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CARBON FOOTPRINT OF THE INTERNET, FISDAP
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See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238634031Carbon footprint of the Internet
Article in Telecommunications Journal of Australia · February 2009
DOI: 10.2104/tja09005
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4 authors, including:
Kerry Hinton Robert Ayre
University of Melbourne University of Melbourne
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, BROADBAND FOR THE SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENT
CARBON FOOTPRINT OF THE INTERNET
Jayant Baliga, The University of Melbourne
Kerry Hinton, The University of Melbourne
Robert Ayre, The University of Melbourne
Rodney S Tucker, The University of Melbourne
A network-based model of the carbon footprint of the Internet is presented and used to determine the
carbon abatement provided by Internet-based telecommuting and teleconferencing services to replace car
and air travel. The model includes DSL, FTTN and PON access technologies, edge and core network archi-
tectures and is based upon currently commercially available equipment. We show that carbon emissions
of the Internet need to be taken into consideration in order to obtain an accurate estimate of carbon
abatement provided by the Internet.
INTRODUCTION
For a number of years, it has been suggested that broadband telecommunications may be able
to reduce the need for business travel, through the use of telecommuting and teleconferencing
(Telecom Australia 1975; Nairn 2007; Mallon et al. 2007; Webb et al. 2008). In the past, the
claimed benefits have focused on savings in travel time, cost and fuel. More recently the relation
between the energy and greenhouse emission cost of travel has renewed impetus to studies of
telecommunications as an alternative to travel. A reduction in business travel would reduce
greenhouse gas emissions (Nairn 2007). However, the capacity of the Internet would need to be
significantly increased to support good quality video conferencing. If Internet capacity is increased,
the energy consumption, and consequently the greenhouse footprint of the Internet will also in-
crease (Baliga et al. 2007). The authors are not aware of any models that provide a quantitative
measure of the increased greenhouse gas emissions from the Internet if it is to support a significant
reduction in business travel.
In this paper, we present a network-based model of the energy consumption of the Internet,
formulated with data from major equipment vendors (Baliga et al. 2007; 2008a; 2008b). We
model the network infrastructure required to service increasing per-subscriber traffic volumes,
including core, metro, and access networks, and take into account energy consumption in
switching and transmission equipment (Baliga et al. 2007). In the access network, we consider
currently used digital subscriber line (DSL) as well as two future high-speed access technologies
– shared passive optical networks (PON) and fibre to the node (FTTN) (Baliga et al. 2008a).
Using this model we estimate the current annual energy consumption of the Internet in Australia
to be about 75 kWh per subscriber, equivalent to 81 kg of CO2-e, at average access rates in the
order of 500 Kbit/s. The model is then used to estimate the increase in energy consumption re-
quired to support increased access rates that would allow standard definition (SD) and high
definition (HD) video-conferencing. The estimations of increased energy, and resultant greenhouse
gas emissions, are compared against savings from telecommuting and teleconferencing.
TELECOMMUNICATIONS JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIA, VOLUME 59, NUMBER 1, 2009 MONASH UNIVERSITY EPRESS 05.1
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