Last week as we drew closer to Earth Day, I talked to Rick Dipper about Nortel’s Green IT efforts. Nortel has long been known as an environmentally conscious company, but only recently have we also started talking up some of our energy efficiency advantages as well.
Rick Dipper talks about Nortel’s green effortsBased in RTP, Rick heads up Nortel’s green efforts as part of his larger Corporate Responsibility role. Rick and I talked through the energy usage details of VoIP and IP Phones, the need for businesses to evaluate their voice and data networks when looking to be more energy efficient, how Nortel stacks up to our competitors in energy efficiency, as well as Nortel’s own internal green efforts. Below is our conversation:
What is your title and role within Nortel? Leader, Corporate Responsibility and I am part of a team that leads our Green efforts within Nortel. I also lead other areas for Nortel: Environment, Health, and Safety, Records Management, Business Continuity, and Corporate Citizenship.
What has your focus been on recently? Much of my focus lately has been on all things Green - what Nortel is doing, what our peers, customers, competitors are doing, what’s world class and innovative in this space…this is an incredibly dynamic environment, as essentially we’re all learning together. From a historical perspective, we’re barely out of the blocks and this provides an incredibly unique opportunity for all of us to set the pace moving forward.
Green IT is the in thing right now, and I hear lots of vendors talking it up. Isn’t Nortel just following a trend here? Nortel has had a long environmental history, dating back to when we were the first company to eliminate CFC’s from manufacturing in the early 1990’s. We had a bit of a lull during our lean years; however, work in this area continued and when we took an inventory last year, we realized that we had a compelling story that we weren’t telling anyone. We’re quickly regaining our voice in this area. There is a global dialogue occurring and it’s important that we participate for many reasons, both from a business perspective where we can contribute solutions as well as from a personal perspective, where we must take action now to set an example for future generations.
I’ve heard that IP phones actually use a lot more energy than standard TDM phones. Is that correct? This is true. A Nortel 3904 TDM phone uses on average 1.5 watts. The Nortel IP Phone 2004 uses 3.2 watts and it goes up to 15.4 watts with other models. Color screens, back lighting of screens, more powerful chips, etc all drive up the watts versus TDM.
How do Nortel’s IP Phones stack up? We are very energy efficient because we have understood the magnitude in power change from the TDM phones. You can see energy awareness on the new IP phone 1200 series. These were designed with customers asking for lower power consumption to address the explosion of operational expense in the wiring closets. So the 1200 series is at the 3.2 watts level — about a 50% reduction from the 1100 series IP Phones.
Obviously this relates back to PoE requirements for Ethernet Switches. So basically if a company is looking to move to VoIP and energy consumption is an important component, do they need to look at their Ethernet Switches too? Absolutely! This is where the explosion in the electric bill is today and it’s forecasted to grow even larger. We are very focused with our ongoing 3rd party independent lab tests with the Tolly group to validate that our PoE energy consumption is less then Cisco and HP. We have an opportunity, even an obligation to help business managers think differently about IT procurement and break the framework of market share being an efficient decision criteria.
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