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BT signs up to energy agreement
Thursday 30th September 2010, by Daniel King
BT is one of the signatories to a new code aiming to cut the power consumption of broadband infrastructure across Europe.
The European Commission (EC) Joint Research Centre has found that broadband equipment is behind 15 per cent of the information technology sector's energy consumption.
According to its figures, this is around 47 terawatt hours.
In total, electricity use by the sector constitutes eight per cent of all energy consumption in the EU.
Equipment included in broadband kit includes modems, home gateways, routers and switches.
Other vendors signed up to the new code devised by the centre include Deutsche Telekom, Swisscom, Telecom Italia, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Nokia Siemens Networks and Cisco.
Collectively, the new signatories will mean that the agreement will cover around 75 million households across the European Union and outside it in Turkey, Norway and Switzerland.
The new guidelines could help vendors cut their energy consumption by half, according to the centre.
Commenting on the initiative, EU commissioner Neelie Kroes said: "Implementing these two codes of conduct will significantly reduce the EU's electricity consumption and could save €4.5 billion (£3.89 billion) per year."
However, the agreement is voluntary, which could stall progress on reducing energy use across all the different suppliers and vendors.
Categories: BT
