Nokia took aim at the energy used by its next-generation technology by pledging to half 5G base station power consumption by 2023, following up on a recent commitment to fulfil a range of tougher climate action objectives.

The Finnish vendor stated its AirScale 5G mMIMO base stations would achieve an average power consumption reduction of 50 per cent by two years’ time, enabled by “continuous improvements” in software functionalities and new product variants based on its latest SoCs.

Nokia claimed in recent customer field tests, conducted over a live network, power consumption for the company’s 5G mMIMO base station sites was double-digit percentage points lower than that of its nearest competitor, and it would continue to work to lower overall power consumption.

As well as improvements to SoCs, Nokia plans to use 5G sleep mode features to further optimise base station energy usage.

The announcement comes after the company set climate goals for its operations and products used by its customers, as part of the Science Based Targets Initiative which pushes environmental action across the private sector.

Nokia acknowledged that while 5G was a natively greener technology compared with previous network technologies, increased deployements were set to increase traffic dramatically “making it critical that the energy consumed does not rise at the same rate”.