Chinese telecoms equipment vendor, ZTE, says that its new software defined radio (SDR) based HSPA+ network for Hong Kong mobile operator, CSL (a wholly-owned unit of Telstra), is helping the the operator reduce its overall network energy consumption by as much as 39%.

ZTE claimed a major milestone yesterday, asserting that it has managed to seamlessly ‘cutover’ CSL’s subscribers to its SDR-based HSPA+ network, now offering customers up to 21 Mbps of mobile broadband data access.

“Following the high-speed SDR-based HSPA+ commercial network launch by CSL on March 30, 2009, ZTE has assisted CSL in a series of network migrations to transform its previous network to HSPA+ for its pre-paid, post-paid and corporate customers,” ZTE said. “The network migration needed to be done with no interruption of service and no impact to customer experience. After six months of planning and thousands of tests, ZTE has successfully completed the cutover.”

CSL had, according to ZTE, operated two networks (GSM and WCDMA) previously. Green Telecom Live understands that Nokia was, at one time, the incumbent GSM network vendor for CSL. However, it is unclear whether the ZTE infrastructure has replaced all of CSL’s incumbent network, or simply serves as the data networking platform CSL’s mobile broadband service.

According to ZTE, its infrastructure now brings ‘significant environmental benefits to CSL.” The company says its modular BBU + RRU (baseband unit and radio remote unit) hardware now offers highly efficient power consumption and leverages “natural heat elimination” to help reduce CO2 emissions.

“With the deployment of ZTE’s environmentally friendly equipment, the overall network power consumption of CSL’s network will be reduced by about 39% per year. This energy savings is equivalent to 7187 tons of CO2 emission, or emissions from 1,000 automobiles in 3 years over 60,000 km,” ZTE said.

According to ZTE, CSL’s Hong Kong SDR-based HSPA+ network project has set many first industry records: the world’s first all-IP HSPA+ commercial network; the world’s first large-scale SDR-based application; and the first large-scale migration project.

See our previous story on the energy efficiency claims from rival Chinese network vendor, Huawei Technologies, who claims that its SingleRAN product now offers up savings of more than 50% compared to legacy platforms.