A Third of UK Broadband Leaders Shun Energy-Efficiency Labelling UPDATE
A new CensusWide survey, which was commissioned by Slovenia-based ICT provider S&T Iskratel, claims to have found that the vast majority of respondents (97%) favour publishing data about the energy efficiency of products and solutions. But 29% of UK broadband leaders are “not prepared to adopt this now or in the future“.
According to the survey, operators are more likely to work with vendors that use energy-efficiency labels (84%). Nevertheless, a significant minority are clearly not willing to provide energy efficiency information on their broadband products (ONTs, routers, WiFi Mesh systems etc.), despite apparently “feeling pressure from investors, stakeholders, and consumers” to do so.
However, it’s noted that younger decision makers (aged up to 34) are more likely to take environmental sustainability into account when selecting a vendor to work with, which may help change things further down the line. Their answers were 7-8% above the averages compared to respondents aged 35-44 and 45 and older, “signalling a positive outlook for the future of broadband networks“.
Simon Čimžar, CTO of Business unit Broadband at S&T Iskratel, said:
“The findings from the survey reveal that network operators are keen to work with equipment vendors that want to adopt broadband labelling and care about environmental sustainability. S&T Iskratel has made the first step with the introduction of broadband labelling to measure the carbon footprint of all of future broadband products and we hope that other players across the industry follow our lead.
The findings from the survey also reveal a huge disparity between the willingness from network operators to adopt broadband labelling and the current legislation available in the United Kingdom.”
Sadly, the press release is extremely vague on the key details, such as who exactly is being surveyed (“broadband leaders” is quite vague), when did it occur and how many took part from the UK. Personally, we haven’t seen much in the way of calls for UK broadband products to add energy-efficiency labels, but in the current cost-of-living crisis it is something that consumers might appreciate.
On the other hand, most routers and ONTs (the devices you’re most likely to see in homes), aren’t particularly hungry. Broadband routers tend to eat around 4-15 Watts or so (varying between idle vs load and model), while Optical Network Terminals (ONT) can be anything from around 3-8 Watts. But as these are “always-on” devices, then their electricity costs do add-up across a typical year (standard electricity prices are currently around 34 pence per kilowatt-hour).
UPDATE 1:23pm
We’ve had a bit more detail back on the survey, which took place in November 2022, and included 250 business professionals with key roles in the decision-making process and employed by large and small fibre-broadband telecommunications operators (internet service providers). The respondents include senior-level managers and professionals (60%), directors (25%), and business owners and C-suite (15%).
The professionals surveyed are from all UK regions: South West, South East, Greater London, East of England, Wales, West Midlands, East Midlands, North West, North East, Yorkshire and the Humber, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Among the respondents, 172 (69%) are male and 78 (31%) are female. They span all age groups.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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I highly doubt any normal person would be thinking their router is too heavy on the electric bill… if it ever comes to that point of extreme poverty then they’ll just stop paying the broadband bill rather than looking for a router that will save a few pennies
Probably true, but the costs of electronics do mount up. A Virgin Media hub, left on all the time will add around forty quid a year to your electricity bill, most of that on account of the continuous signal processing that DOCSIS involves.
A VM hub 3 uses about 11W an hour and, at a cost of £0.34 per kWh, amounts to £32.85pa. A low cost router using, say, 8W an hour, costs £25.55pa. So, the hub costs more but not outrageously so.
One thing which does add to costs is FTTP which invariably requires a powered ONT, and at a cost of up to 8W an hour will amount to another £25.55pa. Furthermore as vulnerable FTTP customers will have no phone when there is a local power or network outage, then some will receive from VM an emergency backup line whose unit enables 112 and 999 calls to be made but will cost money as it should be powered on all the time to enable the battery to be fully charged.
“Every little helps”.
My modem/router consumes 10w an hour and is a lovely source of radiant and conductive room heating in winter. Not so great in summer.
The modem/router consumes as much as my NAS.
87.6 Kwh per annum if operated 24/7 := £49.73 inc VAT
Not worth saving ???? My pension says yes !
Well not everyone believes in climate change…
Energy efficiency is about cost, the more efficient it is then the cheaper it is to run
Climate change is real, what is causing it is a different thing, but even so, we still put far too much muck up in the atmosphere and maybe we should stop launching so much rubbish into space.
@Mark I would say, the more cheaper it is to run, the more likely your bills will go up to foot the cost. I remember the push to LED, except our bills didn’t come down… they just went up to offset the reduced electricity usage. The costs are always put on to the consumer regardless of what scheme is introduced…
Mark, thank you for adding the clarification regarding the demographics. The full survey report is available, naturally, and the link in the PR directs to the download page (https://www.iskratel.com/en/resources/case-studies/the-first-uk-telecom-sustainability-survey).
Let me just comment on whether or not consumption counts. To an individual user, the yearly consumption of the CPE may not be an issue (for the majority, at least). On the other hand, central-office equipment (such as OLTs) serves thousands or millions of users, and its consumption is at the operator’s expense. The total consumption of the CO is far from negligible, and its consequences are two-fold: the cost of electricity, and the carbon footprint resulting from the production of electricity.
@Mark, let me know if you require further details, I will send you my contact separately.
Can you actually provide cost figures (along with the actual purchase cost) for a given number of homes with the difference between an “energy efficient” OLT and a “non energy efficient” one or is this a big nothing burger word salad?
Virtually everyone using the desingenius metric of “carbon footprint” has an agenda behind
I think those lot are mostly talking about business and not so much about an average home user with a standard modem/router.
