The Australian
By: Mitchell Bingemann
Alcatel-Lucent, the University of Melbourne and the Victorian government have established a new research centre to investigate how to build energy efficient telecomunications networks.
The new centre, which has been dubbed the Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications (CEET), will be jointly operated by Alcatel- Lucent's research arm Bell Labs and the University of Melbourne.
The centre will hire 22 research and techology experts over the next three years to lead research into new and more energy efficient ways to design the network technologies at the heart of today's internet. The centre's main aim will be to develop energy efficient network infrastructure that will be able to scale with the exponential growth of data consumption over the internet.
"The problem is that telecommunications networks and the internet are growing their capacity at 40 per cent per annum. That means that by the end of 2020, the capacity of the internet will be 30 times what it is today," University of Melbourne professor Rod Tucker said.
"Today the Internet consumes 2 per cent of the world's electricity. If we don't do anything about that then in 10 years when the Internet is 30 times the size it is today it will be consuming 60 per cent of the world's electricity. That is totally unsustainable."
"That's what we at CEET are going to solve. We are going to ensure that the Internet can grow and expand and provide the types of services that benefit the community."