Are mobile phones and other wireless personal electronic devices green? While we don’t boast how big our gasoline-powered mobile phone generators are, we have to realize that these devices suck up a lot of energy.
Generated by power plants, the electricity powering our mobile devices is hardly clean, and when you consider there are billions of these devices in the world, you suddenly realize a much larger carbon footprint, and this doesn’t include the power on the ground required to maintain computers and base stations.
A firm in Scotland, Sofant, believes that it has the answer to a number of mobile-device issues, from dead zones to call quality and battery life. Sergio Tansini, CEO of Sofant, explains: “Battery life and connectivity are key problems for the global mobile device market.
Antennae account for 50% of power consumption when a device is on standby and even more during calls. Because antenna technology has barely moved in recent years the antenna continues to act as a bottleneck to data transfer.”
Most smart phones and tablet computers have only a few hours battery life, and a significant part of battery capacity is sucked up by mobile communications, from maintaining a signal to data transfer. Sofant’s SmartAntenna, a combination of antenna and software, nearly eliminates dead zones and speeds up mobile connectivity.
Additionally, this new technology, while strengthening mobile connectivity, only uses about 10% the energy of previous antenna versions. Strengthening mobile connectivity would also reduce the need to the number of base stations and reduce their power requirements.
