Commercial factors alone dictate that energy efficiency has become more critical than ever for mobile operators, with sustainability serving to turn the screw and requiring additional monitoring and reporting capabilities. While successive 3GPP releases have themselves delivered advancing energy saving capabilities, through more fine grained sleep modes and standards for coordination among components, with more to come under the banner of 5G Advanced, fine tuning is still required in the field – with the help of machine learning. This rather obvious point emerged at the recent Open RAN Global Forum where sustainability issues reined over the agenda. Coordination, optimization and automation are especially critical for Open RAN deployments, which provide opportunities for energy efficiency as well as challenges resulting from…