Bell Labs gathers broad support for green comms consortium

1000 times more power efficient
LONDON — At the launch of the Green Touch consortium Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs showed off the broad international support it has gathered for the initiative, whose goal is to create the technologies needed to make communications networks 1000 times more energy efficient than they are today.

With its launch, the consortium issued an open invitation to all members of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) community to join forces in reaching this ambitious target.

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 (Leuven, Belgium), The French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA)

Industrial Labs: Bell Labs, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) and Freescale Semiconductor Inc.

The 1000-fold efficiency target is 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 then they are today. 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.