Comment: Bell Labs has a stunning reputation: its researchers have won, or shared in, seven Nobel prizes for physics — including in 1937 for demonstrating the wave nature of matter and in 1956 for invention the transistor. The most recent was in 2009, for semiconductor imaging. But it’s a different beast from the days when it was owned by AT&T, which itself was the operator and equipment maker for most of the US phone network. Today Bell Labs is the profit-oriented research operation of Alcatel-Lucent. But the world’s demand in 2010 is to reduce our energy consumption. If what Bell Labs says is true, that it is possible to reduce energy in communicating information by a theoretical 10,000 times and a practical 1,000 times, then we should all hope that GreenTouch is successful.
Alcatel-Lucent is hoping its Bell Laboratories can go back to the glory days of the late 20th century — when its scientists invented the transistor and other key technologies — and reduce the energy used by communications networks by 1,000 times.
The company is and its laboratory are setting up a cross-industry consortium that aims to develop energy-efficient communications in a five-year programme.
“We think it’s doable,” said Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent. “It’s a game-changer for everybody. In five years’ time we’ll have products that are affordable.”
The founder members of the new consortium, called GreenTouch, include five operators — AT&T, China Mobile, Telefónica, Portugal Telecom and Swisscom — along with a small number of vendors, including Freescale Semiconductor and Samsung’s central R&D organisation.
Several academic and government research labs are also members, including MIT and Stanford University from the US, France’s INRIA and the University of Melbourne.
The invitation to join GreenTouch went out only in mid-November 2009 and some companies were not able to make a decision fast enough — including, it is believed, Intel and BT.
“We ran out of time,” said Gee Rittenhouse, Bell Labs’ VP of research and the leader of the GreenTouch consortium. The project was announced by Alcatel-Lucent and the other 15 members of the consortium at a press conference in London on January 11 2010.
It is “a bold and daring initiative,” said Jeong Kim, president of Bell Labs. He compared the plans to work done at Bell Labs in the 1940s by the mathematician Claude Shannon on information theory — research that led to much of today’s digital economy. It is a “monumental project” that may have unexpected results, he noted.
GreenTouch began in mid-2009 when a group of Bell Labs scientists discussed the modern equivalent of Shannon’s work — how much energy is needed to communicate information.
“In September we presented theoretical results showing the minimum energy required is 10,000 times smaller” than is used by today’s networks, said Rittenhouse. Bell Labs reduced the target to a more modest 1,000-fold reduction but still decided it was too ambitious to do alone. “At the beginning of November we decided to take the project outside.”
A network based on GreenTouch principles would be “very, very different than today’s networks”, he added. “It is a different way of thinking.”
The project will be open, though subscription fees and rules over intellectual property have yet to be sorted. Other members will be invited to take part: “It’s open for anybody inside the ICT industry,” said Rittenhouse — though it is notable that no other large equipment vendors, such as Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, Juniper, Nokia Siemens Networks or ZTE, have joined.
The founding members will set up the programme of work for the next five years, he added. GTB
Read GTB's interview with Jeong Kim, president of Bell Labs:
http://www.globaltelecomsbusiness.com/Article/2373789/Interviews/25238/Interview-Jeong-Kim-of-Alcatel-Lucent-Bell-Labs.html