Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones

Re:Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones by jonas21 on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @04:35PM (#32843003)

Yeah, many things in the report seems a bit off. Like they assume everyone uses the same amount of data regardless of what kind of network they're on. So since 5% of users are on 2G networks, they assume 5% of total data is transferred over 2G (which is ~400x less efficient per byte than 5G).

> The EU average energy consumption of data traffic depends on the distribution of mobile networks used for cellular data traffic. The Ericsson mobility report also provides information on the type of smartphone subscription. This data is summarised in Table 3. We make the assumption that the distribution of the total data-use over the different mobile networks is the same.

According to their numbers, 2G would account for nearly two thirds of total mobile energy use, which probably should've made them question their assumptions.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones by p1necone on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @05:44PM (#32843821)

There seems to be a lot here that doesn't pass even a cursory sniff test. Just thinking about the power consumption of the networking equipment involved and doing some quick napkin math should have at least made them suspicious of their results.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones by philipkglass on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @06:33PM (#32844344)

You can spot-check a lot of claims with freshman level knowledge of the natural sciences, unit conversion, and arithmetic. But this combination of simple, powerful skills is less common than I would like.

[ Parent | on HN ]