Identifying KPIs for green networks

Measuring progress towards environmental goals is a critical success factor for operators as they move forward on their journeys towards greater environmental sustainability and energy efficiency in their networks and operations.

“NGMN’s vision is to provide impactful guidance to the industry with Green Future Networks being a core strategic priority”, said Anita Doehler, CEO, NGMN. “With the publication of KPIs and target values for assessing Green Networks, we are realising that vision by supporting and enabling operators and their wider ecosystem partners to measure and manage their progress towards their sustainability goals”, she added.

This latest NGMN publication outlines a set of KPIs and target values alongside a framework for consolidating the KPIs into an overall measure. The framework encompasses two major pillars: Environmental KPIs as well as Energy and Quality of Experience KPIs. The outlined KPIs build upon and utilise the best practices of existing telco sustainability initiatives and frameworks and, in an industry first, define target values and a scoring methodology for consolidating multiple KPIs into a single measure. Further, NGMN suggests to combine energy efficiency and service quality KPIs to produce a useful measure of how an operator is improving its energy efficiency while maintaining the high service quality end users expect from their mobile network.

As the industry gains experience with these metrics, it is anticipated that the KPIs and the framework will be further developed to ensure continued alignment with industry needs. This will include ensuring that the NGMN KPIs and framework continue to be aligned with work of other industry bodies – with the ultimate aim of ensuring a single set of industry wide agreed KPIs.

This publication was developed with input from across the industry – with NGMN Partners representing operators and vendors, and with umlaut (part of Accenture) as a major contributor to this work.