, I would say. So they are also connected through 5G network. Of course, probably you could think about WiFi, but, you know, we have to keep in mind at least in Poland that it's hard to cover the whole hospitals with WiFi network and 5G is much more reliable because they are a separate function, you know, dedicated IoT, which makes the signal go much deeper, way deeper into the building, because of the special function of 5G networks. So you could actually manage the robots even in the underground, which is not normal or you can do it actually with 2G or 3G.
So that's very briefly my input since I was ‑‑ I was asked to talk for the five minutes.
You have to unmute. That's I think most common word or sentence we talk in the world.
>> THAS NIRMALATHAS: Yes thank you. A. I think I was unmuted me, and because of the noise someone muted me.
The last, we are going to be cover, Robert Zambrana, he will talk about how to guide enterprises to take the pathway towards low carbon and green transformation.
>> ROBERTO ZAMBRANA: Thank you very much, Thas and thank you for the invitation to this panel. I am glad to share some thoughts about it. First of all, it's necessary to remember the difference between different regions and countries about the state of development of 5G technologies worldwide. In one side, we may find advanced development ‑‑ deployments of 5G networks in the United States, Poland, we just heard about it Sweden, Spain, Netherlands, China, South Korea, Japan and Brazil, and South Africa.
As part of the global south, most of these countries are halfway to consolidated 4G technology and we could say that 5G is far behind. This reality goes hand in hand with Internet penetration rates considering the same countries, broadband Internet services are below 40% despite the fact that coverage of technologies, like HSPA, and HSPA plus, what we used to call 3.75G and higher such as LTE and LTE advance cover nearly 80% of the territories where more than 80% of their users live, actually.
And after hearing so many conferences during this IGF 2020, we may confirm that this paradox is mainly a consequence of the high cost of mobile Internet services due to a business model that has not evolved and that continues to apply rates based on the volume of information transmitted which makes the services still unaffordable to most citizens.
This is one of the reasons that in this region, Internet services treated as basic service such as water or electricity, and that's considered a fundamental rights in the constitutions of several of these countries.
Finally, with this background and you are colleague Steven Moore said before in his presentation, the contribution to the generation of carbon footprint is quite lower compared to other sectors such as industry, transport, electricity, general consumption, among others, which far exceeds their priority of mitigation.
This is certainly not the case in countries where 4G services are already more widely deployed and where 5G is undergoing final testing to enter the market.
An important example of this regulatory action that governments can take is the circular economy action plan as one of the main components of the European Green Deal, that includes measures suggests ‑‑ and I'm going to read this, electricity and ICT including mobile phones, tablets and laptops under ecodesign directive so that devices are designed for energy efficient and durability, repairability, upgradeability, maintenance, reuse and recycling.
Focus on electricity and ICT as priority sector for implementing the right to repair, including the right to update also that software.
And finally, just as an example, regulatory measures on chargers for mobile phones and similar devices including the introduction of common charger improving the durability of charging cables and incentives to the couple of the purchase of chargers from the purchase of new devices.
Of course, it's necessary to consider how to involve and what incentives, actually, we could offer to the private sector so that it can adequately and quickly meet this requirements. On one hand, we have the operators with deployment of 5G infrastructure, who should include mechanisms that as far as possible can employ renewable electricity sources in the networks and our colleagues already mentioned this.
Well, this includes from their design mechanisms, to accurately measure the energy consumption used by all the component of their infrastructure, to collect this information in realtime and in transport and manner so that the information is contrasted by the regulators based on the established indicators.
On the other hand, we have the manufacturers of the devices, particularly mobile terminals, which following the example of the European Commission and the regulation that is intended to be implemented will force manufacturers to follow its guidelines, which will surely collide with conventional production strategies, and business models that sustain an important part of the reviews and massive sale of chargers and other accessories. Therefore, governments will have to be very creative when imposing these type of regulatory actions incorporating mechanisms that allow commuting this phase of taxes with others such as a spectrum allocation cost or other regulatory fees. This is very different of what can be done in the global south, such as the LAC region.
In this region, unlike the European Union, there's no supernatural organizations and no regulatory harmonization to articulate a single common strategy to impose this time of regulatory actions as a region. This leaves the implementation of these measures to the discretion and depending on the success imposed on them, it will not be uncommon to expect that any cost or reduction in revenues that this means for 5G network operators and/or device manufacturers will mean that the economic impact will be passed on to the end users.
And under these circumstances, considering that the risk of break in the balance between the urgent need to increase the Internet penetration rate, and pave the way for emerging technologies such as 5G, and IoT as one of the collateral technologies, it will be fundamental to seek consensus among the private sector. Government, particularly regulators and even end users in action suggest ‑‑ and I will end with these five points, establish and reaffirm the commitment and the joint responsibility that we also have to contribute to the carbon reduction, encourage operators to modernize their 3G and 4G infrastructure, and also plan, design and deploy their 5G networks taking into account good eco efficient and low carbon strategies.
Encourage and devise manufacturers to develop production lines with longer obsolescence times and establish new marketing models for new mobile broadband Internet services that enables minimum speeds like 2 to 4 megabits per second but with unlimited potential. And a potential benefit for operators, efforts should be made to reduce the cost of access to a spectrum in new bands required by 5G and to review other bands allocations in order to reduce these costs.
Finally, realize multilateral agreements between the governments of the different regions of the global south to implement joint strategies that establish a common regulatory framework for all Internet broadband mobile broadband services, including 5G. Thank you very much, Thas.
>> THAS NIRMALATHAS: Roberto, that's interesting to finish it on the significant challenge that we have in terms of the connectivity divide and how we need to change the government ‑‑ the governments need to change how they encourage sustainability in these areas.
I think we have a few minutes left, but there was really interesting conversation from different perspective, but I'm really good to see a coordinated coverage of topics all the way from what the operator perspective in terms of the roadmap towards I think 2060, Dr. I articulated the roadmap to zero carbon mobile networks. Dan, you really took us through the kind of how to orchestrate or access the energy efficiency or the energy impact of digital services and I think it was really great to see how your tools can be really extended for broader global use in terms of assessing energy efficiency.
And we also have learned how 5G is critical to really achieving energy efficiency across many sectors and while we here talk about the energy efficiency of 5G itself, but 5G is going to offset energy impact of many sectors, and you mentioned very importantly about with just the health and the ‑‑ you know, the energy sectors, for example, Smart Grid.
And it's also great to see how GSMA is really activating a lot of projects in this space and I think it's great to see mobile operators committing to climate change and very vibrant program.
And Roberto, you really summed it up with some of the challenges when we have major operators committing to this but we also have a significant divide in our connectivity map and that brings us a lot of challenges how do we administer. So we might wrap it up there because I don't see any burning questions there, but I think there was a video that they were planning to show but I'm not sure whether they are going to play now. With that, I want to thank all of you if we finish it early because I think it cuts off very quickly.
>> PIOTR MIECZKOWSKI: Thank you.
>> THAS NIRMALATHAS: Thank you.
>> STEVEN MOORE: Thank you very much.
>> DANIEL SCHIEN: Thank you.
>> THAS NIRMALATHAS: Thanks a lot.