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GreenTouch™ Overview

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GreenTouch™ is a consortium of leading Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry experts dedicated to dramatically increasing the energy efficiency of communications and data networks and significantly reducing the carbon footprint of ICT devices, platforms and networks.

The consortium was announced in January 2010, incorporated as a non-profit foundation in the Netherlands in May, and held its initial members meetings in June and November of last year.

The goal of GreenTouch is to demonstrate by 2015 the key components needed to increase network energy efficiency by a factor of 1,000 from current levels, and to deliver the requisite architecture, specifications and roadmaps. The consortium will achieve this goal by re-designing networks and creating their enabling technologies.

To meet this challenge and dramatically improve the energy efficiency of today’s ICT networks, a radical new approach is called for that depends on broad collaborative effort and takes advantage of innovation and expertise from around the world.

GreenTouch brings together this expertise in a consortium whose members – world-renowned researchers from across the ICT community – are working in concert to invent the technologies capable of achieving sustainable networks in the decades to come.

The GreenTouch initiative is stimulated by recent research indicating that the key technology energy limits of existing underlying ICT network components (optical, wireless, electronics, routing, architecture, etc.) are still many orders of magnitude below current operating levels. The research also identifies a gap between rapid network growth rates today and historical equipment efficiency improvements and suggests that, even with best-case projected energy efficiency improvements, technologies in use today will not be sufficient to check the rate of energy consumption over the long term.

The vision of GreenTouch is to create ICT networks and technologies that enable a sustainable Internet, and to serve as a platform for open collaboration that enables its members to make best use of their expertise and accelerate the creation of these new networks. 

Fast Facts

• The ICT industry currently accounts for an estimated two percent of worldwide carbon emissions and that figure is expected to more than double over the next decade as more people seek to connect with each other and with more content in new, richer ways.
• Leading research institutions, equipment vendors and service providers have launched an ambitious, global initiative – the GreenTouch Consortium – to make communications networks dramatically more energy efficient than they are today.
• The goal of GreenTouch is to achieve a 1,000-fold improvement in the future energy efficiency of the Internet and other networks that support communications, commerce and entertainment.
• Today’s networks are optimized for performance, not energy efficiency. A network optimized for energy efficiency implies a very different design and architecture and this is what is needed to be sustainable in the future.
• GreenTouch will harness the innovation and expertise of the entire ICT industry to invent the technologies that will be at the heart of sustainable networks in the decades to come.

About GreenTouch 

GreenTouch is a global consortium of leading service providers, academic and industrial research institutions and non-governmental organizations working together to define the challenges, identify the trends and issues and develop solutions that will achieve the goal of delivering within five years the architecture, specifications, roadmap and demonstrations of key components needed to increase the energy efficiency of ICT  networks – in particular, the service provider networks that make up the Internet – by a factor of 1,000 from current levels.

In June 2010, GreenTouch received an award for energy efficiency innovation at the Global Telecoms Business Innovation Awards event. For more information, go to www.greentouch.org.

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