Reputed companies are always conscious about their brand image and what a great way to build great brand by taking clean and green route! Bell Lab is the division of the Alcatel-Lucent. Currently Alcatel-Lucent is trying to invest in their communications networks to make it 1,000 times more energy efficient. They have launched a five year program known as “Green Touch.” Members affiliated with the Green Touch are AT&T, and China Mobile from industry; MIT and Stanford University from the academic world; and The French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control from government. Industrial laboratory members are Bell Labs, the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology and Freescale Semiconductor. The project has received the nods of ascent from United States Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and the British, French, South Korean and Portuguese governments.They are going to hold their first meeting in February. The group will chalk-out its 5-year action plan, responsibilities of the members and what role they will play in achieving the overall goal. Their focus will be the telecom field. They want to develop a reference network architecture and the key components in these five years.
Reaching out to make the world greener
Green Touch will depend on the Bell Labs to do required research and provide necessary data to move ahead in achieving its 1,000-fold efficiency improvement in energy field. The laboratory had already accomplished the task of analyzing information and communication (ICT) networks technologies and architecture. After this Bell Labs then applied the Shannon-Hartley Theorem to its findings. In plain terms this theorem represents the maximum possible bandwidth available for broadcasting by adding the value of the signal encoding the data and the value of the noise, or interference.
The Green Touch Vision
The Green Touch Project seeks to accomplish the architecture, specifications and roadmap by 2015. Their aim is to reduce energy utilization of communications networks by a factor of 1,000 for every consumer from current levels. Gee Rittenhouse is the head of research at Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) Bell Laboratories. According to him, “It is a really very aggressive schedule. We have five years to demonstrate these technologies.”
Bell Labs wants more and more organizations to join the Green Touch project. They are expecting to grow their tribe in numbers.
Rob Enderle is the principal analyst of the Enderle Group. He expresses his view, “Governments should like this trend a great deal, and I would expect they’ll have no problem getting on board. It may end up simply being a problem of keeping the folks that have to approve announcements down to a manageable level.”
The members of the project are not ruling out the competition also. Enderle envisages, “This may begin a new war, one on cost savings, which will drive a bigger pricing war” It might also launch a battle for dominance of the standards in this area as networking giants like Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) get involved. “Cisco is a big enough power in the segment to create standards pretty much on its own,” Enderle said.
But competition is not a bad thing at all. Consumer and companies both might be benefited at the end of the day. Enderle explains, “The result will benefit us all, regardless of whether this consortium or some other consortium or Cisco gets to it first.”
