Between 73 percent and 83 percent of all cable industry power consumption is accounted for by hubs and headends, as well as the active equipment on the HFC network.
This data comes courtesy of the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers 2020 initiative, which released results of a recent study during a Tuesday session in Herndon, Va.
According to a detailed analysis conducted by what the SCTE calls a "cross-section" of major cable operators, market data centers and national distribution centers represent only 3-7 percent of the industry's power usage, despite the presence of servers, video processing equipment, routers and other high-consumption devices.
Backbone and co-location sites about for 1-2 percent, the study found, while administrative offices consumed the remainder of power (10-21 percent).
"While devices in the edge facilities and in the network individually are not the greatest consumers of power in our networks, the sheer number of those devices makes those areas high priorities for the reduction of consumption and cost on a per-unit basis," said Daniel Howard, senior VP and CTO of SCTE.
According to data compiled by Cisco Systems and the U.S. Department of Energy, the amount of electrical power chewed through annually by the cable industry is expected to rise from a current level of $1 billion to as much as $4 billion by 2020.
The SCTE's Energy 2020 initiative was created to drive down that cost and usage acceleration.
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Cable operators' power consumption. (Image source: SCTE) |
For more:
- read this SCTE press release
Related links:
SCTE Cable-Tec Expo attendance down 7 percent to 9,100
The 'Energy 2020' challenge: Getting the cable business to look at its power bill in 5 years
Comcast's Schanz expected to issue energy challenge at SCTE Cable-Tec Expo