You are here: Home » Green ICT » Applications » Cool chickens and 'gas guzzling' mobile networks

Cool chickens and 'gas guzzling' mobile networks

Tony Chan | September 3, 2008 | 0 Comments

The session on climate change at the ITU Telecom Asia event in Bangkok this week raised the question, Going Green – Feeling Good or Good Business? For anyone covering this topic, the answer is pretty obvious. Of course it makes good business sense – or else no one will be doing it!!!

Having said that, the session did provide some interesting new ways of tackling energy consumption as well as interesting facts about the performance characteristics of telecoms services.

Below are some initial highlights from the session:

Cool chicks for data centres
No, I’m not talking about Bangkok’s infamous night life, but leveraging a technique for keeping chickens cool and comfortable in poulty farms. Viriya Upatising, the CTO of True Internet, a Thai ISP with a parent who is the world’s biggest chicken producer, revealed that the company is adopting the technique, called free flow cooling, for its data centres. Basically, the technique uses fans to blow air over water to generate a cool breeze to reduce the overall temperature of spaces.

The technique is ideal for data centres because chicken, like IT equipment, need to be kept cool in order to survive. The challenge is that you can’t spend a lot of money on air conditioning for chickens because that will raise the price of the birds.

By adopting this technique for its data centres, True is able to get rid of its air conditioning units – even in the +30 degree tropical climate of Bangkok.

The process isn’t as simple as it sounds. First the company has to raise the temperature of its facilities incrementally to test the operating limits of the equipment. What it found was that it was able to operate the equipment at up to 30 degress and “everything seems to be working fine.” Once it was able to establish that, True then looked for a solution to keep the temperature at that level.

By deploying a modified version of the system from the poultry farms, the ISP was able to keep temperature just below the 30 degree point, well below the 35 degree alarm point for its equipment, Upatising revealed.

The ISP has since deployed the system in 100 of its 700 data centres around the city, saving some 2.4 million baht (US$70K) per month in electricity bills. When deployed across all of its facilities, it will generate a saving of close to half a million dollars every month.

Gas guzzling mobile networks
Professor Tohru Asami of the Department of Information and Communications Engineering at Tokyo University did some calculation and found that mobile networks can be considered ‘gas gazzlers’ when compared to the latest and greatest switching equipment for fixed networks.

Taking the energy consumption data (7,890 GWh) and operational data (357m subscribers; 455 usage minutes per month) from China Mobile, Prof. Asami determined that the operator’s operating energy efficiency rate was 10.92Mbits/60Wh, or 50.6 bits/J in capacity per energy units.

This is an interesting fact in itself, but it gets better when it is compared with the latest core switch from Juniper, the T1600, which can support 163Mbits/J. This makes mobile networks real ‘gas guzzlers,’ Prof. Asami said.

Obviously, the premise of comparing an entire network service that includes backhaul, towers, cooling and other infrastructure with a single high density router standing alone, has its fallacies, but it is certainly an interesting way of looking at the problem of measuring network and infrastructure efficiency.

I do hope, in the next couple of days, to conduct my own comparison between a mobile and fixed network using this model. Keep your eye on this space.

At the same time, a representative from ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, also brought up an interesting point during the Q&A session – that the annual energy consumption of a 3G mobile phone is similar to the amount of energy used to drive a couple of kilometres on the motorway. Mobile phones are ‘not evil’, he said.

Be Sociable, Share!