Green network: More sustainable surfing and phone calls

Deutsche Telekom has not only the best network – it is green as well. We have been running our network entirely on electricity from renewable sources since 2021. We have also made our telephony and internet products and services as well as our cloud applications increasingly eco-friendly over the past few years and intend to achieve even more. By the end of 2025, we aim to be climate-neutral with direct and indirect CO2 emissions in our company. And by 2040 at the latest, our entire value chain will be completely CO2-neutral.

What does the term green network mean?

We are aware of our responsibility to the environment and climate protection: Networks and antennas for mobile and internet reception consume lots of energy. That is why we have been operating our network worldwide entirely with electricity from renewable sources since 2021. As such, all Deutsche Telekom customers surf and make calls in a green network, which is run entirely on renewable energy – regardless of which rate plan they use, including in the high-speed 5G network. We are also working on further improving the energy efficiency of our mobile and internet networks significantly, such as by switching off the outdated 3G network. Network build-out also makes energy consumption more efficient by replacing copper pairs with fiber optic. Deutsche Telekom’s network is becoming ever greener in this way.

How does Deutsche Telekom make the cloud greener?

Besides a green network, our goal of climate neutrality also includes a green cloud – i.e., green online storage and computing applications. After all, increasing digitalization will fuel demand from enterprises for large computing and storage capacity – and, in turn, increase the power consumption of data centers. Consequently, the Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Systems is looking for ways of significantly reducing the power consumption and CO2 emissions of our data centers. One example is the Biere sustainable data center.

What is the Biere sustainable data center? 

The Biere data center near Magdeburg is a highly secure hub of Deutsche Telekom’s global cloud infrastructure. Covering an area of 40,000 square meters, it is also one of Europe's largest cloud data centers – making it the ideal candidate for bolstering environmental and climate protection with cloud applications. Here, T-Systems, together with experts from the Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation (IFF) in Magdeburg, is implementing an ambitious pilot project precisely for this reason. Its aim is to turn the Biere data center into a net-zero energy data center, in other words a data center which, under optimum conditions, does not draw any energy from the public electricity grid and powers itself entirely from CO2-neutral energy. To achieve this, the first step involved the project team analyzing the possible uses of 98 technologies and individual measures to reduce the CO2 footprint of Biere and its twin data center in Magdeburg. These include solar panels and wind power, as well as better cooling systems, heat recycling, and more efficient computers. Thanks to these technologies, our aim in Biere is to increase the degree of self-sufficiency to up to 50 percent and save up to 20,000 tons of CO2 per year. The increased self-sufficiency not only makes the data center more eco-friendly. It also makes it more resilient against fluctuations and disruptions in the public power grid – which, in turn, boosts data security in the green cloud.