LONDON, Jan. 11 (Xinhua) -- The global communications industry will turn green and sustainable within five years, said Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs here Monday, when it announced the establishment of a global "Green Touch" consortium.
The consortium, organized by Bell Labs, is to create the technologies needed to make communications networks 1,000 times more energy efficient within five years than they are today.
This industry-wide consortium will drive a radical re-design of communications networks to cut carbon emissions from information and communication technology (ICT) by more than 250 million tons a year.
"We expect ICT usage to dramatically increase as other industries use networks to reduce their own carbon footprints," said Gee Rittenhouse, vice president of research at Bell Labs and the consortium lead, at a press conference.
He said that the consortium is unique in looking way beyond making incremental efficiency improvements and tapping into innovation and expertise from around the globe to achieve fundamental breakthroughs in ICT carbon emissions reduction.
A thousand-fold reduction of energy consumption 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, he said.
This 1,000-fold efficiency target is based on research from Bell Labs that determined that today's ICT networks have the potential to be 10,000 times more efficient than they are today.
Jeong Kim, president of Bell Labs, told Xinhua after the press conference that it was a fundamental shift in thinking about ICT from a focus on optimizing networks for maximum capacity to optimizing them for energy efficiency.
"ICT market and application are huge, especially in China, and I am so happy to see China Mobile to become a founding member of Green Touch," he added.
He said that the 1,000-fold reduction of energy consumption goal is ambitious and the whole society and every user would benefit from it.
The "Green Touch" consortium brings together leaders in industry, academia and government labs to invent and deliver radical new approaches to energy efficiency.
Service providers such as China Mobile and AT&T, academic research labs such as Stanford University's Wireless Systems Lab, government and non-profit research institutions such as the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control, and industrial labs such as Bell Labs have become the founding members of the consortium.
Within five years, it will deliver a reference network architecture and demonstrations of the key components required to realize energy improvement.
Special report: Global Climate Change
