Ahead of a general meeting next month in London (June 15-17), the GreenTouch consortium has opened its membership to new participants. 
The consortium, which was organized by Bell Labs, aims to create the technologies needed to make communications networks 1000 times more energy efficient than they are today. Specifically, the Green Touch initiative aims to develop and demonstrate fundamental technologies within five years that could lead to radical redesign of how networks are built and operated.
The technical objectives relate to measuring, modeling, and predicting energy consumption in communications networks as well as gauging the effect of GreenTouch innovations on carbon footprint and network power. A technical committee has been formed to define the network architecture, set technical goals and targets, and coordinate the activities of workgroups focused on specific technology areas such as wireless and fixed access, core transmission and switching and routing technologies.
GreenTouch consortium founders include:
Service Providers: AT&T, China Mobile, Orange, Portugal Telecom, Swisscom, Telefonica
Academic Research Labs: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE), Stanford University’s Wireless Systems Lab (WSL), the University of Melbourne’s Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES)
Government and Nonprofit Research Institutions: The CEA-LETI Applied Research Institute for Microelectronics, imec, The French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA), Foundation for Mobile Communications
Industrial Labs: Bell Labs, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT), Huawei, Freescale Semiconductorhttp://www.greentouch.org
