Today’s networks are consuming more energy to meet increasing demand while using more energy than required. A new green consortium has set an ambitious five-year goal of making communications networks 1,000 times more energy-efficient than they are today. Called Green Touch™, this new group effort is led by Bell Labs, with 14 other private operators, as well as several government agencies, already on board.

 The Green Touch initiative represents an industry shift of thinking—from optimizing networks for maximum capacity to optimizing them for energy efficiency. The thousand-fold reduction 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 Initiative aims to deliver a reference network architecture and demonstrations of the key components required to realize this improvement.

Without this turnaround, the industry's energy usage is projected to double over the next 10 years. Bell Labs projects that our global networks can actually be 10,000 times more efficient than they are now.

The trend for building our current communications infrastructure has been to place priority on performance rather than efficiency. Changes like these may raise concerns that at first, this might result in increases in price or even losses in performance.

With movements like this and a conscious effort toward other green options such as reuse, we are well on our way to an eco-responsible future.

The first meeting of the consortium will be in February to address roles, responsibilities, and deliverables for 2010.