Green Touch™, a global consortium organized by Bell Labs to address eco in ICT industry, aims to create 1000-fold improvement in energy efficiency by transforming Internet and communications networks worldwide.
According to Bell Labs, networks could potentially be 10.000 times more efficient than they are today.Energy consumption in communications networks is increasing rapidly and exponentially as billions more people will have access to high-speed networks in the following years. Thus, the consortium’s urgent goal of finding new approaches for increasing energy efficiency in the new global era by 2015.
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.
“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. The consortium we are forming serves as a major milestone along the path toward a future where the potential of communications networks to meet the demands of their users and benefit society is inextricably linked to our success in achieving environmental sustainability by reducing energy consumption”, explained Jeong Kim, President, Bell Labs.
The consortium has already welcomed 15 members on its board, bringing together leaders in industry, academia and government labs. Among the ICT companies who joined the green initiative are telecom service providers AT&T, China Mobile, Portugal Telecom, Swisscom, Telefonica, industrial labs such as Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) and various academic research labs and non-profit organizations such as Stanford University’s Wireless Systems Lab (WSL). A list of all founders is available at www.greentouch.org.
To support its objectives, the Green Touch Initiative will deliver, within five years, a reference network architecture and demonstrations of the key components required to realize this improvement and perhaps generate new efficient technologies.
The first meeting of the consortium will take place in February and will be dedicated to establishing the organization’s five-year plan, first-year deliverables and member roles and responsibilities.
Green Touch Initiative is a consortium of leading industry players, research institutions and non-governmental organizations to define the challenge, identify solutions and develop solutions with the goal to deliver the architecture, specifications, roadmap, and demonstrations of key components needed to reduce ICT energy consumption per bit by a factor of 1.000 from current levels within five years.
