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Bell Labs Says Networks Can Be 1000 Times More Energy Efficient
judgecorp writes "Bell Labs believes that data networks can be more efficient and has launched a consortium which aims to develop technology that uses only a thousandth of current network energy requirements by 2015. The Green Touch initiative is going to focus in particular on wireless, seeking to reduce wasted energy in signal broadcasts. Cynics might say Alcatel-Lucent is using its research division to distract attention from its troubles — the Financial Times described it as 'a poster child for much that is wrong in the telecoms equipment industry' — but Bell Labs still commands respect and support, and the goal it has set is an interesting one."
And how much lower is the bandwidth going to be?
Considering the push towards 4g and faster...
Just how much power is being used for Cell transmissions? What about Wifi?
Think about it. Our appliances are getting more efficient all the time but how much power are our gadgets sucking up.
WiFi, Game Consoles, DVD players, Home networks, Home NAS servers, cable boxes, and TVs.
Way back when when you went to bed you turned off our TV and it was actually off.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There was an article a while back about a phone battery that is able to recharge itself by intercepting the various radio / wifi waves in its Antenna to generate a current. (Still in development, still not efficient)
I'm not sure if they mean "Energy Wasted in signal broadcast" means they want to reduce the whole broadcast in every direction as far as you can idea - or if there is some other process they plan on using to reduce the energy usage. In any event, I don't think the issue is with too many radiowaves flying through the air, I think its not harnessing the ones that do.
On the Green Touch website from the synopsis, I read that one of their goals is: "Nothing less than the reinvention of today’s communications networks". Does this mean that the member organizations of Green Touch will hold the exclusive rights to the manufacture of the technology that they dream up?
And, briefly setting aside the notion that energy consumption of our networks is an actual problem, why do we need to reinvent today's communication networks? What's really wrong with them?
Begin ipv4 vs ipv6 flame war in 3....2...1...
I glanced through the article but didn't see if they are planning on fixing the hardware or the software (or both).
I wonder if bad hardware or bad software leads to the greatest inefficiencies?
If we're using too much power now, that means that we're not getting our bandwidth's worth - right ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Alcatel-Lucent's 802.11 wireless access points and controllers are OEM'd from Aruba Networks. This is interesting and relevant because Aruba also has a big "green island" initiative.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Is that number just pulled out of their ass? Is there a base for it?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The first radio receivers, about a hundred years ago, needed no batteries, they got all the power they needed from the antenna.
Emphasis mine. There's a lot more crap in there that I didn't bother copying and pasting.
This "announcement" reads a lot like a snake-oil advertisement. This consortium will likely produce only one thing: An efficient mechanism for extracting money from investors (government or otherwise).
We want a piece of this 10 trillion dollar global warming scam.
We will save the world but we need 20 billion of your tax dollars to do it.
Meanwhile, 15-20 million children will die of malnutrition and hunger this year.
But hey, if the sea level rises a foot in the next 100 years, it could.. well.. it rose two feet in the last 100 years, and i guess not much came of it. But still. GLOBAL WARMING guys, am i right?
With this development, that means replacing the entire U.S. network infrastructure. That, in and of its self, is no small feat.
Now, even if it is subsidized by the Gov, the tax payer will foot the bill. If we force the telco's to foot the bill, those costs will be passed onto the consumer. Since we, the citizenry, ultimately pay for this thing, the net expenditure of energy required to create the money to pay for it including the costs of manufacturing it and installing it, will probably exceed the energy saved by the switchover. Granted that is only valid for a few decades but the point remains.
Basically, Bell Labs finally figured out that the concept of 'energy efficiency' should rule supreme. Now if the FCC, ICC, G8 and everyone else would jump on board, we might actually progress as a civilization.
Unfortunately, any energy efficiency gains were immediately wiped out upon launching a consortium "which aims to develop technology". I'm guessing this will be mired in various committees and be over-engineered to the point their design for networks will use twice the energy now and cost four times as much as they do now.
... to grow the network eliminating the benefits of energy efficiency by allowing us to expand the network and consume more energy!
you think your network energy levels are over 9000.
thanks, im here all night. just throw money.
Good people go to bed earlier.
