Oct 28 Meanwhile, season 2 covid, internet, surveillance, 5g and other figures straight into the future
While the second wave of covid arrives on schedule in Europe.
Paying attention to what's going on in and behind our screens, above our heads, in our heads too.
A little information
On this digital which also likes exponential curves.
Welcome to the wonderful future of the cloud and all things digital...
(compiled articles, sources at bottom of page)
If the Internet were a country, it would be the third largest consumer of electricity on the planet, behind China and the United States.
Figures vary widely, but the Internet is estimated to account for between 7% and 15% of global electricity consumption. The CNRS puts the figure at 10%.
Everything pollutes, from computers and undersea cables to the big Internet servers that store e-mails and videos and need constant cooling.
Some points of comparison?
A simple Internet query uses as much energy as a lamp burning for 17 seconds. Google confirms this figure.
An e-mail sent with a file is like a lamp burning for an hour.
Worst of all, of course, are videos, which account for 80% of traffic, with figures exploding as more and more people watch videos or films on the Internet.
In France alone, 47 billion videos were viewed on YouTube in the first half of the year, up 32% year-on-year.
With consumption doubling every four years, the Internet is rapidly becoming the world's biggest energy consumer.
In fact, it's easy enough to see why: for users to communicate, work or pay online, they need physical machines. From computers and smartphones to servers, installations are scattered all over the world, consuming a great deal of electricity and raw materials. How significant? The digital sector accounts for 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions - that's 1.5 times more than air transport!
E-mail is a fast way of communicating that's becoming increasingly popular, but its use is not without consequences for the environment. If accompanied by a 1 MB attachment, an e-mail emits 19 g of Co2. Taken individually, this impact is low, but when you consider that 34 million e-mails are sent every hour, not counting spam, the consequences become significant. This would correspond to the equivalent of 14 tonnes of oil. Sending 20 e-mails a day pollutes as much as driving 100 km in a car.
Global video streaming consumption emits 300 million tons of CO₂ worldwide every year. That's equivalent to the digital pollution of a country like Spain! Watching one hour of video consumes as much electricity as a refrigerator for a year. The 2.7 billion views of the Gangnam Style video, it represented the annual consumption of a small nuclear power plant. A Youtube user emits around 117 tonnes of Co2 every year by watching videos. He could reduce his consumption by 323,000 tonnes of Co2 per year just by stopping automatic playback.
If we focus on France, 10% of the electricity produced is consumed by data centers alone. Their consumption is equivalent to that of a town of 50,000 inhabitants. And 40% of this electricity consumption is used just to cool them down. Yet these planet-damaging machines are essential to industry, as they collect and collate data.
In an increasingly data-driven society (90% of all data was produced between 2015 and 2017), the accumulation of data will continue unabated. It must also be said that humanity has never generated so much data: every 2 days, the world's population produces as much information as it did from the dawn of its existence until 2003.
Pollution from connected objects
Connected objects alone generate 39% of greenhouse gas emissions in the digital sector. They also contribute 76% to the depletion of the world's non-renewable natural resources.
The emerging trend is not very optimistic: the planet will have 48 billion connected objects by 2025, with an environmental footprint 3 times larger than in 2010.
5G, satellites and the Internet.
5G is an enabler. Combined with the IPv6 protocol, this technology makes possible the massive deployment of tens of billions of connected objects. So 5G is contributing, indirectly but surely, to a considerable increase in our digital footprint.
As a reminder, at current rates and given their sheer number, according to our EENM study, connected objects will be the main source of digital-related environmental impacts worldwide by 2025.
5G also makes it possible to sell new multimedia uses in mobile situations that didn't exist before or weren't possible: streaming HD video, streaming video games, etc.
Thanks to an addictive design, these hundreds of billions of new hours of use will become new essential needs for an entire generation.
Adding tens or hundreds of billions of hours of additional digital use can only add up to a considerable mass of environmental impacts.
Starlink is a satellite-based Internet access project proposed by American aerospace manufacturer SpaceX, based on the deployment of a constellation of several thousand telecommunications satellites positioned in low-Earth orbit. Two prototypes will be launched in 2018, and satellite deployment will begin in 2019, with commissioning scheduled for 2020. To meet its commercial objectives, SpaceX plans to maintain 12,000 operational satellites in low-Earth orbit in the long term (around 2025), compared with just 2,000 today. However, the initial constellation is expected to comprise only 1,600 satellites in the first few years, in order to fine-tune the techniques to be used before deploying a full constellation.
Kuiper constellation, Amazon announced in April 2019 that they would fund and deploy a large broadband satellite internet constellation called "Project Kuiper". It is expected to take up to a decade to fully deploy all 3,236 satellites planned for the full constellation in order to provide internet to "tens of millions of people who lack basic access to broadband internet."
In 2016, OneWeb planned for a launch cadence of 30-36 satellites a month to create an initial constellation of 650 satellites. The satellites operate in low Earth orbit (LEO). OneWeb chose an altitude of 1200 km for its satellites because there is a minimum existing population of satellites and debris at that altitude.
Like existing LEO based communications satellite constellations, OneWeb's satellites are closer to Earth and will, therefore, provide much lower transmission delays than geostationary satellite broadband services. As late as January 2020, OneWeb was still planning to provide 10 times the bandwidth and one-tenth of the latency of existing geostationary satellites.
Orbit Trash
A waste orbit1, sometimes referred to as a garbage orbit or graveyard orbit2 in astronautics, is the orbit into which a satellite is transferred at the end of its active life.
The corresponding terms are graveyard orbit and disposal orbit.
Telecommunication satellites in geostationary orbit use the remaining fuel intended to keep them on station to reach their waste orbit, which is 230 kilometers higher than their nominal orbit. Placing them in a lower orbit would increase the risk of collision when their successors are put into orbit, and sending them back to disintegrate in the atmosphere would require far too much energy.
Satellite controllers are usually asked to use the last few kilograms of propellant remaining (if the satellite is still maneuverable) to place the satellite a little further away from geostationary orbit, to prevent it from staying too close to other active satellites. Next, it is asked to cut all electrical circuits, to prevent it from interfering with the other satellites it will be passing near, and to completely empty the propellant tanks to guard against an explosion following a possible collision with another celestial object.
Monitoring
Various sources :
https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/30/21348768/fcc-amazon-kuiper-satellite-constellation-approval
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink
https://www.greenit.fr/2020/09/30/5g-recentrons-le-debat/