Why SMS Advertising from 4INFO research
Updates from January, 2010
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Ivan Komarov
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Power Properties of Eyeline's SMS (USSD) Center
Ivan Komarov
It was Eyeline’s entry for Green Award of GSMA: they took the money, ignored the entry. Here it is for those who care:
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What is the name of your policy, programme or initiative? When was it launched or introduced?
Eyeline SMS & USSD Center (SMSC) was first deployed in 2002. To the best of our knowledge, it is the most green solution in its category in the market today.
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What specific environment, employee, management, product manufacturing or deployment issues are addressed by your policy, programme or initiative?
The number of exchanged SMS and USSD messages have been rising on a year to year basis. Environmental impact from such growth of SMS and USSD messaging is yet to be determined. On our side, Eyeline Communications, as a supplier of solutions enabling SMS and USSD messaging, can ensure that messages serviced by our Center have the lowest possible environmental impact.
While meeting most operators’ performance requirements (up to 3,000 msg/sec in current installations), Eyeline SMS&USSD Center shows impressive energy saving characteristics:
Preset performance: 1,000 msg/sec (SMS or one-way USSD transactions)
Required electric power: 1.2 kWh (300 Watt/hr per one idle server and 400 Watt/hr per one 100% utilized server plus one 500W/hr storage)
Required cooling: 3,500 BTU/hr (2×1000BTU+1500BTU=3500BTU/hr)
Required space: 2×1U+2U=4 Units
The system runs on Sun servers under OS Solaris, the code is developed by Eyeline. Code development took approximately 50,000 man-hours.
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How do these benefit users, stakeholders, employees, or the wider world?
USERS: Eyeline SMSC in the described configuration covers the needs of up to 50 million GSM subscribers for SMS & USSD point-to-point messaging and VAS. Extended configurations can serve hundreds of millions of users.
OPERATORS: Significant drop in operating costs.
* Lower power consumption: the Center sends 180,000 SMS consuming the same energy as one hour of one 60W light bulb.
* 2-in-1: USSD and SMS centers in 1 system
* lower cost per message due to high performance.
* Center requires minimal (as compared to other solutions) cooling thus it can easily be added to an existing server room. Operator’s staff is usually surprised to find Eyeline USSD&SMSC requiring 4 units instead of one (or more) fully occupied rack stands.
* savings on support/maintenance staff: only 2 service employees are usually required on the operator’s side.
PLANET EARTH: Gets a lower carbon dioxide foot print from reduced power consumption.
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How do you measure the success of your programme? How successful have you been to date in quantifiable terms?
Success of the green Eyeline’s product is measured by its coverage. To date, Eyeline SMS&USSD Center have had 7 deployments and is available to 61.5 mln subscribers in Russia country wide (single installation in Moscow), and to 40 mln subscribers regionally (6 installations).
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What specific evidence would you highlight for your programme/initiative/policy or product, in terms of it contributing toward a greener economy, industry or community, or reducing carbon emissions?
The evidence comes from comparison to other SMS/USSD centers, which to the best of our knowledge use 2-3 times more space, 1.5-2 times more electricity, servicing 3-8 times less SMS.
Since there are about 3.4 billion subscribers who will send 2.3 trillion messages in 2008 (Gartner estimates), we can calculate potential energy savings from using our solution.
If Eyeline SMSC would deliver all SMS in the world, its annual electricity consumption would be 766,667 kWh. If all SMS (we will not consider USSD for a moment) centers were as efficient as Eyeline’s, the wider world would have saved at least as much as electricity as our SMSC consumes (assuming other solutions consume twice as much electricity for the same number of serviced SMS, a very reasonable assumption).
Therefore, we arrive at wasted energy in the amount of about 750 MWh – minimum – that could provide electricity to 164 European households all year round (based on Greenpeace consumption data).
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What business benefits have you seen from your focus on environmental sustainability?
Today, when awareness about resource depletion and climate change is on the rise, we see more customers choosing “green” and efficient solutions that provide more and consume less. What is more important in our view is to have the most efficient solution at the lowest cost. Obviously it is a non-trivial task but, as our product demonstrates, quite solvable.
Companies choose Eyeline solutions because it shows amazing productivity being very compact and maintenance effective. Efficiency is the focus of Eyeline Communications that gave us the well deserved attention and marketing benefits.
- What plans do you have to expand and extend your policy/ programme/ initiative/product in the future? In what ways is your policy / programme/initiative/product sustainable?
We believe that messaging is here to stay and grow. Therefore solutions that provide or enhance messaging functionality will be in demand. Following the success of Eyeline SMS&USSD Center we developed related carrier-grade products, in which we re-use our green code that proved to be that efficient: Eyeline Missed Calls Alert, Universal Balance Request, SMS Extra, USSD Services Aggregation Portal. Each of these products have interoperability with our SMS&USSD Center and have at least one commercial deployment.
We also plan to provide value added services on a global scale by extending functionality and increasing utilization of deployed Eyeline SMS&USSD centers. As one example of our green initiative, which now undergoes beta-testing, is an arrival tracking application which sends pre-set text messages to a subscriber’s recipients when she turns on her phone upon arrival that reduces unnecessary network utilization.
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Power Savings of Sun Equipment
Ivan Komarov
Continuing from the last post. Another thing found on my computer.
It’s a paper from Sun about their servers’ eco properties. Those who use Sun do good for themselves and environment.