Broadband needs greening too
Got an interesting release from Ovum’s Boston office about the energy-saving benefits of using GPON or gigabit passive optical networking to deliver broadband to customers, instead of DSL or Ethernet.
Why should we think about this? Because increased broadband speeds with DSL means more power has to be used. VDSL2 as rolled out by Vodafone and Orcon chews through more than twice as much power as the older ADSL, Ovum reckons. GPON is rather energy-efficient in comparison.
See table below for a comparison of power cost savings and reduced emissions for one million customers, using GPON.
Other interesting factoids in the release:
- In one European country, the incumbent service provider uses more than two terrawatt-hours (that’s 2,000,000 megawatt-hours of energy a year.
- A service provider with six million ADSL customers will use around 9,600kW at a cost of US$8 million a year.
- End of last year, some 250 million DSL customers required telco central offices or exchanges to deliver roughly 400MW of power.
- That figure doesn’t include airconditioning - for every 100W of equipment power usage, telcos have to use 60W on airconditioning, or a 60 per cent power premium.
- The 250 million DSL customers contribute over 771,100 kg of carbon dioxide every year, or the equivalent of buring 340,000,000 litres of petrol.
Comparison of GPON vs. other high-speed access technologies for power and emission
GPON vs. Power savings Power cost savings CO2 savings
ADSL2 ~11MWh US$1.2M ~2.2M kg CO2 or 946,000l of petrol
VDSL2 ~29MWh US$2.9M ~6.2M kg CO2 or 2,650,000l of petrol
E-FTTH ~27MWh US$2.7M ~5.8M kg CO2 or 2,480,000l of petrol
Source: “GPON: Reversing the Power-Bandwidth Trend,” Dan Parsons, IEEE Globecom 2007, Washington, D.C., November 28, 2007
August 4th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Interesting stats - what is the accumulated total number of consumer connections being compared between GPON and alternatives to arrive at the power savings figures?
August 4th, 2008 at 10:20 am
Do you mean for Dan Parson’s figures in the table? I believe he used one million customers for both GPON and the DSL/Ethernet alternatives. Unfortunately, the actual paper appears to be locked way behind an IEEE paywall…