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."

Comments

One does wonder.

[LWATCDR]

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.

Re:One does wonder.

[Rogerborg]

You know what else? Those kids these days, they play their music so damn loud. How much power is that using?

Re:One does wonder.

[Monkeedude1212]

I highly recommend this to everyone who has to pay an electricity bill: Unplug your appliances.

I have saved over 60% of my electrical bill by following the simple process of unplugging everything when its not in use. The only 3 things that remains plugged in are the Fridge, Stove, and the alarm clock. The Television, sound system, game consoles, all that is on a power bar so its easy to just unplug the power bar. The laptop, computer, microwave, toaster, all that stuff can be left unplugged when I'm not using them. I even do it for the washer and dryer. It is only inconvencing yourself like 3 seconds max, and after a while you get used to it.

I heard someone once say that your electronic devices still use 80% of their power consumption if plugged in, even while not in use. I think that number might be bogus, but I do believe that they still use power, even when not used.

Point is, you can save alot of money by unplugging.

Re:One does wonder.

[ScentCone]

toaster

Are you using some sort of programmable, logic-controlled toaster? I've never seen one that wasn't electro-mechanical. I highly doubt that your toaster, your clothes dryer, or your washing machine use a single watt when you're not actually running them.

Also: there are power strips/supplies with switches on them, so that you don't have to fuss over the wear and tear of actually unplugging things.

Re:One does wonder.

[LWATCDR]

How much? Really people get bent over SUVs but how many of those Prius owners have two or more big HDTVs, multiple game consoles, routers, PCs, DVRs, Home NAS servers, and goodness knows what else sucking down watts 24/7 often doing nothing at all?

Re:One does wonder.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you using some sort of programmable, logic-controlled toaster? I've never seen one that wasn't electro-mechanical. I highly doubt that your toaster, your clothes dryer, or your washing machine use a single watt when you're not actually running them.

Luddite. MY toaster is web 2.0-enabled, runs ajax, ruby-on-rails, jboss, .NET, updates my twitter feed & facebook status (I'm making toast!) and then pushes an rss feed to my iphone when the toast is ready.

Re:One does wonder.

[ScentCone]

That is epic. If i had mod points I'd mod you up for having the coolest damn toaster on earth

No, he's a loser. My toaster is in low earth orbit.

Re:One does wonder.

[vlm]

True but how much power do all the cell towers use? I am not anti tech but the explosion of tech we have has got to be running up our power bills.

Thats a very amusing question, because a typical setup of 3G equipment draws about 3 KW, yet you're asking how much the tower itself draws, which is of course zero. The equipment draw at a site varies based on auxiliary gear, power level, multiple sites on multiple towers, multiple antennas on multiple gear, etc. Suffice it to say a cell site draws enough power to keep warm in the winter, but its not much compared to a steel mill or a retail establishment. The local power company is generally unimpressed in urban and suburban areas, although in rural areas the towers tend to be in the middle of nowhere resulting in some logistical difficulty, although the power required is no major thing. Local power companies do not install new substations just for a cellsite, for example, on the other hand when colocating in a building they will require a dedicated circuit or two, maybe a tiny subpanel, probably a separately billing power meter.

On the other hand, the FAA requires substantial tower lighting, you're looking at about 1.5 KW of lighting on a big tower. See link to a typical supplier, note that light requires TWO 700 watt bulbs, pretty impressive. Then again a couple hundred watt light bulb is probably what you'd need to light up a couple hundred feet of street, it just makes sense.

So, yes you could reduce the power used by the equipment. From 3KW to 3W to fit the pie in the sky 1:1000 ratio, probably not. Even if you could magically reduce the equipment power draw to zero, by using magic pixie dust and space alien technology, tower lighting requirements alone mean you'll never be able to reduce the total site power draw below about %33 of what is currently used.

http://www.gordtelecom.com/Tower%20Lighting.htm

and thats before you get into discussions about aluminum towers, what with aluminum being "liquid electricity".

Re:One does wonder.

[cheesybagel]

Remember when computers had a real power button on front? A power button you had to actually push with a moderate amount of strength to operate? That button is today in the back of the computer near the power supply.

Now in these days of soft power buttons, nothing is ever really disabled. But rejoice! EPA Energy Star (TM) devices only use a minimum amount of power when in standby mode. Uhuh.

Re:One does wonder.

[Monkeedude1212]

A cell phone is like a refridgerator (figuratively, not literally). It's sole purpose is to be passively doing its job (recieve incoming calls) all the time. I turn it off when I'm in the movie theatre. Otherwise, I expect it to ring.

I do however, unplug it like I do the rest of my electronics :P

Re:One does wonder.

[MaWeiTao]

I find that hard to believe. A few months ago I went from appliance to appliance with one of those Kill-a-watt devices measuring electricity consumption over a 24 hour period. Usage was insignificant for devices in standby mode, this included my PS3, television and other electronics. And by insignificant I mean a couple of dollars a year for everything in total and this is at roughly 22 cents per kWh in my area.

Where I found heavy usage was from appliances used on a regular basis. The dryer, water heater (which I want to get replaced for a gas heater), air conditioning and things like that. Even my PC, which I leave on because of internet phone was only something like $60-$120 a year. I don't remember the exact figures; I'd have to consult my spreadsheet.

