Another Way IP Desk Phones Should Be Like MobilesAnother Way IP Desk Phones Should Be Like Mobiles

It may be time to think about IP desk phones' power consumption the same way that cell phone designers think about battery life.

Just one quick thought before I turn in from a long first day of VoiceCon:At a function earlier this evening I happened to end up in two separate conversations about managing power consumption in IP telephony networks. First I was chatting with Manfred Arndt of HP ProCurve, who's one of the authors of the IETF's LLDP-MED standard, which I blogged about last year. Then, later, I talked with some guys from Akros Silicon, a small company that makes chipsets specializing in efficient power consumption.

It's not surprising that this topic would come up at a VoiceCon function. Everybody wants to be green and they want to save powering costs, too. There are very ambitious ways of thinking about saving power on IT systems, but one thing that everyone's going to have to think about is how much power is drained by Power over Ethernet (PoE) devices like IP phones.

It occurred to me that may people recognize that we've begun to think about IP desk phones as if they were mobiles, in that we want their functionality to be portable, and to be reproduced when users transition from that desk set to a smart phone or other mobile device. And it may be time to think about IP desk phones' power consumption the same way that cell phone designers think about battery life.

In other words, while IP phones probably will continue to have to be "always on," why shouldn't users demand that every new IP phone come with automatic sleep mode, and why shouldn't power consumption--"talk time," if you will--be one of the baseline factors in every new IP phone design?

In the mobile world, no one would ever question that power usage is just such a critical element in the design. Maybe it ought to be the same for IP desk sets. It would mean lower costs for power and PoE equipment.

I don't know if this will happen, though. In mobile phones, there's a clear forcing factor driving power efficiency: Consumers demand smaller phones that run on smaller batteries. In contrast, there's a clear constituency within the enterprise for power savings at the datacenter level--i.e., the team responsible for the datacenter--but any mandate for savings at the wiring closet and desktop level will still likely fall on the facilities staff, rather than the IT/telecom staff (who, ironically, used to be part of Facilities). My experience at VoiceCon has indicated there isn't a clear link made between these two constituencies at a lot of enterprises.

What's your experience? Is there anyone in your enterprise with a mandate to control power consumption to PoE-enabled desktops?It may be time to think about IP desk phones' power consumption the same way that cell phone designers think about battery life.