As the telecom industry continues to adopt green as its color, Bell Labs has launched its Green Touch consortium. Led by Bell Labs, the global consortium has set a lofty goal of making communications networks 1000 times more energy efficient than they are now.
The consortium estimates that a thousand-fold reduction is about equal to how much energy it takes to power the world's communications networks, including the Internet, for three years using the same amount of energy it uses to run them for just one day.
To achieve this goal, Green Touch was founded by four major industry groups that are set on delivering and inventing new approaches to energy efficiency: industrial labs (Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, Samsung's Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT), Freescale Semiconductor); service providers (China Mobile, SwissCom, Telefonica; academic research labs (Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE), Stanford University's Wireless Systems Lab (WSL), the University of Melbourne's Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES)); and government agencies and nonprofits (CEA-LETI Applied Research Institute for Microelectronics (Grenoble, France), Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (Leuven, Belgium), The French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA).
Among its many goals, Green Touch said it will create a reference network architecture over the next five years and demonstrations of key components to realize its ambitious 1000-fold energy improvement.
For more:
- see the official release here
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