National Broadband Network may increase Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The ACS Victorian Branch conference this year is on the theme "Greening ICT towards Sustainability" 15 to 16 May 2009. I am facilitating a session on The Carbon Footprint and was thinking we might look at the environmental implications of the government's $43B National Broadband Network plan. This will have both negative effects and positive. An example of a negative effect is that higher bandwidth devices use more electricity and will therefore cause more greenhouse gas emissions. Also the digital devices connected to the network tend to use more power than old fashioned analog devices. A positive effect will be if more access to teleconferences results in less business travel.