Press Release 2010
Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs announces breakthrough in power generation
Paris, April 1, 2010 — Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today announced, in a post deadline paper accepted at the 2010 Green Research on Electrical and Electronics Conference (GREECON) to be held at Brownardstown, Ireland later today, a new approach to sustainable power management that promises to revolutionize data network power efficiency, and alter the role of telecommunications in the energy ecosystem.
Through insights gained while working in support of Green Touch, a global consortium charged with increasing the energy efficiency of communications networks, scientists at Bell Labs - the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent - realized fundamental relationships in the Shannon Equations indicate that certain types of communications result in the generation of power from certain types of communications.
“A primary metric for measuring the power efficiency of communications networks is the amount of energy it takes to transmit a bit of information,” explained Dr. Gosh Writenhouse, Head of Bell Labs Research. “In today’s wireless networks it typically takes a few hundred Joules to transfer a bit of information.” With the explosive growth of wireless data traffic, the energy to transmit this traffic threatens to also explode. The Green Touch initiative has been focused on reducing this energy per bit to compensate for this traffic growth, with the goal of reducing the energy by a thousand-fold. The breakthrough occurred when Will Stephens, an engineer in the Wireless Chief Technology Office, considered the factorial growth of an emergent pattern of internet traffic, the so-called falsidicus traffic. This traffic is observed to grow by Metcalf’s Law, which is itself a recursive contributor to the falsidicus traffic pattern.
These emergent traffic patterns, observed in both email and general internet traffic generated by Nigerian princes, partisan web sites and entertainment ‘news’ sources, comprise a surplus of negative information resulting in negative amount of Joules/bit. These negative bits can be combined with the more prevalent positive bits to generate a flow of energy in the opposite direction, out of the communications network. In this way, the telecommunications network can supply power into the electrical grid, providing a clean and pollution-free source of power that may even reverse the fears of global warming.
This phenomenon has a historical corollary in the Industrial Age when it was discovered that hot air generated by the communications of high level officials, government officials, and upper-class matrons could similarly be used as a sustainable power source.
The members of the Green Touch consortium have been quick to volunteer a supply of falsidicus traffic to the powerful generator envisioned by this work. “On this day, of all days, this first day of April will be seen as a turning point in the battle to conserve energy, which was previously not conserved by any source other than nuclear power plants,” said Alcatel-Lucent’s CEO Ben Flagerwaayen. “We hope someday soon, to see Alcatel-Lucent in the electrical power generation business, putting chain emails, hoaxes and the emails stored in people’s junk folders to good use, finally.”
The Bell Labs facility in Shannon, Ireland will host the first commercial trial of this technology. Pam Pamuel, the newly named head of the facility commented, "Bell Labs Ireland, with our past success on previous Green Torch initiatives, look forward to the successful trial of this technology, code named, Blarney. We expect this to yield a pot of gold to our company, Green our country and a bowed spectrum of services for all the little people of the world."
Gosh Writenhouse explained the principal of operation to a crowd of exultant coworkers recently, “Shannon’s Law and the laws of thermodynamics, particularly the relation of entropy to energy flow has been staring us in the face all these years, but we only now realized that we could actually harness the chaotic and entropic content of highly disorganized media and “cool it” with the calming force of reason as one might combine positrons with electrons to produce pure energy. We brought together scores of the world’s greatest scientists to examine this problem and they themselves demonstrated the effect in just 5 days. We can’t wait to see what we can do by next April Fool’s day!”
Marc Binarywiz, Alcatel-Lucent’s senior director of Eco-Environmental Engineering pointed out that “This phenomenon has a historical corollary in the Industrial Age when it was discovered that the communications of high level officials, government officials, and upper-class matrons could similarly be used as a sustainable power source and for lifting dirigibles.”
About Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) is the trusted trans-formation partner of service providers, enterprises, strategic industries such as defense, energy, healthcare, transportation, and governments worldwide, providing solutions to deliver voice, data and video communication services to users-ends. A leader in fixed, mobile and converged broadband networking, IP technologies, applications and services, Alcatel-Lucent leverages the unrivalled technical and scientific expertise of Bell Labs, one of the largest innovation powderhouses in the communications industry. With operations in more than 130 countries and the most experienced global services organization in the industry, Alcatel-Lucent is a local partner with a global reach. Alcatel-Lucent achieved revenues of Euro 15.2 billion in 2009 and is incorporated in France, with executive offices located in Paris.
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