The environmental effect of broadband growth was one of the topics on the agenda at the Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) Council Europe’s annual conference in mid February in Copenhagen.

Delegates heard how the industry has made substantial efforts to minimize any negative environmental impact from their products and services. Hardware has been completely redesigned and recycling services have been implemented.

Don McCullough, head of Product Marketing at Product Area Broadband Networks, Business Unit Networks, was the Ericsson speaker at the conference. He says that in the operation phase, power consumption is the main contributor to carbon dioxide emissions, and therefore focus on energy efficient solutions is key.

Here, Ericsson has been a pioneer, with its Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) analysis of telecom networks, McCullough says, referring to studies that show the telecoms industry is a relatively carbon-lean sector.

By using LCA and putting focus on our products and solutions, Ericsson has made great strides in reducing carbon emissions. “A subscriber on an Ericsson mobile network emits 25 kilogram of carbon dioxide per year, which is equal to driving a car on the motorway for about an hour – down from 180kg in 1985 for subscribers in first-generation networks.”

McCullough points out that an even more interesting development is how an increase in broadband use can lead to substantial reductions of CO2 emissions in other sectors,, making telecoms an integral part of the solution to climate problems.

One of the most obvious areas where telecoms can help is traveling, McCollough says, noting that some calls can replace a physical journey.

In addition, today’s ADSL or 2G/3G mobile networks can also handle simple banking transactions, which help minimize the need for physical transport.

However, human interaction in the form of virtual face-to-face meetings will require a much larger bandwidth,” McCullough says. “This is where we need to expedite the proliferation of fiber-based networks such as GPON, and of next generation mobile networks based on LTE, to provide a consistent, multi-megabit, low-latency connection.”

Also at the conference, Joeri Van Bogaert, president of the FTTH Council, expressed optimism about the future of fiber, noting that it is evolving at a faster pace, not only in the Asia-Pacific region and the US, but also in Europe.

“The Asia-Pacific region is still leading the FTTH rollout, and, until recently, the US had the largest growth in percentage terms,” he said at the conference. “Europe started later but we are catching up. Since June 2008, growth in FTTH subscribers in Europe – not taking Russia into account – has been 23 percent."

Citing the Netherlands as an example, Van Bogaert said that expansion in Europe will be driven not only by one group of utility companies or operators, but also by alternative carriers. “In the Netherlands, you have a private-public partnership, where the incumbent operator and the alternative operator are building passive FTTH networks. On the public side, you have the city of Amsterdam, which, together with six housing corporations, is planning to connect the next 100,000 homes."

Not even the current economic downturn is expected to adversely affect FTTH rollout across Europe. "I believe it could actually help FTTH rollout considerably,” Van Bogaert says. “The market sees FTTH as a very reliable, long-term infrastructure investment."