GreenTouch Consortium Passes 50-Member Milestone, Adds Seven New Members

AMSTERDAM Oct. 4, 2011 GreenTouch™, a global industry initiative dedicated to dramatically improving the energy efficiency of information and communications technology (ICT) networks by a factor of 1,000, today announced that seven new organizations have joined the consortium, bringing the total number of member organizations to 53, and involving more than 300 individual participants.

The new members – four academic institutions, two manufacturers and a research laboratory – will collaborate with existing GreenTouch members to research and invent technologies that will enable more energy-efficient networks, plus create the network architecture, specifications and roadmaps that will define them.

The new members are:

  • CommScope/Andrew – United States
  • Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – United States
  • Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) — Korea
  • Universität Paderborn – Germany
  • University of L’Aquila – Italy
  • University of Rochester – United States
  • ZTE Corporation – China

“These seven organizations bring a varied set of approaches and ideas that will help advance our goal of reinventing telecommunications as we know it today,” said Gee Rittenhouse, chairman of the GreenTouch Consortium and newly named COO of Alcatel-Lucent Software, Services and Solutions. “Their energy and enthusiasm will add tremendous value to many projects already under way within the consortium.”

(Statements from five of the new GreenTouch members appear at the end of this announcement.)

The next GreenTouch Members Meeting and Open Forum takes place at the Edgewater Hotel in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A., November 14-17, 2011. GreenTouch will unveil its comprehensive Roadmap during the morning session of the Open Forum on November 17; attendance is free to the public, but advance registration is required.  The access code for non-member registration is GTOpenForum2011.

Membership in GreenTouch is open to any organization or individual that is committed to environmental sustainability and to supporting the consortium in realizing its vision. More information about joining GreenTouch is available on the consortium’s website.

About GreenTouch

GreenTouch is a global consortium of leading service providers, academic and industrial research institutions and non-governmental organizations working together to define the challenges, identify the trends and issues and develop solutions that will achieve the goal of delivering within five years the architecture, specifications, roadmap and demonstrations of key components needed to increase the energy efficiency of ICT networks ‒ in particular, the service provider networks that make up the Internet ‒ by a factor of 1,000 from current levels.

In June 2010, GreenTouch received an award for energy efficiency innovation at the Global Telecoms Business Innovation Awards event. For more information, go to www.greentouch.org.