In his post earlier this month, Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, highlighted the work of GreenTouch, a consortium of ICT companies looking to reduce emissions from communications networks. With increasing internet access and mobile use and the growth in music and video downloads, network usage will spiral in the coming years and with it energy use and emissions.
The Guardian reported that the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is forecasting that the number of smartphones in use will rise from current global estimate of 500m handsets to almost two billion by 2015.
GreenTouch has the ambitious target of reducing communications energy consumption per user by a factor of 1000 from 2010 levels by 2015. Earlier this month the organisation gave an update of its achievements, including a demonstration of a technology that promises significant energy savings in mobile transmission. It's a radio mast that, through increasing the number of elements within the aerial, significantly reduces the power consumption. An antenna array with 100 elements would transmit only 1% of the energy transmitted by a single-element antenna.
A week later, Alcatel-Lucent announced lightRadio, which it calls a breakthrough in mobile and broadband infrastructure. It involves shrinking and simplifying mobile phone towers and associated electronics, which are the most power-hungry elements in the network.
The architecture breaks down the tower base station into its components pieces and distributes them into both the antenna and other parts of the network. As well as reducing the energy consumption by up to a half, lightRadio will mean that small antennas will be easier to place, so there could be broadband coverage virtually anywhere there is power.
By helping reduce network power, these innovations support the growth of other services and solutions that can help us lead greener lives.
One recent example is the launch of 'PC as a Service' by Ericsson and India-based Novatium. The idea is to deliver PC services online through the cloud. The service provider will supply the user device, but the operating system, virus protection, software updates, application installation, maintenance, etc. will be provided remotely. There are some clear advantages from cloud-based computing services. For example, the end-user device is able to surf the web and access media content more quickly – the service can start up in just five seconds.
But although it is said to consume less energy, the service is not designed primarily as a green alternative. It's a way to offer potentially cheaper, quicker, easy-to-use computer services on a pay-as-you-go basis. It can also make PC capabilities available in places where it might not have been otherwise.
So will it be greener? Well, maybe. It depends on whether the devices accessing the service emit less carbon than standard PCs. It also depends on how efficient the data centres running the service are. A central data centre has the potential to be a lot more efficient in delivering computing capability than stand-alone PCs, but not all.
The other question is how much more overall load will the service put on telecoms networks and how will that impact energy use and emissions? This could be the potential deal-breaker, since there will inevitably be more telecom power use. But if GreenTouch achieves its objectives and the rate of innovation elsewhere continues, the network may not turn out to be the weakest green link.
Pete Foster is a writer, researcher and consultant on sustainable ICT
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