A new consortium of global communications companies and research institutions launched on Monday with a goal of creating the technologies needed to make communications networks 1000 times more energy efficient than they are today.
The Green Touch consortium is organized by Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs and includes founding members AT&T (NYS: T), China Mobile (NYSE: CHL), The Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Swisscom (SWJ.DE), Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) and Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT).
A thousand-fold reduction is roughly equivalent to being able to power the world’s communications networks, including the Internet, for three years using the same amount of energy that it currently takes to run them for a single day.
The efficiency target is based on research from Bell Labs that determined today’s information and communication technology (ICT) networks have the potential to be 10,000 times more efficient. This conclusion comes from a Bell Labs’ analysis of the fundamental properties of ICT networks and technologies (optical, wireless, electronics, processing, routing, and architecture) and studying their physical limits by applying established formulas such as Shannon’s Law.
To support its objectives the Green Touch initiative intends to deliver within five years a reference network architecture and demonstrations of the key components required to realize this improvement.
The first meeting of the consortium will take place in February and will be dedicated to establishing the organization’s five-year plan, first-year deliverables, and member roles and responsibilities.
With its launch, the consortium also has issued an open invitation to all members of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) community to join forces in reaching this ambitious target.
“Truly global challenges have always been best addressed by bringing together the brightest minds in an unconstrained, creative environment. This was what we used when putting a man on the moon and is the same approach we need to implement to address the global climate crisis. The Green Touch initiative is an example of such a response – bringing together scientists and technologists from around the world and from many different disciplines in an environment of open innovation to attack the problem from many different directions,” said US Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
Green Touch Initiative founding members include:
Service Providers: AT&T, China Mobile, Portugal Telecom, Swisscom, Telefonica
Academic Research Labs: The 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)
Government and Nonprofit Research Institutions: The CEA-LETI Applied Research Institute for Microelectronics (Grenoble, France), imec (Headquarters: Leuven, Belgium), The French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA)
Industrial Labs: Bell Labs, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT), Freescale Semiconductor
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