As the economy triples, how do we keep a lid on CO2?

Carriers will play a key role in the growth of the economy as new communications networks will add tens of millions of new broadband, mobile connections causing - significant hurdles as the cost of energy rises and consumes a greater portion of operating expenditures. With energy usage accounting for up to 50 percent of operating expenses and IP technology delivering new bandwidth-intensive services to an ever-growing number of fixed and mobile subscribers, service providers need greater insight into where they can find efficiency in the network without impacting service delivery.  For these reasons, carriers, and the customers they serve, are reviewing how their products and services can contribute to current global initiatives, as well as use energy more wisely. 
The development of industry-wide agreements on a methodology for measuring and reporting energy consumption is being addressed with increased urgency as the need to define requirements for power consumption is taking precedence in several governing organisations.  Governments are also defining limits to the amount of power that should be used to deliver broadband services to a residential subscriber.  Such initiatives quickly give rise to some key questions:  what are the metrics, how do we measure?
To date the metrics available have been conventional measurements of watts per platform or port (i.e.watts per GigE). However, metrics that build linkages between service creation and energy consumption are inherently more useful to providers who monetise their businesses and plan their infrastructure investments by the number of subscribers serviced. If we can provide metrics more in line with the economics of a provider’s business in terms of the costs associated with delivering services, they can better plan the return on investment around the traffic dimensioning and capacity planning in order to deliver those subscriber services. Since the IP edge and metro Ethernet platforms are responsible for aligning, shaping and monitoring subscriber traffic as well as the circuits that deliver that traffic, they are logical hot spots for service providers to target when reducing energy consumption.
The measurement and analysis of energy efficient designs recently performed by Iometrix, a recognized network testing authority, on Ericsson’s edge and metro  service platforms aim to contribute additional ways of  thinking about lowering power consumption in the network. The tests, which were conducted on Ericsson’s SM 480 Metro Ethernet and SmartEdge 1200 Multi-Service Edge routing platforms, measured the power consumption of configurations capable of delivering Triple Play services to up to 250,000 subscribers.
The goal of energy efficient designs is to offer more services using less energy. The broad range of results posted in tests show that networking platforms that consolidate functions can significantly reduce per subscriber energy costs from 70-92 percent. The industry-wide adoption of metrics to reliably measure energy efficiency in terms that take full account of the platform architecture and working conditions of this class of device will help pave the way for service providers to achieve greater energy cost savings and environmental friendliness.