At the European Utilities Telecom Council (EUTC) conference in Brussels on 5 November 2025, our Wireless System Analyst, Damian Bevan, presented an overview of the EU Horizon-funded SUSTAIN-6G project to a utilities-focused telecoms audience. If you missed the session and would like to explore the work in more detail, Damian’s presentation slides are available to download below.
SUSTAIN-6G brings together 24 European partners from academia, the wireless industry, and multiple vertical sectors to explore how sustainability can be embedded into the design of future 6G networks from the outset. The project considers sustainability across three pillars; economic, social, and environmental, both in the networks themselves and in the sectors that rely on them.
A key part of the project is understanding how 6G could support sustainability in usage domains such as mobile broadband, agriculture, e-health, and smart grids. For the EUTC audience, the presentation focused on the smart grid domain, and in particular the low-voltage (LV) electricity network, where increasing deployment of low-carbon technologies is driving new requirements for monitoring and control.
Within SUSTAIN-6G, a set of smart grid use cases has been defined to explore the telecoms requirements of LV grid modernisation. These include availability and resilience, cybersecurity, latency, data rates, equipment lifetimes, and questions around how networks might be deployed, for example using public or private infrastructure, terrestrial or satellite connectivity.
Real Wireless continues to contribute to SUSTAIN-6G through modelling and techno-economic analysis, working with consortium partners such as Siemens and EDF.
If you’d like to learn more, Damian’s slides from the EUTC presentation provide a concise overview of the SUSTAIN-6G framework and smart grid use cases, and can be downloaded below.
