I’ve spent considerable time writing about green initiatives within the telecom industry — you can read it all here – and I personally consider the telecom industry to be at the heart of a lot of what we can do to save energy. But for all of that, I’ve seen very little in the way of advertising and promotion from telecom service providers where environmental benefits are concerned.
I don’t know if this is because advertising dollars are very tight, or because telecom players aren’t convinced consumers care. Enterprises certainly do – because energy savings affects the bottom line — but advertising may not be the way telecom service providers are getting their message out to their enterprise and SMB customers.
But I think promoting the envirnomental benefits of today’s telecom services has merit, and it’s something I’d like to see the industry do. Such advertising would raise the visibility of telework, telepresence, remote energy management, and remote monitoring services, all of which will be based on broadband connections. The current projections for 2009 revenues in telecom don’t look good, but lowering broadband prices and battaning down the expense hatches only goes so far.
I think telecom needs to take a broader view, and display some of its vision for what the future could be, if we made better use of telecom resources already available to us.
Carol, I wanted to update you before my knowledge of what the VTA is doing gets dated as I retired (again) as its chair after 18 months. Their planned use of windmills, working with local electric companies to build a smart grid and telecom network and the use of smaller less energy demanding software driven radios should interest you. Their plan is innovative and as is said “necessity if the mother of invention.”
In 2007 the Legislature passed a bill that set up the Vermont Telecommunications Authority. It is tasked with providing scalable Internet access and mobile phone coverage to 100% of the state by the end of 2010. It was given access to all state lands, the state telecom contract and authorization to sell $40 million in revenue bonds.
50% of the land mass of Vermont has no mobile phone infrastructure and very little Internet access except dial up and some rather small WISPs.
The plan is to engineer where cell sites are needed, overlay where there are existing structures (like silos, towers, church steeples) that radios and antennae can be put on, then overlay state lands, and then look for residences or businesses that are in the left over places that are windy for residential windmills, that the state will purchase for farms or families, and finally put smallish standalone towers in the remaining places. There will need to be about 220 plus or minus sites and Vermont has limited resources. The VTA is hoping that residential windmills will be less expensive because they will be put close to a barn or garage where there is existing electricity, some communications and a driveway. They are also hoping that permitting will be easier and the families will love them because they will get the netmetered power. This is all well in the works at this point.
Next step is to work to put less expensive radios on the sites. The incumbents put eqpt that costs about $200,000 up and it only sees either GSM or CDMA. New fangled radios are 1/3 of the cost and electricity, are software driven and see both technologies….and we need to see ALL the minutes that drive by in rural places.
Then maybe a wholesale roaming company is needed. My personal opinion is that the incumbents will most likely not be able to go to the most remote areas…their margin needs, etc are too great. The VTA needs a company to cover the entire state…not just a few more miles that are safely profitable. A wholesale roaming company could capture calls from all customers in all areas regardless of what company “owns the customer” and send the call back to the right switch. Even customers of companies like T-Mobile, Rogers and Spring, who have little or no infrastructure in the state would have connectivity. The VTA and the roaming company would be paid a few cents a minute to do that and the consumers will not know the difference. (the debt of the revenue bonds needs to be paid back)
The final piece is that each site needs a robust connection to the national Internet, phone and electrical grids. The VTA is putting together a statewide backhaul fiber network that will go to the electric substation in each town. The substations will then be add/drop locations. We have interviewed all the players who own bits of fiber today and are asking them to make them available at non-monopolistic prices or we will build over them. Our hope is that we can build a consortium and only have to fill in the holes with bonding money.
The VTA, the electric companies (who need smart grid technology) and the State of Vermont will be anchor tenants on that network. (others will also be able to purchase connectivity there). The State will bring fiber to all its locations from the substations, the VTA to all its cell sites (which WISPs can also hang antennae on) and people can connect to the Internet thru the mobile phone network or the WISP) so fiber is needed at each cell site….as our need for data will be increasing. RFPs for this part are planned to go out in Feb.
That all said…the challenges are still huge:
obtaining spectrum
raising the needed funds
permitting and NIMBY issues
and then execution.
I also dream that since the big guys have spectrum several times over for Vermont that they can be enticed to lease it to the state for $1 for 10 years with renewal for another 5-10 years..or something like that..they don’t want to build out here anyway….or they would have. With this plan they buy by the minute…no cap ex or op ex risks.
It drives me wild to keep reading that the US market is saturated.
Sorry to rant but I am passionate about this. The above are my thoughts and not those of the VTA.
If you want to follow up on Vermont’s innovative direction and confirm my understanding of their current plans, I suggest that you contact Dawn Terrill the VTA’s Acting VP at dawnterrill@msn.com.
Mary
One of the biggest environmental factors is power consumption, and currently no metrics exist today in the industry that take into account power consumption. One possible way to address this is to have a metric for power consumption per transaction. For example, an operator could deploy legacy SMSC equipment or newer SMS Routing-based technology that both support 1000 transactions per second. Now, when you use the power consumption per transaction metric, a different story emerges. The metric for newer routing technology could be magnitudes less than that the legacy SMSC network. If the operators wanted to reduce his power consumption then deploying the newer SMS Routing technology would be the best course of action. This issue is gaining traction in the telecom market. The leading wireless industry association, the GSM Association, has launched a renewable energy push for mobile networks called the ‘Green Power for Mobile Program’.