Not too long ago the telecom service providers, and their suppliers, discovered the virtues of promoting the green face of business. Whether it is solar panels on the roof (AT&T in sunny California), wind turbines on the roof (BT in not-so-sunny U.K.), Web environmental channels (Orange France), magnetic-bearing centrifugal chillers to increase the efficiency of water-cooled air conditioning systems (Ascent Media Network Services, U.S.), or organizing conferences on green telecom issues (jokes about hot air, anyone?), we are all pretty much green now.

But telecom may have a stronger case for going green – and much bigger problems, too, in doing so – than the local hairdresser, because of the extent of its potential environmental impacts. Telecom networks and services underpin, and can alter, social and economic structures – and burn gigawatt-hours in so doing, such is the scale of their operations.

"Increasingly telcos and vendors alike are not only keen to be environmentally responsible, but are also looking at ways to reduce costs – which greener networks, less use of materials, and efficient cooling systems in data centers all provide," says Sally Banks, senior analyst, Telco Operations, at advisory and consulting firm Ovum Ltd. , and author of the report, "Green Telecoms: Strategies and Implications for Operators." "Mobile operators and vendors seem to be driving this very hard, as there is much more scope – for example, solar-powered base stations, improving battery life of handsets so there is less need to recharge them, and so on."

From a vendor perspective, the operators’ drive towards greener telecom networks is becoming more and more important.

"I wouldn’t say it’s their number one priority, because, in the competitive environment we are in, profitable revenue growth opportunities are priority one for our customers," says Dan Kelly, EVP of Global Products Tellabs Inc. (Nasdaq: TLAB; Frankfurt: BTLA). "But it is a very close priority two, and something that customers are even outlining as goals."

All this is taking the telecom industry to some extent into unknown territory, and raises questions such as whether business plans and procurement are being significantly affected, and whether there is potential for significant changes in network or equipment practice, design, and operation. While this report is not designed to recount every single green telecom movement that has happened in the past few months, it does review some selected recent developments to help form a picture of where green telecom has got to, and where it may be going next.

Here’s a hyperlinked contents list:

— Tim Hills is a freelance telecommunications writer and journalist. He's a regular author of Light Reading reports.

Next Page: What’s the Problem?

Interested in learning more on this topic? Then come to Green Telecom East 2009: Transitioning to Environmentally Responsible Networks, a one-day conference designed to provide telecom executives with a concise summary of the latest infrastructure developments that will facilitate a global transition to environmentally responsible networks, to be staged in New York, June 17. For more information, or to register, click here.

For the telecom industry, green concerns currently focus on two key aspects: equipment lifecycle costs and power consumption. The first is well established across many other industries and is now very much mainstream thinking among operators and vendors. It covers such matters as equipment logistics, installation, disposal, and recycling, and is leading to a wide range of changes from, for example, new forms of packaging to the manufacturing materials used.

Power consumption is more specifically telecom-related. Telecom operators and service providers run some of the largest collections of electronics on the planet. Worse, this mass of electronics is also one of the planet’s larger electrical space heaters – as it isn’t doing any mechanical work, most of the energy input comes out again as heat. Even more energy has to be used to drive fans and other cooling equipment to stop overheating failures.

Initially, concerns tended to be focused on the obvious, literal hotspots – the massive data centers used in Web hosting and the like. The result has been a lot of work on server power reduction and appropriate standards, but now attention has swung 'round to the network elements of all types.

"Once you start adding up the millions and millions of networking devices, it is not the big data center any more, it is consumer products as well," says Sunil Kalidindi, director of product development at Ixia (Nasdaq: XXIA). "People have been looking at it and realizing that it is a problem. But it is very nascent at this point. Initial discussions to date mostly happened in 2008, and 2009 is when we are going to see a little more maturity in the characterization and understanding of the problem."

Quantifying the problems
It’s difficult to quantify in monetary or other measurable terms the size of the green-telecom challenge, but the following points drawn from across the industry help to indicate the size of the problem:

Industry observers also point out that the operators themselves cannot claim to be entirely the innocent victims of inefficient network equipment and high utility power prices. Look into some central offices and points-of-presence (POPs), they say, and count the numbers of linecards and other access gear that are powered up and idling as the result of sparing and hot-standby practices that may need revisiting in a green-telecom environment.

