As part of the Paris COP21 Climate event, the 190 countries attending agree that SpiderCloud’s E-RAN is the most sustainable indoor cellular system.

Just kidding!

But, seriously, consider our small cell architecture benefits:

• Annual Electricity carbon difference – Our partner NEC analyzed electricity use for powering technology and air conditioning required to dissipate the heat generated by a passive DAS infrastructure in a 350,000 sq foot building.

  This table converts their finding into *kgCO2e:

  	DAS Carbon	E-RAN Carbon
  Technology	33,916 kgCO2e	3,431 kgCO2e
  Air Conditioning	28,667 kgCO2e	Not required

   

  That is a huge annual difference of 59,152 kgCO2e in Carbon Footprint just on electricity consumption. To put this into sharp perspective a similar Carbon Footprint is generated by 26,956 litres of petrol (for USA readers, that’s 7,121 gallons of gasoline). Let that sink in for a moment, please.

• Installation – An E-RAN installation requires less investment of people resources and site visits to the building to be improved. This directly translates into less use of vehicles for round trip travel to/from the building. There are additional resource savings by using existing transport, and not building a parallel infrastructure throughout a building. Finally, with an E-RAN, the packing trash is very limited relative to the packing and surplus materials to be discarded with a DAS, eNodeB, and additional HVAC.
• E-Waste – In the world of sustainability, what happens to technology at its end of life can have profound negative impacts when they are disposed. It’s well documented here. When an E-RAN leverages the enterprise’s physical LAN by way of a logical VLAN created to host it, there is literally no mobile operator E-Waste generated by the transport infrastructure. The mobile operator’s E-Waste lifecycle contribution by the E-RAN is limited to just SpiderCloud’s technology because the Enterprise already has the E-Waste lifecycle for transport.
• Extended life – the E-RAN can have a far longer lifetime than legacy systems due to software upgradability of platform. The Services Node is software upgradeable for features and the Radio Nodes can be software upgraded when re-farming spectrum from UMTS to LTE and adding Carrier Aggregation. Compared to the alternatives, that’s a huge win.
• Adding capacity – as we discussed in this post, because of the massive RF air link and Ethernet fronthaul capacity, there are no fuel consuming truck rolls necessary to add capacity to an E-RAN. Because a 1Gb Ethernet physical port with a 100Mb or greater logical rate is typically used to provision a system, when the time comes to add bandwidth, the OSS of circuit provider is used to add capacity.

Because we leverage synergy with Enterprise technology in our own way; along with SON software and many little features that future-proof the mobile operator’s investment, the SpiderCloud E-RAN is a very green technology.

If you would like the supporting analytical numbers from NEC, see their presentation from Small Cells Americas, November 2013.

– Art King, SpiderCloud Wireless, Director of Enterprise Services & Technologies

Twitter: @EMobilityInside
Visit our Enterprise IT site @ http://SpiderCloud.com/EInsider

*Calculator used with “kWh electricity (main source)” and “litres of petrol” operations.