AlcaLu spearheads green telecom drive

Robert Clark | January 12, 2010

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Alcatel-Lucent has launched a green telecom initiative aimed at making the world’s communications networks 1000 times more energy efficient.

“A thousand-fold reduction is roughly equivalent to being able to power the world’s communications networks, including the internet, for three years using the same amount of energy that it currently takes to run them for a single day,” the company said.

The new body, Green Touch, has the backing of several European governments and participation from carriers such as AT&T and China Mobile, and research institutes like MIT and CEA-LETI.

But apart from Alcatel-Lucent, Samsung and Freescale are the only chip or network vendors to sign up. Key players such as Intel, TI, Cisco and other comms network suppliers remain on the sidelines.

Alcatel-Lucent said it invited all ICT players to join the initiative.

“Truly global challenges have always been best addressed by bringing together the brightest minds in an unconstrained, creative environment. This was what we used when putting a man on the moon and is the same approach we need to implement to address the global climate crisis. The Green Touch initiative is an example of such a response,” said US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu.

AlcaLu said the 1000-fold target was based on Bell Labs research that showed that today’s networks had the potential to be 10,000 times more efficient.

It says Green Touch aims to deliver within five years a reference network architecture and demonstrations of the key components required to realize this improvement.

“What we are witnessing is a fundamental shift in thinking about ICT from a focus on optimizing networks for maximum capacity to optimizing them for energy efficiency,” said Bell Labs president Jeong Kim.

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Robert Clark