Next Page: Telecom to the Rescue

Although telecom clearly has to brush up its green credentials, it has to be stressed that many in the industry see telecom technologies and services as an important part of the wider solution to building green economies and societies.

Ovum’s Sally Banks points to Australia’s incumbent Telstra Corp. Ltd. (ASX: TLS; NZK: TLS) as an example of the wider role that telecom can play in global green issues, and how operators may adapt their business strategies accordingly. Telstra recently commissioned a report on climate change that investigates how telecom networks and digital products can enable businesses, households, and governments to reduce carbon emissions.

"The report outlines seven carbon opportunities, when, if implemented, could reduce Australia's total greenhouse gas emissions by 4.9 percent by 2015, while generating savings of A$6.6 billion per year. The report states that these opportunities, if achieved, could reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by an amount that meets the Kyoto Protocol target," she says."Telstra is positioning its national wireless and wireline networks to be leveraged by consumers and businesses to realise these opportunities. Telstra's Enterprise & Government division especially has focused initiatives at customers by demonstrating the substantial cost savings in areas such as travel. The recent macroeconomic conditions have heightened the necessity to reduce costs, and aligning this with climate change has advantages all around."

Telstra’s seven opportunities are:

There is also growing interest in promoting certain telecom technologies as green per se. IP and fiber are two of the big contenders here.

"Operators are upgrading their networks to all-IP, and this improves efficiencies in the core significantly," says Banks. "Also the use of fiber in the access network is marketed as a greener option. According to Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ), although power consumption in the home on either copper DSL or fiber are similar, within the central office the power consumption of fiber is just 38 percent of that of copper DSL."

The FTTH Council Europe 's SUDEFIB initiative is a good example of the promotion of FTTH as a green telecom technology. The council recently launched its software SUDEFIB Configurator, which provides detailed emissions models of FTTH deployments.

William Bumbernick, CEO of hosted-services provider Alteva LLC , argues that hosted services like IP PBX can offer enterprises significant savings in carbon and cost compared to CPE solutions.

"A hosted IP PBX can contribute to an overall reduction in resources (and costs) of power and cooling by up to 84 percent," Bumbernick says. "By reducing energy consumption you reduce the carbon dioxide gas emissions produced as a byproduct of generating electricity."

Contributing factors to such hosted-service savings include the ability to support home teleworking, video conferencing, and remote meetings, fewer maintenance and site support visits, and lower power consumption of hosted VoIP compared to customer premises equipment (CPE) solutions.

Next Page: What’s Being Done

When it comes to what operators are doing to bolster their green credentials, the impression is somewhat of a group of hyperactive politicians launching a blizzard of policy initiatives.

Still, lots of activity is taking place to improve energy efficiency, reuse materials, and promote teleworking. Some typical examples are:

But behind all this activity lie a number of more formal initiatives that have been implemented or have sprung up over the last few years, and which affect both telecom operators and vendors.

Next Page: Initiatives Galore

Green initiatives affecting the telecom industry include:

European Telecommunications Network Operators' Association (ETNO) Sustainability Charter. This is a voluntary scheme aimed specifically at telecom operators, and had 18 members (17 European operators plus Verizon) as of early 2009. It aims to:

There have been biannual workshops since 2005, which have looked at a variety of topics aimed at improving energy efficiency within telcos. Members have implemented various measures, and performance against these is published in corporate social responsibility reports.

The Green Grid. This is a 2-year-old global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing. Activities include defining meaningful, user-centric models and metrics, and developing standards, measurement methods, processes, and new technologies to improve performance against the defined metrics. It published its first two Data Center Efficiency Metrics in February 2009: power usage effectiveness (PUE) and data center infrastructure efficiency (DCiE). The intention is that these should become international standards.

International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The ITU is, inevitably, involved in all this. Its most recent move has been to form a new Focus Group to examine the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on climate change. Hoped-for results will include the development of international standards for reducing the energy consumption of telecom networks, and methods for measuring the emission reductions that can be achieved through the use of ICT.

Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment. More happily known as RoHS, this is EU Directive 2002/95 (effective from July 1, 2006), which bans the placing on the EU market of new electrical and electronic equipment containing more than agreed-upon levels of lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyl (PBB), and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) flame retardants. As the EU market is very big, RoHS has been widely followed by telecom equipment vendors and their suppliers.

While on this topic, there are several other similar EU initiatives, such as Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemical Substances (REACH); the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive; and the Energy Using Products (EuP) Directive.

Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA). The TIA is behind EIATRACK, an online service providing information, news, alerts, advice, and other tools and facilities on environmental regulations and legislation in more than 100 countries.

Energy Consumption Rating (ECR) Initiative. This is probably the most recent initiative, launched in late 2008 by Ixia and Juniper Networks, with the collaboration of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories . The idea is to develop a technical framework and methodology for measuring the energy efficiency of network devices, and subsequently to pass this over to a suitable standards body for further development into a standard.

"The ECR is an open forum, so anyone can participate, and it’s not a commercial or an industry forum – it is a technical forum," says Ixia’s Kalidindi. "And it is not a standards body, meaning the intent is not to develop standards on its own as a parallel organization to other standards organizations. Instead, it is meant to do some initial technical work, come up with some proposals, and do some real-world testing to get a headstart on the standards. Our experience with developing Internet standards has shown that you cannot write standards by sitting at your desk."

Kalidindi points out that, unlike protocols, for which there is a huge pressure for standardization because of the fundamental need for different vendors’ products to interwork, power-efficiency metrics don’t seem quite so urgent, so there is a certain amount of industry inertia to be overcome, even though they are now obviously a good idea. Hence the idea of using the ECR initiative to try to start to prepare the ground for a future standard.

A proposed ECR metric (See Page 6) has been released, and an immediate aim is to obtain industry feedback and encourage further practical work so as to be able to take a more developed case to major organizations such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for comment. In parallel with this, the ECR initiative hopes to obtain a broader consensus for a proposal among vendors and operators beyond the half a dozen or so that have been associated with the work so far. It may be possible to bring these two strands together and to initiate work with a standards body in late-2009 or 2010, but this is still tentative.

Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS). As it is becoming increasingly clear that industry standards are needed, particularly in the key area of power consumption, much recent work has been done on this, particularly within ATIS, which also, in mid-2008, launched its wider Green Initiative, one of whose aims is the development of industry-driven, market-oriented benchmarks. The ATIS Network Interface, Power, and Protection-Telecommunications Energy Efficiency (NIPP-TEE) committee is developing a standardized method of measuring and reporting energy efficiency as a function of power consumed versus performance delivered for new equipment and technologies introduced into the network.

A recent example of ATIS output is its Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM) Technical Report (ATIS PP-0600007), which defines three levels of DSM for managing noise, power, and crosstalk in DSL systems of all types – ADSL1, ADSL2/2+, and VDSL – in both single-service-provider and unbundled, multiple-service-provider environments. The DSM techniques seek to minimize transmitted and consumed power subject to a targeted grade of service.

GSM Association (GSMA). Conscious that the number of mobile handsets is now in the billions, the industry association behind the dominant GSM technology announced at its annual Barcelona event in February 2009 an initiative for a Universal Charging Solution (UCS). The idea is to migrate to a single type of mobile-phone battery charger, using a micro-USB format, and to have this widely available by 2012. The new charger will have a 4-star or higher efficiency rating, which the GSMA says is up to three times more energy-efficient than an unrated charger. A further green gain will be that fewer new chargers will need to be manufactured, as people will be able to reuse their existing charger when buying a new phone, thereby cutting greenhouse gas emissions, perhaps by as much as 20 million tons annually.

The telcos wade in
As the ATIS example shows, routine telecom technologies are now subject to green requirements, and this trend can only strengthen. A factor that is adding urgency to this is that some operators are beginning to set out their own requirements that will be enforced on their equipment procurement. In the U.S., for example, Verizon is pushing power efficiency very hard, and has extended it to a wide range of equipment through Technical Purchasing Requirement VZ.TPR.9205 (here's the PDF file), originally released in June 2008. The requirements took effect at the start of 2009, and apply to a wide range of equipment types, including CPE, broadband, data center, and network.

Verizon’s aims are well summarized by the TPR itself:

AT&T, too, is formalizing its energy performance requirements to equipment vendors and has introduced a set of principles, which provide guidance on conduct related to citizenship and sustainability issues, for suppliers in December 2008. (The PDF copy of that document is here.) Under the Sustainable Business Practices section, AT&T notes that it expects suppliers to add value in a number of ways, including through increased energy efficiency.

