This year, I was honoured to moderate three panels at the German trade fair ANGA COM on AI, Wi-Fi, and, yes, of course, sustainability. In between, I wandered the two halls to assess the sustainability messaging at the show. This post is just about the latter.
Food options are cheaper and better than at IBC or NAB, but as soon as you need to throw something away (which you cannot escape if you need to eat), you feel like you’ve time-travelled back a decade or two. There wasn’t a single recycling bin at the venue. That may be a Cologne thing.
Briskly walking through the larger of the two halls, hall 8, I estimated that about one booth in ten had some sustainability messaging. See some examples below. I kept Vodafone’s as a sample of the many booths using grass or plants for an overly green theme without any specific messaging.
I went through hall 7, where most of the streaming was, more carefully, and spoke to over a dozen booths with sustainability messaging – at least, whenever someone would talk to me.
Zattoo, Greening of Streaming’s (GoS) latest member and an e2e TV solution provider had an impressive booth at the entrance with a scaled model of a wind turbine in which, for the past two years, they’ve been trialling a data centre in the wind turbine‘s machine room. One of their ANGA messages was that they help telco partners reduce their CO2 emissions by mutualising TV platforms across 30 telcos. Zattoo showed me some of the ESG data they publish (see here). I was surprised to see “commuting and working from home” was a scope 3 activity, as I’d have intuited that they’d be scopes 1 and/or 2, so I checked, and, of course, they’re right: energy consumption in employees’ homes is considered to be an indirect emission because it occurs outside of the company’s direct operations.
Walking down the first aisle, I was struck by eero’s (a Wi-Fi provider) multi-dwelling unit (MDU) solution, which sounded promising. I see a solution sometime in the future where separate SSIDs could be provided from a single device that could serve several neighbouring apartments – but that still seems like sustainability science fiction. eero’s offering competes with Plume’s Uprise solution. The eero solution saves only marginal energy by trimming radio energy from each appartements separate eero device.
eero told me they were ready for the coming EU regulation requiring power down after 10 minutes of inactivity – to be investigated. eero also told me their devices can lower power on 10 Gbps Ethernet over copper when all that speed isn’t feasible.
Next up was Sagemcom.
I’ve been speaking about sustainability to Sagemcom for two years now, and I was genuinely impressed that all the people I talked to were up to speed and engaged in the topic. The two concepts promoted at the booth were “Eco-design” and “energy management.” – I was disappointed that they were the last points on the list, but at least they were there.
In the white paper I wrote just over a year ago with Sagemcom, we indicated that black plastic was probably more sustainable because it stayed new for longer. At ANGA, Sagemcom was proud to show off 100% recycled white plastic (obtained through a filtering process). The next big challenge is aluminium recycling, which is still in the R&D labs.
Energy management is all about deep sleep scheduling (reaching 0.3 to 0.5W), light standby (reducing radio power), and reducing boot time — some physical limitations, like powering up an antenna, slow progress here.
Implementing “Matter” and “Thread” promises to improve sleep / wake-up scenarios. For example, a door sensor could send a “Thread” to wake the closest mesh node from deep sleep.
AI and ML offer ways to learn from actual usage patterns. Users could, for example, be offered a deep sleep/light standby schedule based on their usage.
Sagemcom is researching cloud-based solutions, but the vendor is also excited about bringing this to devices, especially with Broadcom’s announcement of an NPU onboard HGW chipsets.
Sagemcom also identifies sustainability potential by using the “matter” protocol to reduce the number of IoT devices in sleep mode, which can represent up to 15% of a household’s power consumption.
One company that went all out on ESG messaging was Korean N-iTUS, a network equipment manufacturer.
They are a private 40-person company founded in 2007. Their own ESG report for 2023 is 40 pages long.
Their main sustainability message at ANGA was about reduced pollution in device production.
Telco Systems is a US-based, 400-person company that has been around for decades, as attested by their domain name: www.telco.com
I walked into their booth because of the “60% reduction in CO2 emissions” message on their back wall.
Their rep, Gidi Raz, told me about their UK client, CityFibre, which went from a dedicated hardware solution to a software one. In my world of codecs, that would be a recipe for disaster, but not so here, as energy consumption was reduced from 100W per location to 40W. The box is just a computer running a virtual router and firewall.
ILOQ is a Finish 350-person company created in 2003. I walked in to avoid bumping into someone because the booth, surprisingly, had no sustainability messaging. But there is a powerful link (they should hire me to get that messaging together).
ILOQ uses energy harvesting from mobile phones or the movement of a key into the barrel to provide battery-less connected devices, mainly locks.
Beyond the obvious sustainability gain of getting rid of batteries, other benefits include:
• Unlike mechanical locks, these can have log trails.
• One Can disable a user in real-time.
• Any regular phone can be used.
• A new digital service is created with almost no added CO2 footprint.
I found it encouraging to see how sustainability was just part, but a genuine part, of the whole story.
MainStreaming is one of the founding members of Greening of Streaming. They are eight years old and currently have a headcount above 60 people. One of their sustainability messages is already being carbon neutral (certified by Climate Partner). Another is the single hop from origin to edge that their architecture offers. Reducing caching layers reduces carbon footprint and improves latency. Flagship customer DAZN doesn’t use ultra-low latency but still achieves a delay of no more than 30 seconds. Mainstreaming’s low-latency solution offers a 3 to 4-second delay. I asked MainStreaming if ultra-low latency (ULL) was bad for sustainability. The answer was, “Probably not, but it is bad for quality whenever the network isn’t perfect because there is so much less buffering”.
