250 m tons of carbon for all that talk!

A report from Bell Labs has pointed out the high ineffeciencies in communication networks. “Networks could be 10,000 times more energy efficient,” says the report and notes that “today’s networks are optimized for capacity not energy.”

That goes for all networks that run our cell phones and broadband connections, and deliver us voice, video and the web. A 1,000-fold reduction in energy use 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.

The global network and technology required to run mobile telecom produce 250 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, roughly the same as is produced yearly by 50 million automobiles. It would take a forest the size of the U.K. to absorb 250 million tons of CO2.

As the report notes, the contribution of information communication technology to global energy consumption will double over the next decade.

Driven by increasing Internet traffic, telecom networks have scaled rapidly over the past decade to accommodate growth and this growth has called for more computers to run the software that new handsets and Web sites require.

Much of networks' inefficiencies today come from wireless, because its signals are not broadcast toward anyone in particular (unlike traditional wired broadband signals). Last year, Bell Labs researchers turned their attention to this problem and set out to calculate the minimum amount of energy required to power today's global networks.

The big question is whether there is need for research to improve efficiencies or if the technology is already with us. Is it the focus alone that needs to be put in place?