Cable’s IPv6 Work Seen Guiding Energy Reduction Efforts
Work on preparing for longer Internet Protocol addresses can guide energy-reduction and efficiency efforts, executives from the cable, content and consumer electronics industries said on a Brookings Institution panel. They said cable operators’ preparations that began several years ago for IPv6 are bearing fruit now that shorter IPv4 addresses are being exhausted. The IPv6 efforts can be a guide to all those industries’ work at an early stage to cut energy consumption and use power more efficiently, speakers said. Rivals will have to work together, and companies with their vendors, for the energy effort to be a success, executives at Intel, Comcast and its NBCUniversal business said.
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"As is true in many industries, energy is a big part of the business model,” said Brookings Vice President Darrell West, who moderated the event (http://xrl.us/bm9t6y). “We need to think about how to design our networks to focus on long-term energy requirements and sustainable systems. Power consumption has to be an important part of that planning and design process.” Comcast Senior Vice President Mark Coblitz, working on efficiency with industry groups like the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers, repeated at Wednesday’s Washington event his previous comments to SCTE that the company might have trouble expanding in five to 10 years if electricity reliability wavers (CD March 16 p15).
Moving DVRs away from set-top boxes and toward networks, so content is much more fully stored in the cloud, could mean a major reduction in energy use, Coblitz said Wednesday. No longer keeping separate copies of content stored on DVRs, unlike what happens now because of copyright requirements, could reduce by 98 percent the electricity needed, he estimated. Energy usage is now a technical issue, “but tomorrow it could become a real business issue, and that is our incentive to act,” Coblitz said. “If we figure out how to need less, we reduce that risk” that he warned SCTE about of energy not being available in every municipality where Comcast has systems, headends or data centers, he said. Unlike companies such as Amazon and Google which can locate data centers in most any region, Comcast needs them where its systems are, he said: “They have a lot of geographic flexibility -- we don’t have that choice” because “our energy needs are very local."
Broadband industries need to get utilities’ support, panelists said. Getting “power utilities on board” among others is important, and “they have to be part of the solution,” Coblitz said. “We know this won’t happen overnight. That’s okay if we start now.” Google, Microsoft, the World Wildlife Fund and most computer makers in 2007 (http://xrl.us/bm9uab) began a climate initiative along the lines of what Coblitz proposes for ISPs and others in the Internet industry, said Lorie Wigle, general manager of Intel eco-technology. Intel also is part of the initiative. “We aligned with government policies” like Energy Star in the U.S. and other standards elsewhere, and though the initiative didn’t “quite hit the goal for carbon emission reduction,” the efforts are “very much” a “proxy for big gains in energy efficiency,” Wigle said.
Challenges to energy efficiency include getting employees and a company’s vendors to back power reduction efforts and to see them as business initiatives across companies and not just among those directly working on green projects, executives said. “People have to understand that there is a strategic benefit” to the work, said Comcast Cable Senior Vice President Charlotte Field. “Who doesn’t want to be energy efficient?” asked NBCUniversal Senior Vice President Beth Colleton. “But if it comes at the risk of the quality you're offering to your consumer and customer, it’s for naught.” She said that “sustainability becomes sustainable when it becomes part of the core business."
An audience member said panelists pointed up a possible conflict between goals. “What I heard is a need to collaborate, across the industry, across competitors” and also that energy reduction “provides a competitive advantage,” said Hitachi Consulting Senior Sustainability Executive Frank Priznar. Coblitz replied: “I really don’t see a conflict.” He hopes that efficiency will be “a broader opportunity for all of us,” Coblitz said: “If we're going to come up with architectures that work better,” that’s good for all stakeholders.