AVEQ is a Vienna and Berlin-based startup founded in 2018. ANGA was their first-ever booth. Their sustainability message was about avoiding over-engineering. AVEQ’s video quality measurement identifies issues that impact perceived quality to avoid fixing things that don’t bother users (or throwing more resources at the problem, as we too often do in the streaming space). Like with Greening of Streaming’s LESS Accord project, this is about “Good Enough”. AVEQ can, for example, analyse whether different CDNs have a QoE impact or how far resolution or bitrate can be optimised without adversely affecting perceptual quality.
Varnish Software, another founding GoS member, presented its core product at ANGA, a caching solution between video origin servers and the edge. One of their main sustainability messages was enabling large data throughputs of up to 1.3 Tb per second per node to handle more (video) with less (servers). Since November 2022, with partners Intel and SuperMicro, the global CDN software specialist founded in Sweden, promised to get CDN power consumption of close to 1 Gb per Watt. The latest number is 1.17 Gb/W, with ongoing tests and increasing efficiency.
Ruwido is an Austrian remote-control maker from Salzburg, established in 1969 with a headcount of just under 150. The company boasts 100% made in Austria. I was piqued by their unique booth message: “Remotes designed by the planet”. Ruwido told me that they have a new architecture removing all harmful chemicals (like the latex often used to make buttons feel nice that isn’t recyclable), leading to a 70% lower carbon footprint. PCBs (circuit boards) are made of paper. Ruwindo’s ANGA 24 booth was built exclusively with cardboard, wood, and paper, and cornstarch was used instead of glue.
ORC (Optical Refurbishment Centre) is a German company founded near Karlsruhe in 2009. Its headcoyunt is 20. Its core business is refurbishing rackable routers. When a device is too old or damaged, it is recycled for spare parts and materials. ORC has a small customer-facing business that is not profitable enough to grow at present (that opens a can of sustainability worms – for another post).
Most refurbs are demand-driven (i.e., ORC will go and hunt for a device that a potential buyer is looking for) and sometimes offer-driven (when an operator retires a generation of devices that could be used elsewhere). The business model mainly involves buying and reselling, although, occasionally, ORC can refurb devices for reuse with the same operator.
ORC performs its work in Germany but has international customers.
When I asked if ORC had political or activist support, I was told it was “just a business,” which reassured the prospects of encouraging circularity in the industry.
“My climate” certified that ORC saved 2000 Tons of CO2 in 2023, with up to 99% CO2 reduction in the best-case projects.
Visonum was an unusual company to find at ANGA. The German startup (from 2021) was in Cologne to promote a single product built on ten years of prior experience: a Speed Test. Visonum boasts over 20m tests per year with Vodafone.
The technology powers the ISP benchmark from Computer Bild, especially for mobile operator ranking.
From a sustainability perspective, their founder told me that with servers, the ISP network data remains local. The test shows you how much data you are putting on the network. My 4G test used 216 Mb but can be stopped as soon as the user wants (it was already stable at 74 Mb in my case). The graphing is also real-time. Visonum can thus be used for real-time Wi-Fi coverage testing because the actual data is displayed (unlike Ookla). You can walk around your house to identify weak or dead spots; you don’t have to pause in each part of each room.
TCP/IP packets can arrive in the wrong order, requiring larger buffers.
Packet loss must also be measured. 4% packet loss is acceptable for downloads but not for Zoom calls.
When I challenged Visonum on why a Speed Test was complicated and if there was any barrier to entry, the founder was adamant that you first need to measure multiple streams in parallel, learning what to ignore during startup. Another hard nut to crack is removing the influence of the performance of the device used to run the test.
G&L, a systems integrator, is another active Greening of Streaming member. Based in ANGA’s home city, they would win any competition to run their booth with the lowest carbon footprint. As with other GoS members, it was energising to hear from different people at the booth who were enthusiastic about making progress in sustainability from technology and marketing. G&L offers all your streaming needs under one roof, or as one of their co-founders realistically put it, “on throat to choke, if it’s broke.”
G&L was founded in 1999, and its headcount is currently around 60.
From a sustainability perspective, G&L uses “super high density” to boast under 300 watts per ARM server. The company promotes a hybrid Cloud / On-prem approach in most cases for the greenest streaming.
I walked by UGG’s booth without picking up on the messaging but met one of their staff on the way to the train station home. This four-year-old Bavarian company is a “fully green-focussed FTTH ISP”. The website claims that fibre networks use 60% less energy than copper ones. UGG (Unsere Grüne Glasfaser) already exclusively uses EVs and is focused on fully transitioning to solar power for almost all operations.
On the downside, one hall 7 booth that will remain nameless had some prominent sustainability messaging, but the booth staff had yet to learn what it meant. I was also disappointed to see a prominent Chinese vendor with no green messaging when I photographed a green wall on their booth full of sustainability messaging only six months ago during Network-X.
Overall, the mood aligned with my recent post on sustainability and the hype cycle, which concluded that even if the short-term trend is downward regarding sustainability hype, the longer-term trend is still positive. I saw three categories of booth messaging:
1. sustainability has been actively embraced by some stakeholders like all the GoS members present, Sagemcom or Nokia; for example,
2. most companies are aware and are just embarking on their journey,
3. the laggards who have yet to realise they will have to start soon are delaying as long as possible.
A subjective distribution would be that almost 10% have embraced sustainability enough to have clear messaging already, and 20% to 30% aren’t yet interested. This leaves us with the 60% to 70% remaining that have started but don’t yet have enough clarity to communicate proactively.
