A switch that consumes no more power if you pump more data through it. This is also reflected in the CSR/Green Bond reports of Dutch telecom companies. Traffic increases like crazy, but energy consumption remains stable and sometimes even drops. This is not surprising, because it is important for the network that the connection is always on. Whether you play games or not, there is always data running on the network and probably because there are a lot of other junk in your house doing all kinds of things.

If you look at consumption, it turns out that it’s not really that bad. For example, Juniper says: The MX204 is a power and space-optimized router that offers ultra-high port density and high throughput while consuming just 0.9W/Gb. This is the ability, not whether bits are sent. I’ve heard from the pros that this box is inefficient and a bit on the old side 🙂 The entire box has a typical draw power of 1860 watts. The specifications are here. https://www.networkscreen.com/MX960.asp

10 Gigabit SFP takes less than 1.8W over 100 km https://www.fs.com/de-en/…?attribute=7035&id=273791. If you want to go completely unruly, you can also do 400Gbps at 80km and that takes less than 14W. https://www.fs.com/de-en/…?attribute=3620&id=167113 Power consumption may be a little higher because it combines multiple colors. 100 Gbps more than one color actually fits 6 watts! https://www.fs.com/de-en/products/121103.html

You can also see that the energy consumption is not that bad in other ways. I happen to be gathering some data and now I have in my spreadsheet that VodafoneZiggo is running 46 kWh per customer per year on their cable network and 21 kWh per SIM on their mobile network. Don’t extrapolate this, because energy consumption is likely to halve if they have twice as many clients and double if they have half that number of clients. Energy consumption has remained fairly stable across the company, despite data usage doubling in two years.

Unfortunately, a lot of nonsense is sold about the power consumption of networks, because scientists, journalists, consultants and sometimes telecom companies miscalculate how much power they are using and then how many bytes they think they are sending. They divide this by each other and then get the kWh/GB number. This is actually very bad, because it is like dividing the energy consumption of a lamp post by the number of cars passing by. The laser light on the fiber and the light in the lamp post anyway, small pieces or cars don’t change that. They actually make it worse by extrapolating based on the number. That’s a great word to say that they make the big mistake of multiplying the growth in network traffic by the number of kWh/GB they found. Surprisingly, power consumption increases with the growth of data traffic. It’s not true, but it makes catchy headlines. 🙂

You see, I’ve been a little excited about covering networking power usage lately and I’ve been digging deeper into it. But you can rest assured that you can send as many bits as you want.

Do you want to save energy while playing? Then play on a tablet or smartphone, because these screens are super efficient. 55 inch TV kills compared to the rest of the series!