"Pending the publication of the ATIS energy-efficiency standards in 2009, AT&T plans to republish the ATT-TP-76200, our product evaluation guide for telecom equipment suppliers, and reference the ATIS standards," says an AT&T spokesman. "They will be used to establish baselines for minimum energy-efficiency of network elements. In the future, supplemental ATIS standards will create Telecommunication Energy Efficiency Ratios (TEER) by equipment type."

In Japan, as part of the government’s national energy strategy, NTT Group (NYSE: NTT) has ambitious goals to reduce its own energy consumption and is thus working towards a formal acceptance plan with vendors. And, as noted by the Smart2020 report, the Japanese government provided ¥3 billion (US$31 million) in 2008 to fund R&D in energy-saving technologies related to information and communications technology (ICT) equipment.

Next Page: Measuring Energy Efficiency

According to Ixia’s Kalidindi, the industry needs to make two big changes in order to solve the issue of telecom power consumption.

"Future designs have to be improved over power consumption. That is a major shift in design and isn’t going to happen overnight. I have been involved in the design of routers and switches since they started and low power consumption was never in the requirements. It was always a bit of an afterthought," he says.

"The second is to understand what is being used in the real installation so that it can be tuned and minimized. Right now, though they do get a power bill, if you ask most data centers and service providers how it breaks up – location, device, etc. – it is very hard for anyone to have a really good feel for the consumption patterns."

The basic idea underlying much of the technical standards work and other initiatives is that, of two networks, the more energy efficient is the one that transmits more data for the same energy consumption (or the same amount of data for the lower energy consumption). So metrics along the lines of bytes/joule or Mbit/s/W (or their inverses, such as W/Mbit/s) immediately spring to mind. Sadly, in practice, it is not that simple.

ECRI
"One of the key concepts of the ECR Initiative is that you cannot compare apples and oranges, so there is the concept of device categories," says Kalidindi. "You cannot, for example, take a core router that may be forwarding hundreds of gigabits per second of data, but isn’t doing anything else with it, and compare that with a security device that is encrypting and decrypting, and expect that both would use the same amount of power per megabit per second – they are doing very different things."

Table 1 lists the currently proposed ECR device categories. Other requirements are a public, well defined, measurement-based methodology and a universally accepted method of calculating the metrics.

Table 1: ECR Proposed Product Classes & Test Applications

In Ixia’s view, implementing energy-efficiency tests of this type requires test equipment that:

Figure 1 shows the setup for a live technology demonstration by Ixia and Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR) of the ECR approach for a Class-1 Juniper T1600 core router. This was fully loaded with 64 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports operating at line rate with 64-byte UDP frames. The energy consumption is measured at full, half, and zero loads, and the test has three stages:

The Emerson Electric Co. NetSure provides the power measurements, and the Ixia IxGreen operates as the control point for integrated measurements and reports with time-correlated energy and external load analyses.

The key proposed energy-efficiency metric is the Energy Consumption Rating (ECR), which is expressed in watts/Gbit/s and is defined as:

Energy consumption (watts) measured during running test under full traffic load / maximum throughput (gigabits per second) achieved in the measurement.

Some complications come in calculating the denominator, as this is a full-duplex figure. A second, more complex, metric is the Energy Consumption Rating Weighted (ECRW), which adds in factors to reflect the throughputs and energy consumptions during the half- and zero-load tests. It reflects the dynamic power-management capabilities of the device.

Verizon
Verizon’s methodology of Telecommunications Equipment Energy Efficiency Rating follows a similar system of device categorization (see Table 2), although it goes two better in the acronym stakes than ECR – reaching a total of five letters with TEEER. However, as the application of TEEER is a straight yes/no as to whether a device satisfies the Technical Purchasing Requirement for energy efficiency, TEEER is calculated differently for each of the different categories, and the results are more numerical scores than comparable values of a single interpretation of energy efficiency.

Table 2: Examples of the Types of Equipment to Which Verizon�s TPR-9205 Applies

So, as Table 3 shows, for the Transport category, TEEER is a logarithm of the power/throughput ratio, whereas, for the Power category, it’s the intuitive in/out ratio. Further, TEEER uses a weighted average power consumption (a bit like ECRW). Got all that?

Table 3: TEEER Formulas & Allowable Minima in Verizon�s TPR-9205

Next Page: How to Improve Equipment Power Consumption

One path to improving energy efficiency is to lower the power consumption of the chipsets and other active components used in network devices, and equipment vendors are pushing for this.