All my slashdot posts have always been made from 100% recycled electrons.
I would like to become more efficient when I masturbate. I wonder how much energy I waste getting to a point where I am ready to release that energy? could that be harnessed for something?
I say networks can be 1 MILLION times more energy efficient. Beat that, Bell Labs.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
In the global human energy use game, the network energy use is close to noise level,
and can be probably thought of as offset by the efficiencies the net brings to other
business activities (like removing the need to fly to conferences, eliminating personal
sales calls, coordinating supply-demand chains to reduce waste and idling production
lines, allowing rapid global dissemination of technical and process best practices etc.)
Perhaps its most important effect on energy use and environment will be that it
provides a more efficient forum for discussion and dissemination of knowledge about
environmental problems and solutions. Ambitious Google Earth visualisation projects
and civilisation-strategy games which allow more and more people to be able to get their
head around some of these large-scale, long-term issues that are hard to grok if
you are not a math/science nerd. That and all the free public lectures on advanced
topics, and of course the vast knowledge base of wikipedia, which can allow rapid
but fairly precise communication and debate about important environmental and
technology choice issues (e.g. are electric cars cool? practical? affordable? effective
at reducing climate change? why or why not? How do I insulate my house properly in
a cold but humid climate? etc.)
Knowledge sharing and the rapid spreading of radical new cultural and technological
memes and attitudes. That is the most important effect that the net will have on
energy use and contribution to global warming or its solution.
The electrically efficient net is a nice-to-have, but pales in comparison to these
other factors.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If the power can even be reduced by 1/100th, there would be no reasonable cause to require payment for a broadband internet connection. This would not only save an enourmous amount of energy, but it would also be a MAJOR economic stimulus.
Oh sorry, I forgot about greed.
This is something we can't get working properly now! What the fuck greenies! This is like going after nuclear power, if you win this one humanity is fucked.
Sounds like bad news for these guys. :)
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
Obviously it's time to pull all those wasteful orange-clad fibers out and replace them with green-clad fibers.
That "wasted energy" is where the noise immunity comes from. Drop the signal to just above the noise level, and the error rate goes way up. I think most people would rather pay higher energy costs than drop more packets, but for mobile devices the inverse might be true.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
No more PHP sending XML for AJAX.
Assembly sending BER encoded ASN.1 for browsers written in Forth.
Get crackin'.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
With smarter solar rural base stations. Why can they do it?
A smart person sat down and ***designed*** a new system.
Stop hacking onto the US/NSA rustbelt revenue stream and start thinking.
http://www.vnl.in/technology/cleantech/
http://www.vnl.in/productsheets/worldgsm_village_site.pdf
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
For example - Cisco routers have the ability to hibernate PoE ports and turn off modules at certain times of the day or when they are not required. With Virtualised environments you can turn of VMs for times when you have lighter load etc. I am sure other hardware/OS has features like this but people just need to use them.
It is truly pathetic how these gas-guzzlin' deniers are grasping at straws to maintain
their totally untenable position.
On the one hand: 800 Scientist contributors + 2500 scientific reviewers work went into the latest IPCC
assessment report.
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/global_warming/IPCCflyer_lr.pdf
On the other hand: A few stolen personal emails by a few scientists in Britain had some ambiguously interpretable language, that could have been talking about trickery or how to format some summary
data, or how exactly to interpolate in the presence of uncertainty.
Hmmmmmm. You figure it out.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
There's no more Western Electric or Bell System, so it surprises me to hear that Bell Labs is still around. That's good if it is the Bell Labs, the one that invented the transistor, laser, microwave communications, the UNIX operating system, satellites, etc.
Then again, AT&T is not the same AT&T that was around before Judge Greene broke it up in 1984, so I hope it hasn't become some kind of "no Bell Labs left behind" that provides jobs for underachieving American Dilbertized engineers...
Ask Me About... The 80's!
yes vapor there is a bell labs...alcatel-lucent is the recent moniker (part of lucent) is it any wonder they get no respect...people forget... yet it is still THE powerhouse of innovation in wireless...buy the stock now while cheap before the street gets wise...get rich and do something...what about superconductivity as a road to effciency...superconductors..that's the ticket...