Safaricom Kenya Picks Nokia to Drive Network Energy Efficiency

Nokia has deployed its AVA Energy Efficiency software for Safaricom Kenya to help the operator achieve lower power consumption and costs over its 5G, 4G, and 3G networks.

The rollout, covering approximately 30,000 5G, 4G, and 3G cells, is expected to lead to planned network energy cost savings of 8-10%, and follows the recent successful completion of a pilot program with Safaricom Kenya.

Nokia AVA for Energy uses artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to shut idle and unused equipment automatically during low usage periods whilst maintaining customer experience; this is done in conjunction with Nokia Radio Energy Efficiency features.

Nokia has a growing list of more than 50 completed or active energy saving projects with CSPs around the world, as operators increasingly look to reduce energy consumption and costs, and address environmental sustainability issues in their networks.

Samar Mittal, VP, Cloud and Network Services (CNS), Global Business Center (GBC) at Nokia MEA, said: “As Nokia says often: there is no green without digital. So we are very pleased to be helping Safaricom lower its network power usage and use its assets in a more cost-effective way through Nokia’s advanced software capabilities. These drive meaningful power use and cost reductions and do so without impact to the customer experience. This is especially important as we look to the annual United Nations climate conference later this week and the progress we hope that is achieved at that gathering.”

Anthony Gacanja, Network Director at Safaricom Kenya, said: “Network power consumption is a challenging issue for operators on many levels, including costs and from an environment perspective. This rollout with Nokia represents an important step to helping Safaricom Kenya mitigate this challenge while delivering the same network quality and reliability to our customers.”