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A comment on Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones. Parent comment

Re:Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones by p1necone on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @09:27PM (#32845864)
You also need to take into account the fact that most of this equipment is always going to be turned on and processing some non trivial level of load whether you're sending requests or not. There's generally going to be a difference in power consumption between different levels of load above idle state, but an n% increase in bandwidth is almost always going to result in < n% increase in power consumption.

Also, any section of the network that's at full throughput all the time, and just evenly divides that throughput amongst users as it gets more load is not going to consume /any/ more power per GB no matter how many requests you throw at it.

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Re:Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones by toast0 on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @09:59PM (#32846103)
> Also, any section of the network that's at full throughput all the time, and just evenly divides that throughput amongst users as it gets more load is not going to consume /any/ more power per GB no matter how many requests you throw at it.

If it's at full throughput, you can't throw more load at it (well, smaller packets is more load than larger packets for the same throughput).

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Re:Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones by p1necone on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @11:15PM (#32846543)
I meant more at an individual level - like if I use 100gb of bandwidth today, and 200gb of bandwidth tomorrow there's a good chance that the extra power consumption on at least some of the network from my extra bandwidth is zero if what I described in my previous comment is the case.

If everyone attempted to double their bandwidth usage tomorrow, then yes equipment is going to have to be upgraded. (Although even that could be a case of upgrading equipment that provided N throughput and cost Y watt hours before to newer equipment that provides 2N throughput, and still costs Y watt hours)

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