Not before time, the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) has announced that it will be working towards a set of specifications that will outline energy saving solutions for home Internet gateways. Because home based broadband equipment is switched on 24 x 7 x 365, even a small power draw will have a significant total life energy cost. Typically equipment draws between 20W and 100W meaning that in seven days we could be consuming nearly 17 KW hours, more than the one or two dishwasher cycles the typical family uses in a week. That does not account for the Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexor (DSLAM) in the telephone exchange that the broadband supplier pays the electricity bill for. 

“Reducing the energy consumption of broadband communication equipment without impeding the fast technological developments and the service provided has been at the forefront of operators’ minds for some time now,” explains Paolo Pastorino, Chief Technology Officer at the HGI. “Energy conservation is a major discussion point globally and in the telecoms industry.”

Broadband services are always on and most operators do not even attempt to place the equipment into low power or standby mode during the many hours when there are no active users on the network. The prize for getting this right will be many hundreds of KW hours of electricity and cost savings for consumers and huge sums for the telecommunications industry. In my time at BT this was seen as the largest addressable prize in terms of total energy savings and one that was well within the grasp of engineers and equipment manufacturers.

Some broadband suppliers own the end-to-end service with design control of the home hub device, and the DSLAM in the telephone exchange so that they can manage the power utilized on the local loop circuit. Currently any protocol used must be proprietary as there are no internationally recognized standards for DSL power management end-to-end. Broadband vendors who supply (or allow) off the shelf DSL hubs and routers to be connected to their line can have no control over the power required to keep the line active.

The HGI was founded and launched by nine telecom operators (Belgacom, BT, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, KPN, TeliaSonera, NTT, Telefonica and Telecom Italia) in 2004, and now has members from five continents, representing the entire spectrum of actors in the broadband home arena.  The main tasks of the HGI are to establish home gateway-related technical and interoperability specifications and provide input to standardisation bodies.