Is Green communication politics?
Much discussion is being carried out on green communications. Some people support the idea as it can help to control the power consumption by communication systems. However, some people think it is a politic strategy by some companies. Their arguments are: If we look at the power consumption distribution at home, the communication facilities like modem consume a very small amount of energy compared to a refrig and a TV. For example, a modem consumes 5w power, while a refrig consumes several KW power. Thus, the effort on energy saving should be taken for a refig rather than a modem.
Green communications may not be critical for the access network. Rather, we may need to focus on power saving for the backbone networks. For example, the high power consumption of router could make it more and more difficult to disseminate heats of the router with the increase of routing capacity. Thus, the power consumption could be an eventual limiter for a router to further upgrade capacity. In addition, data centers such as Google and facebook data centers are another important sector that we can spend effort on saving power consumption as they are really power-hungry beasts.
