Some of Alcatel-Lucent members of the EARTH project proudly presenting the FIA AWARD 2012

By Dietrich Zeller, Bell Labs, Project Coordinator FP7 Project EARTH

This is exciting. It seems like only yesterday when we kicked off the EARTH project 2 years ago in with the ambitious goal to reduce the power consumption of mobile networks by 50%. Fast forward to May, I am the EARTH project coordinator in the closing session of the Future Internet conference waiting to receive the Future Internet Award on behalf of the EARTH project.

The director of the European Commission’s ”Emerging Technologies and Infrastructure“ enters the stage to conduct the award ceremony. In his speech he says this is the fourth time that this award distinguishes one project as being the initiative that has the greatest potential to advance the Future Internet and which provides a model for innovative products/services.  Thirty-six well known projects have applied for this prestigious award in the area of Future Internet.

In my short speech I gave credit to the strong EARTH consortium, which is a role model for cooperation for open innovation. Surely the high impact of EARTH was only possible by the credibility of such a strong group of key stakeholders, speaking with one voice and coming up with solutions integrating the work of the different partners. I made the point that such open innovations are hardly thinkable without public funding as EARTH received from the Seventh Framework Program of the European Union. But even these impressive savings of 50% by EARTH will be eaten up in the future by the ever-increasing traffic demands. So I expressed that further funded projects would be needed for future solutions building on the blueprint of EARTH.

Back in my seat I glimpsed in the EARTH application. It describes that EARTH has provided hardware, network management and deployment solutions for mobile infrastructure, yielding together more than 50% energy savings.  It shows that EARTH has validated its solutions by prototyping, and that EARTH methodology is seminally being adopted by other research initiatives and has impact on standardization.  In our self assessment we concluded that “EARTH results are pivotal for a sustainable and environment friendly growth of mobile broadband communications as needed to bridge the digital divide and allowing for smart growth enabled by mobile infrastructure.”

Now the jury was confirming this was a: “well-run project attacking important area of energy efficiency in an important & rapidly growing technological area. The potential impact is very big and relevant, and the obtained results are convincing enough to be quite confident about the success of this approach.”

What a success!

I am really happy that we could lead the consortium to such a successful result of the project. Once again Bell Labs could demonstrate that Alcatel-Lucent is living up to its priority for Corporate Responsibility. Ten people from ALU have made key contributions to the project. In total around 60 people from 15 companies are collaborating in this FP7 project. I am proud that this is a fine example of our people, our passion and our energy to make a difference through our innovation.