Despite the ongoing rhetoric by the ICT industry to reduce its carbon footprint and adopt more environmentally friendly technologies, the main driver behind the roll out of renewable energy cell sites by mobile operators is still very much about power and cost.

While there’s much discussion by industry initiatives such as the Green Power for Mobile program by the GSMA, the primary motivator for cell sites with wind, or solar, or both, remains the lack of availability of traditional power solutions and the reduction of operational costs, and not so much to combat climate change. Read the rest

Tata Communications aims to add another 25 public Telepresence rooms this year. The new rooms will bring the total number of public Telepresence rooms operated by Tata to 38 by year end.

As part of its global partnership with Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Tata recently launched two new Telepresence rooms at the W Chicago City Center Hotel in the US, and the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney, Australia, bringing rooms connected to its network to 13 as of March 2010. Read the rest

Tomorrow’s Value Rating, a new tool that rates companies on how well they manage their most pressing social and environmental issues, has ranked Vodafone at the top of all ICT companies with a score of 60%.

“The Tomorrow’s Value Rating of the world’s largest information and communications technology (ICT) companies shows that sustainability leaders such as Vodafone, Nokia, HP and France Telecom are developing products and services to support the world’s response to climate change. The results of the Rating reflect the broader trend of ICT companies showing sustainability leadership,” according to the Tomorrow’s Value Rating website. The rating system is developed by international sustainability consultancy, Two Tomorrows. Read the rest

Green Telecom Live had a chance to catch up with power systems specialist PowerOasis at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The company, which supplies power systems for base stations to mobile operators – among other infrastructure operators – offered us a very interesting look at how power is generated in a hybrid wind and solar power setting, as well as the operational savings that such sites can offer operators.

We also spoke to company CTO Pete Bishop about the trend of alternative power base stations, and why operators are increasingly looking at deploying them. We will cover Bishop’s interview in a later post. Read the rest

Japan’s NTT DoCoMo revealed at Mobile World Congress that it has started a project to put environmental sensors on their base stations to gather climate and air quality information. Each of the nodes will feature an sensor that gathers information such as air quality, the intensity of UV light from the sun, atmospheric conditions and temperature, a DoCoMo spokesperson said.

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Samsung’s booth at this year’s Mobile World Congress features a wall display of their green initiatives, ranging from green handsets to their corporate carbon reduction commitments.

According to the information on display, Samsung Electronics aims to reduce its Greenhouse Gas emissions by 50% by 2013 against its 2008 figure. The slide showed also charted the company’s progress, with a 7% reduction in 2009. By 2011, the company is hoping to reduce its emissions by 46% compared to 2008, and reaching a 50% by 2013. The company did not however give further context for its reduction targets, such as how emissions will be related to business performance (CO2/$), or employee productivity (CO2/staff), or other metrics that would give further meaning to the target. Read the rest

Vodafone had a more or less complete cell site outside their pavilion at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, demonstrating their Green Technology Programme. The installation featured a bank of solar panels connected to what appeared to be a full cell site complete with antenna and base station controller.

The demo equipment itself was from Huawei Technologies and appeared to be their latest generation of energy efficient base stations. The size of the largest piece of gear was no larger than a small fridge and there appeared to be network equipment for a microwave backhaul solution. Read the rest

Digicel Pacific, who operate a cell phone network in Papua New Guinea, has put in solar panels for some of its cell towers, not so much to protect one of the purest natural environment on earth, but to drive better operational efficiency and cut the cost of powering its network.

According to Eltek Valere, who provided its Flatpack2 HE Solar Charger and the Flatpack2 rectifier power conversion solution to support Digicel’s roll out, the new installations are yielding significant improvements in both areas. Read the rest

Less than a week after Cisco released its Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) to the industry, TANDBERG, who is being acquired by Cisco, showed off interoperability between its telepresence systems and those of Cisco.

The successful demonstration was conducted between TANDBERG Telepresence and the Cisco CTS 3000. According to TANDBERG, Cisco TelePresence solutions will be added to the list of third-party telepresence solutions it can seamlessly interoperate with while maintaining the three-screen, high-definition telepresence experience. Read the rest