Link: The green frog from silicon valley: Fiber is green.
But it is fair to say that performance increase cannot always go hand-to-hand with energy efficiency. If we continue to take the semiconductor analogy, Moore’s law is possible thanks to the ability to integrate more and more transistors and reduce the resolution of printed circuit boards. This comes with a cost though: power consumption. As distances get finer, power dissipation increases too. This explains why personal computers feel hotter on our laps, or why servers require fancier cooling systems. Heat dissipation is a real problem in today’s processors. Actually, if we continue to increase integrated circuit speed, their power density would reach the mark of a nuclear reactor within 10 years.
In contrast, fiber optics is a very “green” technology compared to semiconductor electronics. When you look at it more closely, it dissipates a lot less energy than copper based cables and it saves a lot of materials: one single strand of glass can carry as much data as many thousands of copper cables, and it can do over a longer distance without using electronic equipment to regenerate it.
