Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, in collaboration with service providers and other leading research organizations around the world, is the lead organizer of the GreenTouch™ initiative, a global consortium focused on making communications networks 1,000 times more energy efficient.
GreenTouch™ has been recognized by stakeholders worldwide, including the World Economic Forum, as an industrial best practice for today’s global sustainability challenge.
GreenTouch,™ the research consortium initiated by Bell Labs, targets a 1,000-fold improvement in the energy efficiency of Internet and communications networks by reinventing the technologies on which they are based.
Created in January 2010, the GreenTouch™ global consortium brings together leaders in industry, academia and government labs. They aim to invent and deliver radical approaches to energy efficiency, to lay the groundwork for tomorrow’s sustainable networks. To support its objectives, the GreenTouch™ initiative will deliver – within five years – a reference network architecture and demonstrations of the key components required to realize this breakthrough.
A 1,000-fold improvement in energy efficiency: Using the amount of energy needed to power all of the world’s communications networks for one day now – to power them for three years tomorrow.
Incremental approaches to reducing energy consumption are valuable. But they will ultimately fail to keep pace with burgeoning information and communication network traffic. An ambitious, visionary solution is required to address the growing demand for energy. This long-term demand is driven by dramatic increases in the number of users, video usage, the advent of machine-to-machine communication and the growing role of ICT for energy reduction efforts in other industries.
Research conducted by Bell Labs shows that today’s networks have the potential to be 10,000 times more energy efficient. A concerted effort to bring energy efficiency closer to this theoretical limit would shrink the estimated 2% of the world’s carbon emissions directly contributed by ICT. More importantly, it would also lower the 98% contributed by all the other sectors touched directly and indirectly by ICT.
The GreenTouch™ global consortium is committed to reinventing the network as we know it. The goal is to invent the technologies needed to make communications networks 1,000 times more energy efficient than they are today.
Through a focused and collaborative cross-industry initiative, GreenTouch™ intends to define the challenge, conduct breakthrough research and deliver innovative new technologies and sustainable solutions that can be applied across ICT and beyond — for a greener and more sustainable communications future and for the benefit of all.
Read more on greentouch.org
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