Thierry Van Landegem
Chairman, GreenTouch
Vice President, Global Operations, Bell Labs
What a week!
May 13, 2013
Talking about a busy week, this is one never to forget. Today GreenTouch announced its latest research study indicating that energy consumption in communication networks can be reduced by up to 90% by the year 2020, and this despite traffic growth. Yes, savings of 90%! The number is even more impressive in absolute numbers: for a country like the USA the savings in mobile access networks would amount to the equivalent electricity consumption of a city like Dallas, for France it would amount to the electricity consumption of the city of Reims. That is a lot.
We have called this latest end-to-end research study the ‘green meter’, as it shows how far we are on our journey. Last week Thierry Klein and myself have spent considerable time in briefing analysts and press on our results – a marathon of interviews. The overall reaction was one of excitement – yes, GT really delivers on its promises, of interest to better understand the various technologies – we provide an end-to-end portfolio of technologies, and about when / how to get this into products – GT is a research consortium and therefore doesn’t build products, that is up to our members. And today we just finished a ‘green’ webcast with participants from all over the world. The world will know it! If you want to check our press release click here, if you want to see the slide deck that summarizes the results then click here. If you want to know more, contact Thierry or me.
This tremendous result is the climax of all the excellent work that GreenTouch members have performed in the last three years. It is the consolidated view of all the technologies, protocols, architectures and algorithms that have been worked on in the various working groups. What is even more, is that this is a progress report – we haven’t included in this green meter report several other technologies we are working on but that we haven’t de-risked or fully assessed yet. I am sure that some of those will be discussed during this weeks’ face to face meeting in Shanghai! So more to come!
Thierry