Telecom Trends

Bell Labs is leading an initiative called Green Touch to fundamentally change and dramatically reduce the amount of power consumed by the communications industry in running the world's networks.

The objective is a thousand fold reduction: consume as much power in 3 years as conventional networks require in a single day. This efficiency target appears attainable based on research from Bell Labs that determined that today’s information and communication technology (ICT) networks have the potential to be 10,000 times more efficient than they are today.

Bell Labs has recruited founding members for the consortium from industry, academia and government research groups as well as service providers, including AT&T, China Mobile, Swisscom and Telefonica.

The first meeting of the consortium will take place later this month, to establish a five-year plan, first-year deliverables, and member roles and responsibilities.

At this point, there are no Canadian carriers, suppliers, research institutes or universities that are part of the initiative. Why not?