As a result, the power consumption of the entire network was estimated to be 23 TWh in Japan and 490 TWh worldwide in 2018. Assuming a 27% annual increase in the traffic and a technology level fixed to the latest one currently available, the power consumption is estimated to be 93 TWh by 2030 and 9,000 TWh by 2050 in Japan, and 2,400 TWh by 2030 and 260,000 TWh by 2050 worldwide. The consumption increase of core and metro networks will be relatively mild until 2030 because the processing capacity of the routers is large even with the current technology. The problem is the access networks that account for 80% of power consumption, especially wireless access systems. Due to the nature of communication infrastructure, the access network must cover a wide area regardless of the amount of the traffic, and also cope with large time fluctuation of the traffic. In order to improve this, it is necessary to consider not only hardware but also communication systems and architectures.
　The equipment with particularly high power consumption is wireless base stations and routers, which need to be reduced to 1/2 to 1/3 of the current level by 2030, and to 1/100 or less by 2050.