Save the Planet, Rely More on Broadband

The fact that there is a lot of energy to be saved by increasing our use of broadband is well documented.

For example, if half of the movie rentals in the United State today were accessed by video-on-demand services rather than driving to and from a rental store, the country would save the equivalent of 200,000 household's annual electricity consumption, according to a report from the California Broadband Task Force.

If just one-quarter of 1 percent of the workforce were to telecommute one or two days per week, the presence of volatile organic compounds could be reduced by 25 tons in California's largest cities, according to the same report.

Smart building infrastructure, systems for real time demand management, and real time congestion control, are some other well known energy savers.

However, making it easier to use less energy is not enough according to Bill St. Arnaud, Chief Research Officer at Canarie, a non-profit organization focused on advanced Internet development.

"Research shows that people consume more when the cost of operating something is reduced. This means the benefits of energy efficiency are lost as consumers take advantage of energy savings to heat larger homes or drive bigger cars", he says.

As such, St. Arnaud is championing an innovative suggestion to overcome this behavior: use broadband as an incentive for people to reduce their carbon footprint.

"If you reduce your carbon emissions by for example driving less you might earn 'carbon credits' that can be used to supply you with a free broadband connection, or free downloadable music or film", says St. Arnaud.

With more and more incumbent broadband providers considering moving from flat fees to charging users for how much they use their broadband connections, St. Arnaud's suggestion is very timely at the least.

Using Fiber Instead of Copper

St. Arnaud also points out that the cost savings from decreased energy consumption could be used to finance the expensive deployment of next-generation fiber optic networks that carry exponentially more data than the old copper networks and are ten times more energy efficient. This is due to the fact that the loss of signal in optical fiber is less than in copper wire, which means lower-power transmitters can be used instead of the high-voltage electrical transmitters needed to amplify the signal in copper wires.
Building Zero Carbon Data Centers

According to a study by the European Fiber to the Home Council, the CO2 emissions of the ICT industry exceeds that of the entire aviation industry. Most of these emissions are caused indirectly through the electricity produced to power the equipment and keep it cool.

St. Arnaud suggests more data centers should be located in remote places where they have access to renewable power rather than in cities.

Virtualization

Virtualization, also known as cloud computing, allows physical servers to be removed and replaced by virtual servers in data centers.

Most of the computing power for many online applications such as web searches or social networking takes place "in the cloud", distributed across a cluster of servers.

Through Internet-based data backup, mirror images of computer hard drives can be stored virtually. Cloud computing also provides the possibility to share capacity among a large pool of users as most computer servers today are drastically underutilized.

Using thin clients, mobile phones or other devices rather than big PCs consuming lots of power, to access new services, communicate or store data, is another way of going green.

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