Green IT : Internet and Telecom players demonstrating everyday a different culture

Today, Facebook announces the "Facebook open compute project". Facebook in fact releases as open source its design of computers and data center which is proven to be very "green" and energy efficient. They actually mention an impressive PUE of 1.07 (meaning 7% losses to transform energy into computing capacity).

Last year, Alcatel-Lucent - a major telecom vendor - launched the "Green Touch" initiatives as a consortium where major telecom operator and vendors join in order to reduce the energy consumption of telecom network. There is a meeting today in Seoul of the consortium. This consortium apparently already demonstrated some results about the way to use and group elements of antennas.

Both initiatives are relevant and interesting, sharing the same positive objective. However, the way to proceed is different and probably reveals that telco world did not yet adopt the practices of this Internet driven decade.

While Alcatel-Lucent initiates a consortium with meetings and plans, Facebook demonstrates a very efficient center in operation and proposes to share their practices in open source mode.
While telco world always plan, sometimes act according to a plan and rarely share, Internet boys sometimes plan, always act and often share, at least for what is not their core business.

Internet boys communicate on what they release while telecom senior guys communicates on what they plan.
Even if the efficiency would be the same, this results in different levels of perception of speed, visibility and ... trust.

Will telco world one day adopt Internet culture ?

Future will say ...

Benoit Quirynen