[LINK] NBN may increase Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Richard Chirgwin rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au
Fri Apr 10 17:29:30 AEST 2009


Tom Worthington wrote:
> The government's $43B National Broadband Network plan has 
> implications for greenhouse gas emissions. An example of a negative 
> effect is that higher bandwidth devices use more electricity and will 
> therefore cause more greenhouse gas emissions. Also the digital 
> devices connected to the network tend to use more power than old 
> fashioned analog devices.  

Perhaps the impact won't be so severe. Looking around for GPON devices (there
aren't many), I found Motorola CPE that has a 20 watt maximum power requirement
(I suppose less if it's idle).
http://www.motorola.com/business/US-EN/ONT1000GT2_US-EN.do?vgnextoid=57c49e3eeed46110VgnVCM1000008406b00aRCRD

A Netgear ADSL2+ gateway with voice needs 12 watts.
http://www.netgear.com/Products/RoutersandGateways/WirelessGRouters/DVG631G.aspx?detail=Specifications

On the surface, that says the fibre CPE needs twice the power - but it may be
offset in the distribution side.

The Motorola ASX1800 optical line terminal (ie, the exchange-end kit) uses a
maximum of 1500 W and can be split to 64 subscribers per line - so its head-end
power consumption per subscriber (maximum) is about .42 watts per subscriber.

It wasn't easy to find numbers for DSLAMs, but this one uses about 2.5 watts per
subscriber:

http://www.united.com.mu/solutions/i_ipdslamsol.php

So there may be considerable savings at the exchange to offset the higher CPE power.

While there is a general case that higher speed = more power, it doesn't hold
true when comparing different technologies (ie, optical is more efficient than
wired, so the speed - consumption relationship is different).

RC

A positive effect will be if more access
> to teleconferences results in less business travel.
> 
> The ACS Victorian Branch conference this year is on the theme 
> "Greening ICT towards Sustainability" 15 to 16 May 2009. I am 
> facilitating a session on The Carbon Footprint and was thinking we 
> might look at the environmental implications of the NBN in the 
> workshop: <http://www.acs.org.au/vic/2009conference>.
> 
> 
> 
> Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
> Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
> PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
> Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University  
> 
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