Alcatel-Lucent rebuts Ericsson power claim

Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) says Ericsson’s claims about the power consumption of the Alcatel Lucent edge gear are erroneous, leading to a false advantage for Ericsson’s IP edge gear in a power usage consumption.

“Their assumptions seem to be based on the notion that we would need separate boxes to do aggregation and subscriber management, when that is not the case,” said Lindsay Newell, vice president of marketing for Alcatel-Lucent.

Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) claimed that the Alcatel-Lucent edge solution would require 18,000 watts of power to support 256,000 customers, when Newell said the more accurate figure is 4060 watts of power for Alcatel-Lucent’s 7750 Service Router to provide broadband services to that many customers. Ericsson’s solution using its SmartEdge router would require 3840 watts, according to Ericsson.

“The difference is that our solution in that case would deliver significantly more bandwidth per subscriber if you are using that methodology,” Newell said. “If you are going to compare power consumption and energy efficiency, you have to look at both the number of subscribers and the bandwidth per subscriber.”

This latest debate only points up the need for industry-wide standards for measuring energy consumption and efficiency, Newell said.
“It is absolutely essential in the industry that the work that is being done by ATIS on their TEER [Telecommunications Energy Efficiency Ratio] values and the work in the Metro Ethernet Forum continues to push forward,” Newell said. “I think those are both good forums – there is also work in the IEEE going on with energy-efficient Ethernet. The important thing is that the interworking between the various bodies -- the liaison groups are effective, so we don’t end up with seven standards. There is no question that the topic is very important to service providers – it’s important to the whole industry. With bandwidth demands growing as rapidly as they are, we as an industry need to work out how to be more power-efficient” throughout the product life cycle.