5G adoption is driving spending on utilities (electricity, fuel, and water) higher, as several early adopters of 5G business saw increases in utilities spend (as a percent of Opex ex-D&A) in 2020, according to MTN Consulting.
Based on a sample set of 17 telcos which report the data, utilities as a percent of Opex (ex-D&A) was 5.2 percent in 2020 as compared with roughly 4.8-4.9 percent in each of the previous 4 years, and 5.0 percent in 2015.
The above chart shows utilities as a percent of Opex (ex-D&A) for 2018-20, for some of the key early 5G adopters in our database.
All of the companies in the chart above began their 5G deployment by mid-2019, at latest. For every one of them except China Unicom, utilities spend either rises or stays flat in 2020, as a percent of Opex.
A typical 5G base station consumes up to twice or more the power of a 4G base station, the report said. The disparity can grow at higher frequencies, due to a need for more antennas and a denser layer of small cells. Edge compute facilities needed to support local processing and new Internet of things (IoT) services add to overall network power usage.