SUSTAINET’s Commitment to Sustainable Technologies for Resilient and Energy-Efficient Networks at the Berlin 6G Conference 2025
Exploring the Future: SUSTAINET’s Commitment to Sustainable Technologies for Resilient and Energy-Efficient Networks at the Berlin 6G Conference 2025
Berlin, 2nd July 2025 – Today, the CELTIC flagship project SUSTAINET unveiled its ambitions for a greener, more resilient, and trustworthy telecom sector at the 6G Platform Event. Dr. Dirk Ziemann, representative from the German Ministry (BMFTR), along with representatives from the SUSTAINET project consortium—which includes major players from industry (both large companies and SMEs), research organizations, and academia—formed an excellent lineup to present the visions and goals of this ambitious European project to attendees of the 6G Platform Event.
SUSTAINET aims to chart a European course toward a digital and sustainable future amid global crises and geopolitical challenges. However, with its share of the global ICT market declining, urgent actions are required to ensure technological sovereignty. This project addresses this multifaceted challenge by focusing on network resilience, energy efficiency, sustainability, high-performance end-to-end networks, and network security.
SUSTAINET and its 113 partners are divided into three pillars: SUSTAINET-ADVANCE, SUSTAINET-GUARDIAN, and SUSTAINET-INNOVATE. Each pillar is represented by high-level speakers from the industry.
The session was moderated by Mr. Anastasius Gavras, Technical Director at Eurescom, who emphasized the contributions of the 113 partners and the ambitious goals that the CELTIC flagship project aims to achieve. Following him, Dr. Dirk Ziemann, a representative from the German Ministry (BMFTR), welcomed the audience in the plenary room and stated that SUSTAINET is an important step toward a sovereign European future, highlighting the collaborative efforts of the project with Canada.
The opening was followed by an introductory presentation on CELTIC-NEXT by Christiane Reinsch, the CELTIC-NEXT Programme Coordinator from the CELTIC Office. She presented CELTIC’s goals and its latest achievements, pointing out the successes of the CELTIC flagship initiatives, which have consistently set world records and surpassed key performance indicators.
Dr. Achim Autenrieth, Senior Director of Advanced Technologies at ADTRAN in Germany, provided an overview of the SUSTAINET Umbrella and introduced the three main pillar projects: SUSTAINET-ADVANCE, SUSTAINET-GUARDIAN, and SUSTAINET-INNOVATE. He offered insights into the collaborations between the projects and highlighted activities already undertaken, such as active participation at the IEEE Conference in Montreal, Canada, and at Hannover Messe in Germany.
The next session focused on presenting the three sub-projects. SUSTAINET-ADVANCE, presented by Dr. Jörg Peter Elbers, VP of Advanced Technology, Standards & IPR at Adtran (D), highlighted that in today’s geopolitical climate, sabotage, theft, cybercrime, and increasing natural disasters can damage infrastructure and disrupt networks. This creates dependencies between energy and communication networks, and SUSTAINET-ADVANCE aims to address this issue.
SUSTAINET-INNOVATE, introduced by Dr. Rene Bonk, Lead Technology Strategist in the Fixed Networks Division at Nokia (D), emphasized its approach to creating a frictionless, high-performance communication network for heterogeneous network elements extending to 6G. In a dynamic digital world, SUSTAINET-INNOVATE will provide solutions through environmental sensing and awareness, which are essential for achieving reliable and secure sustainable paradigms.
SUSTAINET-GUARDIAN, represented by Dr. Christoph Lipps, Team Lead – Cyber Resilience at DFKI (D), focused on simplifying network management with an emphasis on secure and resilient sustainable infrastructures. He highlighted use case partners, such as Charité in Berlin, which performs an exceptional number of operations each year.
All three speakers convinced the audience of the importance of their individual projects in achieving a sustainable future within a trusted telecom environment that contributes to sophisticated cross-sector sustainability goals.
The session concluded with a panel discussion on how Europe is accelerating toward a greener, more resilient, and trustworthy telecom sector. The panelists in this session, moderated by Technical Director Mr. Anastasius Gavras from Eurescom, included Jörg-Peter Elbers and Achim Autenrieth from Adtran (D), Rene Bonk from Nokia (D), Christoph Lipps from DFKI (D), Tobias Hoßfeld from the University of Würzburg (D), Omran Ayoub from SUPSI (CH), and Marc Schartmann from OmegaLambdaTec (D).
About SUSTAINET
SUSTAINET is a 66 million euro public-private partnership project under CELTIC-NEXT, the EUREKA Cluster for next generation communications for a digital society. SUSTAINET comprises three sub-projects with 113 companies, research organisations, and universities from Europe, Canada and the UK. The CELTIC-NEXT flagship project is coordinated by Adtran Germany.
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