"We have an initiative looking upstream, where we are trying to set expectations with our suppliers around key components, such as optical components, which make up a huge portion of the costs and power consumption of our products," says Tellabs’ Kelly. "So we are trying to drive them down – not only the price/performance (price down, performance up) but looking at the power consumption as well."

But there are complex issues here, involving trade-offs among fundamental semiconductor physics, Moore’s Law on increasing chip circuit densities (for example, more heat, more cooling), and greater chip functionalities. Kelly, however, is optimistic that the semiconductor industry will overcome them.

"Those problems will be solved, but it’s just going to be more and more expensive to do so," he says.

Smarter chipsets may also be one way forward. Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. (Nasdaq: VTSS), for example, released a two-part software upgrade in early 2008 for its SimpliPHY, SparX, and G-RocX Ethernet ICs (used, for example, in CPE), which it says can eliminate unnecessary power consumption. (See Vitesse Goes Green.)

The first part, ActiPHY, is an automatic power-saving mode that can detect unused Ethernet ports on network devices and power them down or place them in standby mode. The second, PerfectReach, is an intelligent algorithm that actively adjusts the power level needed, based on cable length.

But perhaps the most dramatic and immediate reductions can be made through increased device functional integration, and this is an example of how green requirements are becoming another driver of telecom architectural change. In the classic multilayer protocols and networks, each layer adds another lump of processing and power-using equipment into the overall structure, which is unlikely to lead to minimum-watts-per-bit implementations. So there is a strong motive to reduce power consumptions by collapsing functional layers where possible.

Kelly cites a couple of Tellabs’ products as examples of this trend. The 7100 Optical Transport System integrates what used to be a standalone add/drop multiplexer with DWDM functionality, an agile optical layer, and Layer 2 switching, resulting in a 65 percent decrease on both capital costs and power consumption. Similarly, the 8800 Multiservice Router integrates legacy ATM and Frame Relay functionality into an IP/MPLS device, and has shown energy savings of up to 50 percent in real implementations.

"We absolutely see this trend continuing – putting previously multi-element, multilayer functions into specific products. That does increase complexity, but there are cost and power savings," Kelly says. "We are even looking at some really creative things, such as: How do you go farther up the stack? As far as integrating Layer 4/7 functionalities on top of some of our Layer 2 or Layer 3 functions, as well as with other types of solution."

Next Page: Green Becomes a Selling Point

There’s no doubt that being green has become a selling point for vendors ever eager for product differentiation in crowded markets. It also adds a further headache to those who find product specs already sufficiently opaque, as vendors start to slag off their competitors over their green credentials. In trumpeted announcements reminiscent of the soap-powder TV advertisements of the 1950s (SuperSuds Washes 50% Whiter that Brand X!), the technical press was treated in 2008 to releases containing such statements as:

And so on... There is also good marketing mileage to be made out of comparing apples and oranges – that is, at the architectural or solution level.

"Energy efficiency has popped up in the context of competition between different solutions in the same network layer and between products in different network layers," says Stan Hubbard, Heavy Reading senior analyst. "For example, ADVA Optical Networking has highlighted that using Layer 1 transport in as much of the network as possible can provide significant energy savings, compared to a heavy reliance on Layer 3 routers that require processing power for IP look-up and forwarding."

Recent products promoted as green
The range of telecom products being promoted as green is widening. A few recent examples (all from 2008 or 2009) include:

There is also growing activity in what might be termed green support products and technologies, which aim to help vendors and operators to green their telecom products and services. This is a very broad and miscellaneous group, and recent examples include:

Perhaps the most immediately significant product area, however, lies in test and measurement, as this will form the basis of any engineering assessment of the green credentials of any telecom networks. Ixia’s IxGreen, already shown in Figure 1, is one of the earliest T&M products dedicated to facilitating telecom energy-efficiency rating.

IxGreen controls a traffic generator that is driving traffic through the device under test, but what is measured is the power consumption of the device under test. These readings are fed back into the IxGreen, which uses them to perform input/output analyses.

"That is the basis of all the measurements, but there is a lot of intricacy in how we vary the load and what methodology we use when we do the necessary base-lining. But the basic idea is simple,” says Ixia’s Kalidindi. "We did a proof-ofconcept in mid 2008, and are tweaking the methodology as we are developing it more."

— Tim Hills is a freelance telecommunications writer and journalist. He's a regular author of Light Reading reports.