By transforming networks to all-IP, CSPs can dramatically reduce their real-estate footprint, from multiple floors of legacy PSTN equipment to just a few racks. This represents incremental savings, because those acres of legacy central office space also require extensive cooling, which brings us to our next point.

In traditional environments, for every one watt of power used, another watt is expended cooling the systems. Last year, the power draw from data centers increased by 63 percent, and this figure will only rise. Traditional cooling is not sustainable and highly inefficient. New cooling technologies, such as conductive cooling, use 90 percent less space and consume 85 percent less water. Companies such as Inertech offer solutions that can reduce power consumption by 90 percent, while boosting capacity by 60 percent at the same time with higher density.  

Based on the latest statistics, a power reduction of 50 percent would save the telecommunications industry $31 billion per year. With numbers like these, it’s easy to see that the value proposition can be built on a business case, not just environmental stewardship. Since the operational expenses of next-gen networking equipment are so much lower, companies like TelEfficient have created financing options that enable network transformation with no up-front cost.

Reaching the unconnected

The amount of money spent on mobile infrastructure in the developed world is neither practical nor sustainable in the developing world. While explaining the results of recent research, Mark Zuckerberg wrote, “The vast majority of data costs go directly toward covering the tens of billions of dollars spent each year building global infrastructure to deliver the Internet. Unless this becomes more efficient, we cannot sustainably serve everyone at prices they can afford.”

Competing with green

From any perspective - sustainability, growth, cost, or human interest - green is the new black. Green is mainstream. Even in lieu of the positive environmental impact, CSPs must continue to reduce their power consumption, embrace renewable energy resources, and demand the utmost of efficiency from their systems in order to remain agile and competitive. Consumer devices like smartphones offer 100,000 times the power of the ENIAC at .0001 percent of the energy cost. There is no reason why modern networking can’t attain similar achievements.