BACK IN MY DAY…
Virtually everything we do currently relies on one form of energy or another.
Let’s go back to the basics.
Back in the old days, coal was mined for put in fireplaces and to power the steam engines. Then we had gas to light the street lamps and finally we had electricity that revolutionised our progress in technology.
We also drilled in land and sea and made variants of crude oil and through learning that heating this black, liquid gold releases different fuels at different temperatures within a distillation column. This has helped fuel (pardon the pun!) or motor industries throughout the decades.
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Within businesses, the increase in technology meant that we needed more and more plug sockets as we have had more Servers, PCs, Laptops, mobile phones, Phone Systems, monitors, web cams/video conferencing units, lighting, air conditioning, CCTV and Wi-Fi systems and many more equipment that has been added to our working environment over the past 40 years or so.
We now have electric cars to charge up, and from a purely logical point of view, where is that power coming from? Yes, we may not be using fossil fuels (petrol/diesel) to power the car, but we are still using electricity from the Grid (or maybe your own solar panels – which were manufactured in a factory that also uses power), and that power is probably still using incumbent processes to generate the power.
Even if we are using renewables, wind turbines, etc., how do we manufacture these colossal structures?
Take the internet as another example.
If we removed all of the self-indulgent posts, photos and videos that is purely for entertainment or in most cases to have to hook people into following some nonsense or another and making a minority rich through the least effort, we would use half of the electricity that we do on the vast computing power that we require to store all the useless reels of our dogs, cats and other non-educational content that we have in data centres around the world.
THE WAY FORWARD
Equally, Apple, Google, Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft have all encouraged us to store our personal content on their cloud-based hardware. This is in turn, uses vast amounts of electricity in the background to keep the servers at optimal temperatures by deploying cooling systems and backup generators in case of mains failure so we can still have access to our data.
Leased Lines and 10 or 100 Gigabit fibre optic circuits are intertwined throughout the whole country, weaving in and out of datacentres and then ‘back-hauling’ to the International Network connecting voice, video and static content and now, the ‘Internet of Things’ or IoT devices as known for short.
MAXIMUM NETWORKS
Get in touch with the Maximum Networks team team today on 0330 102 7444 or using our contact form