Recently, there has been a lot of discussion on addressing the improvement of energy efficiency in the telecom sector.
The article posted in the Technology Quarterly from the December 6th issue of The Economist titled "How Green is your network?" discusses key problem areas in telecom where challenges lie towards reducing carbon footprint.
Keeping the networks running, by far, is the largest chunk (around 80%) of this problem. Of this, around 75% comes from powering the base-stations for mobile phone networks. Interestingly, this power is much higher in developing countries, which has a large wireless market. This is due to the base-stations being located in remote areas where there is no grid and hence they are diesel powered. The article, besides citing a few simple tricks such as free-cooling and powering off the base-stations when not needed, discusses activities by equipment makers such as Ericsson and Nokia-Siemens who are looking into renewable energy solutions using solar panels, wind turbines etc.
The other area discussed by this article is hand-sets, where low-power is the key focus without impacting performance. Nokia and Ericsson are looking towards building their cell phones using bio-plastics that can act as low power chargers.
Similar challenges exist for fixed line networks as well.
On a separate note not discussed in this article, Cisco is working on ways to improve energy efficiency in several ways, especially at an enterprise data network level by helping their customers manage their power.
Texas Instruments' strategy on low power and energy management could bolster this effort. Energy harvesting and alternative energy sources could potentially be some of the answers towards reaching this goal.
Nagarajan Sridhar