Energy saving is fairy pointless in the UK, we are responsible for about 1% of global emissions. If all human activity stopped in the UK tomorrow it would have a 1% effect, which is meaningless at a global scale. The fact the UK can only effectively cut by a fraction of 1% really annoys hysterical climate change campaigners because it points out they should actually be campaigning outside the US or Chinese embassies, and that moaning about the UK is absolutely nutty.
Problem is, universities and schools are literally teaching children we are going to burn up in a ball of fire in 10 years (its always 10 years since the 1990s) and the UK is one of the bigger causes. Hence why we have Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion causes all these problems
It was never about saving the planet but enslaving it.
It isn’t fluffing hysteria matey when the wise and sagacious Tory gouvrement were plebe frigtnening us all in the UK with power cuts just before Christmas.
All because the UK now has a minimal contingency power reserve on the national grid thanks to the consequential effects of 25 years of privatised power provision plus the HMG sagacious energy policy making which determined not to replace aging first generation Magnox power stations during John Majors period of office.
Is governmental forward planning and provision so deficient that it couldn’t forsee events like Ukraine arising as the planet approaches peak population ?
Or can’t they be arsed ?
This is the 21st century, and if you want to be a significant player you’ve got to take these prospective factors into account – rather than just monotonously maximise profit all the fluffing time.
Wilson, I’m sad to sense your suspiciousness; I can, however, understand what years of greenwashing of certain vendors can do.
Let me give you some specific examples instead. A 16-port Combo PON (XGS-PON/GPON) OLT (which I am not naming) consumes 155 Watts, measured using *standardised* eCoC methodology. This is more that 30% less than industry average. Savings alone account for 570 kWh per annum per OLT. In UK, carbon intensity per kWh (CIPK) was 281 grams of CO2 per kWh produced. Savings alone yield avoided 160 kg of CO2 emissions for a single OLT.
How many users are there per GPON OLT? With, say, 250 Mbps commercial packages, it’s 160. 155 Watts per 160 users means 0.97 W per user, or 8.5 kWh per user per annum. For a million users, yearly consumption of OLTs alone (not accounting for aggregation, BNGs, air-conditioning at the CO, etc.) mapped to 2.4 thousand tonnes of CO2 emissions (taking UK CIPK for 2018).
How much are 30% savings then, yearly, for a million users, for OLTs alone? More than 2.5 GWh per annum *not* consumed, or over 700 tonnes ov CO2 *not* emitted in the atmosphere.
I hope this sheds some light on figures, or what they mean for an operator, whether they connect millions or just thousands – or what they mean for our environment.
You shouldn’t be sad for someone asking a basic question about the product you’re pushing
You’re claiming that your OLT flat out reduces energy cost by 30% over what you’ve called “industry average” (which as pointed out in the article will be a varying figure). Since you’re not naming it and you actually dodged the buying cost, I will assume it is a higher cost than “industry average”. It is understandable and logical to buy a cheaper OLT even if the opex may be slightly higher, it is how the market works
“0.97W per user” shows that the OLT power consumption is absolutely insignificant compared to the power consumption of the ONT and router at the customer premises. This is of course good – but also means it’s not worth worrying about.
What might be more interesting is comparing with other technologies – e.g. Virgin Media with its powered cabinets. I’d still expect it to be pretty low though, for the simple reason that Virgin Media is paying for all this power and will do their best to minimize it.
Aside: at current government-capped consumer prices, something that uses 10W continuously costs £2.50 per month to run.
@NE could you please elaborate on that £2.50 per month thing. So if I fire up 10 graphics cards to mine bitcoin will they get capped?
10W (= 0.01kW) running for 1 hour consumes 0.01kWh (“units” of energy)
Over 24 hours that’s 24×0.1 = 0.24kWh
Over 30 days that’s 30 x 0.24 = 7.2kWh
Current government energy price guarantee is currently 34p per unit [will rise from April]
7.2 x 0.34 = £2.44 per month
If your ten Bitcoin-mining graphics card use 2000W, then multiply that figure by 200 (2000W / 10W) to get £488 per month.
If Openreach and CityFibre started saying FTTP is more energy efficient than FTTC, the takeup would be huge I would say. You could find ways very easily to argue FTTP is more energy efficient than FTTC. For one your copper cable requires a neverending electrical supply being passed through it constantly to power telephones.
More energy efficient for whom? For most consumers, no, since they will have to have power to the router and the INT, no matter how little power the NT takes and also with faster speeds, comes faster routers with more processing power, so more energy again. I know that processors are more efficient these days, but they still use more energy than a lot of older ones. My Zyxel uses more energy than my plusnet home hub.
For network providers like BVT and alt network then maybe FTTP is more energy efficient, but it will still be many years before FTTC is taken off-line, so the energy for them will still have to be paid for
As I said just “say” it is. Teenagers are being sold by their teachers the world is going to end. And they keep this delusion until they are closer to 40. Just “say” its more energy efferent as a marketing ploy and they will all take it up.
But it is not Teenagers who are paying for the broadband, it is normally their parents. The only time teenagers pay for broadband is when they leave home, and a lot are doing that later in life these days and many are not bothering with fixed broadband unless they have a Xbox or play station
Unfortunately these booted and suited telecomms expense account executives driving around in their BMs and Audis with der leather ejector seats and GPS ashtrays are about as switched-on to the cost constraints faced by the mass of their customers as the current beknighted HMG.
Slack barstewards
God help us.