EcoTalk: A Greener Phone Network

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About 6 months ago I set out looking to procure a greener phone network provider. After browsing the web I found a few potentials but in the end I settled on EcoTalk. In this post, I wanted to share some of my thoughts about EcoTalk, as well as share some information about how our phone usage can harm the environment.

How do phone networks effect the environment?

As with almost anything in the technological age, the phone network we pay to give us calls and data can cause harm to the environment. To put it another way, this is an area where you can do something to reduce your impact on the environment and help society move to Net Zero emissions. But how?

Mobile phone networks are not too dissimilar to other communication networks such as email and instant messaging. When you send a photo of your cat to your mate, you are most certainly sending data over the internet, which must be processed in several ways before your friend gets that much needed smile. The same goes for your voice when on a call or just simple text in a message. The ways in which these move through the network are largely the same, though it’s worth noting that voice calls and standard SMS text messages work slightly differently, but I digress.

A quick not on emission source

The ultimate source of emissions in all the cases below, is from generating electricity. We call this the carbon intensity of the grid and wind, solar and other renewables have been bringing this down. You can see the current grid intensity here.

Emissions from mobile phone use

When you send data from your phone, it must be processed in some way. For example, a message must be forwarded from your phone to the cellular tower, and then on through the network to eventually be routed to another cellular tower and delivered to your friend. This involves computers, servers and databases, and radio waves, which all consume power.

Mike-Berners Lee calculated, in his book How Bad Are Bananas, that an SMS on average produces 0.014 g CO2e. So 100 texts release about a paper clip’s weight of carbon equivalent greenhouse gases. Considering we are still sending 270,000 text messages per second, that’s 1.3 MILLION sent in the time it took you to read that sentence. That’s a lot of carbon from text messages! For the record, 270,000 texts would produce about 3.78 kg/CO2e. And this is just SMS messages, it doesn’t count the phone calls, iMessages, WhatsApps etc. I won’t go any deeper than that but I’m sure you can see, a lot of greenhouse gases come from sending messages.

Considering data very briefly because these days, its not uncommon for us to consume tonnes of content through our phones. In 2020, the IEA estimated streaming 1 GB (gigabyte) of data was 28 g/CO2e. In 2022 Ofcom reported the monthly average data use per person was 5.6 GB. Some quick calculations show that per month, on average, we produce 156 g/CO2e per month, each! When there are 40 million of us using phones that number become huge.

In summary

So, based on this very rough maths, we can see that in a year, we produce nearly 2 kg of greenhouse gases each from using our phone alone. That doesn’t include the emissions we used to charge it or even those that were released when manufacturing the phone itself. When included, the number increases to around 70 kg per year.

A greener phone network

As we have seen, a not-insignificant amount of emissions come from using our phones. The root of these emissions are in the energy used. By changing to cleaner energy, we can reduce that emissions figure dramatically as well as supporting a range of other positive initiatives.

EcoTalk are at the forefront of this because their parent company, Ecotricity who claim to be the greenest energy supplier. All of the energy used to process calls, texts and data by EcoTalk are powered by this green energy, therefore reducing the carbon emissions significantly (though not to zero as some may tell you – this is simply not possible). The specifics of this are a bit more complicated because EcoTalk uses EE’s network, but in essence the non-green power used by EE is offset by EcoTalk and Ecotricity generating clean energy – it can get a bit confusing but the process is sound.

Are EcoTalk a good network provider?

In terms of the environment, yes. I’ll not go through the details here as I’m neither payed by or interested in selling, EcoTalk. But do check out their website if you’re interested. In terms of the network, I’ll quickly run through the bits that I think are important.

Overall, I’ve not had any issues. As mentioned, the network is run by EE so you’re getting the same coverage and service reliability as EE. While EcoTalk is thin on the ground with extra features, they have just introduced WiFi calling which is great. The plans are dead simple and very affordable for what you get. I did have an issue with my Sim not activating but the customer support team were able to resolve promptly. Traveling hasn’t been an issue either, they set out the roaming costs on their website, but for most places in Europe it’s £2 a day and you can use all your data.

All in all, I’ve been using EcoTalk for over 3 months, and I’m happy with the service and would recommend them to anyone who is looking to reduce their impact on the environment.

And with that, I’ll wrap it up. I wanted to share a bit about my experience with EcoTalk incase anyone else is on the fence. I thought it was a good time to dive into some of the carbon surrounding phone use with the hope of helping you understand why you might want to consider a more ethical network provider.

Niall

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Created by Niall Bell (niall@niallbell.com)