I was watching Soylent Green recently, a classic film about overpopulation. In one scene, Edward G Robinson was pedalling a bike linked to a generator to power a light bulb. Given the current energy crisis, this made me wonder if one day the first thing people will do when they get to the office will be to pedal to produce enough, leccy to boot and power their laptops or PCs.
After all, we already have wind-up radios for Africa, and in future there are plans for the units to play pre-recorded material on memory cards – an excellent way to distribute information in areas where there may be no electricity cables.
Meanwhile, here in the UK the lights are still on, and the current Power over Ethernet (PoE) standard, 802.3af, which has been around since 2003, allows a fair selection of devices to be powered through standard RJ-45 category 5 cabling. This standard limits the maximum power deliverable to 15.4W, good enough for devices such as PDAs, IP phones and wireless access points, but not enough for PCs or laptops.
In 2005 the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) set up a body to create a new standard for PoE – 802.3at, which could deliver 30W to 40W to devices, not just at 10/100Mbit/s speeds but at gigabit speeds or even 10Gbit/s. Of course, even delivering 30W to 40W over the LAN would exclude some of the heftier notebooks, but not most ultraportables. However, the newer ultraportables, even with power-conserving chipsets, may be pushed out of the PoE-enabled bracket since vendors seem to want to put in power-guzzling Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G and WiMax radios.
The 802.3at standard, which is otherwise known as PoE Plus, is due to be ratified in 2007, but there could be problems because you can imagine the power that resulting switches will need – compared with 802.3af-based and standard Ethernet switches. One of the new switches might operate at say 30W per port, so a 24-port model 802.3at switch could crank out well over 700W of power.
And datacentre managers are already on the back foot, courtesy of the hefty electricity bills for air conditioning and cooling for servers and networking kit. Google, for instance, has found that its electricity costs exceed the capital cost of its servers.
Could IT managers deploy switches in the datacentre that use four of five times the energy of current PoE switches? Well, yes, providing they have sufficient air conditioning to cool down this new hardware.
And finance directors might even find the cash if there is a compelling business case for it.
The 802.3at standard will probably be ratified, but energy prices may discourage some firms from buying the kit.
Of course there are the cynics who say the current energy crisis is being talked up by energy companies eager to make bigger profits. But this time the crisis seems real. Problems in the Middle East and the rise of energy-thirsty countries such as China and India, whose combined populations number over two billion, could mean that energy prices will never fall again.