I've found that if you want to really cut utility costs you have to do a good bit of sacrificing. That means enduring the heat of the summer and not turning on air conditioning, running a dryer once a week, or better yet hanging your clothes out to dry. Certainly turning off lights in an unoccupied room helps, but with CFLs the savings there are minimal as well. Reducing the number of electronics you're running at any time certainly helps.

The only way to cut down on electricity usage is to take some fairly significant steps. The small stuff matters because when everyone is doing it that consumption really adds up, but on an individual basis it's pretty insignificant. I suppose living in a relatively small home helps.

Re:One does wonder.

[AvitarX]

Don't computers only use a watt or two to sleep?

200+ when booting?

Waking from hibernate would then be worth over 2-hours of sleep (vs waking from sleep), and waking from shutdown even longer.

Re:One does wonder.

[TheRaven64]

I don't think I know anyone who has more than half the stuff on that list. Maybe I just don't hang out with enough consumers...

Re:One does wonder.

[TheRaven64]

Why link to a joke when there's a real toaster that fits that description?

Re:One does wonder.

[LWATCDR]

Not at all. But a lot of GREEN folks are at the same time really into tech and really like to bash people that drive SUVs. I do not own an SUV or even a pickup truck. I really want a pickup truck but frankly only the Ford Ranger is close to what I think of as a small truck and I don't need a big truck. Just point out that waste is everywhere and having a house full of power sucking tech but a small car isn't all that green.
BTW I too have to many gadgets sucking power. I started to buy power strips to power down some of my devices when I am not using then to save power.

1000 times

[oldhack]

Is that number just pulled out of their ass? Is there a base for it?

Re:1000 times

[Monkeedude1212]

I assume they are using Base 10.

Re:1000 times

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that number just pulled out of their ass? Is there a base for it?

There's a 93.56% chance that is correct.

Re:1000 times

[BESTouff]

I assume they are using Base 10.

Hey, actually maybe they use base 2. They got the hint from the harddrive marketing guys.

Re:1000 times

[kohaku]

I assume they are using Base 10.

Hey, actually maybe they use base 2.

That's what he said.

Speaking of crystal radios

[mangu]

The first radio receivers, about a hundred years ago, needed no batteries, they got all the power they needed from the antenna.

Re:Speaking of crystal radios

[gyrogeerloose]

The first radio receivers, about a hundred years ago, needed no batteries, they got all the power they needed from the antenna.

That's true, and you can still build one with a few feet of wire, a ten-cent diode and a set of headphones. It will still work, too, although not very well. You must remember that 100 years ago, there wasn't the plethora of transmitters that currently exist so a receiver did not have to be particularly selective. A simple set as described will generally be overwhelmed by a local station and that's all you'll receive.

Oh, yeah--no FM either.

Re:Speaking of crystal radios

[ei4anb]

Modern transceivers can work on low power too. Amateur radio QRP (low power) enthusiasts have achieved communication at startingly low power levels: "In the spring of 1994, Bob Moody and Bill Brown, WB8ELK shattered this 10-meter record by successfully using only 0.720 microwatts over a 1500-mile path for over 2 billion miles per watt" quoted from "ARRL's Low Power Communication: The Art and Science of Qrp"

Re:Speaking of crystal radios

[gyrogeerloose]

That was the perhaps most indecipherable thing ever posted to Slashdot. But it looks like you're right, I was wrong--it is possible to detect FM signals with a crystal radio. I stand corrected.

Oh, and by the way, you're about as big an asshole as the guy on solomonsmusic.net.

Not the facts you're looking for

[Lord Grey]

From TFA:

Scientists addressed the problem over the summer of 2009, and concluded that the energy used in networks could be reduced by a factor of up to 10,000 without breaking fundamental laws such as the Shannon Limit, but it would require a fundamental rethink to achieve a massive reduction, said [Gee Rittenhouse, vice president and head of research at Bell Labs]: "Today's networks are optimised for performance and simplicity".

...

The technology produced would be commercially viable and would naturally replace existing networks, as it will be backwards compatible, [consortium] members assured the audience.

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).

Re:Not the facts you're looking for

[gad_zuki!]

>This "announcement" reads a lot like a snake-oil advertisement.

Why is this snake oil? Look at modern CPUs and all their power saving functions like speedstep. They make complete sense and save quite a bit of energy.

Now look at your typical ethernet switch. Each port eats up like 5+ watts. Yes, watts, not mW. So you're looking at quite a bit of power usage here to maintain a network connection for 100mbps or 1gbps and to maintain the spec of 100 meters. Well, most computers rarely need that full bandwidth or need the power to maintain a 100 meter run. The idea with greening the datacenter is to write an ethernet spec that dials down the power as needed, like speedstep.

Another idea is to use the cold winter air to help with cooling as opposed to just running the AC at 100% like you do in summer.

Thats not snake oil, those are good ideas, and considering that we're in the middle of energy crisis (not enough uranium to switch to all nuclear and not enough oil for cheap prices) its probably a good time to start proposing this stuff.

More important net green effect is education

[presidenteloco]

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.