Modernizing telecoms with all-IP networks

Many businesses and residences remain reliant on traditional telephone networks and technology that have well outlived their lifecycle. This is having a significant impact on energy consumption and power and environmental costs. Telecom facilities require more energy per square foot than all other commercial buildings, producing masses of carbon dioxide and wasting billions of gallons worth of water every year.

There is clearly a huge opportunity for the telecoms industry to make a change and do their part to aid the environment, while ensuring their businesses are more sustainable. After all, every one Watt of telco equipment power saved results in 2.42 Watts of saving in total power consumption.

For example, VTR Chile, the main player in Chile’s residential telecoms market with 2.8 million customers, moved its legacy infrastructure of 11 switches featuring different technologies, which had been in place since 1997, to one switch. It has seen dramatic improvements on real estate, air conditioning, power and, most importantly, quality of service.

While each region has a different history and telecommunications infrastructure with different plans to achieve sustainability targets and goals, there’s no doubt that globally all are moving - at their own pace- towards highly consolidated all IP networks. In addition to helping to harmonize service and feature availability for consumers, this will also are a positive environmental effect all of us can benefit from. Let’s not wait too long before moving forward.

All the signs point clearly in one direction: it’s time to overhaul older networks and move to the next-generation infrastructures that deliver better services and massive cost and energy efficiencies, ultimately paying for themselves.