In January 2010, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, in collaboration with service providers and other leading research organizations around the world, launched the Green Touch™ Initiative (more about it in this post and on the Green Touch website), a global consortium focused on making communications networks a 1,000 times more energy efficient than they are today. The Innovation at Work video crew was in London for the launch and met with some of the Green Touch members (Freescale, IMEC, MIT, University of Melbourne). Host Hugh Schofield also met with Gee Rittenhouse, Bell Labs, and Claude Fussler, programme director of the UN’s Global Compact initiative “Caring for Climate”.

Download/read the transcript of the video [PDF file, 21 kb]

Vodafone Qatar and Alcatel-Lucent announced last week the opening of the first hybrid powered wireless Base Station in Qatar, using an integration of solar and wind energy (read the press release here). This site demonstrates a new level of efficiency, paving the way for green powered base stations to enter a new industrial era of large scale deployments.

According to Jenny Howe, CTO, Vodafone Qatar, “it is one of the most innovative and best-performing solutions that we have tested so far in Vodafone”. “Our partnership with Alcatel-Lucent has enabled a significant first step toward commercialising the technologies we need to reduce our carbon footprint and make a world of difference for all people in Qatar.”  In this video, Vodafone Qatar and Alcatel-Lucent tell us more about it.

Read More…

The Green Touch™ Initiative (more about it in this post and on the Green Touch website) was launched on Jan. 11, 2010 in London. There’s a full replay of the webcast here, but we did a shorter video edit of Gee Rittenhouse’s presentation, so you can get most of the info in less than 10 minutes!

The Green Touch™ Initiative (more about it in this post and on the Green Touch website) is based on groundbreaking research Bell Labs conducted to answer the question:  What is the minimum amount of energy required to power communications networks?”  The Bell Labs study concluded that today’s ICT networks have the potential to be four orders of magnitude (10,000 times) more efficient than they are today.  This conclusion is based on a fundamental analysis of the underlying components of ICT networks and technologies (optical, wireless, processing, routing, architecture, etc.) and their known physical limits -- using theorems such as Shannon’s Law, a formula used to predict the useful capacity of any communications channel. In this video, Gee Rittenhouse, head of Research at Bell Labs talks about this research and Shannon’s Law.