Like everything, data, too, needs power & water.
Updated: July 1, 2023. Readers, first of all, please accept my apologies for sharing a report whose results are not what they seemed to be.
Rudolf van der Berg emailed earlier this morning to share his concerns about the efficacy of this study on energy and water use. He pointed out that the data has been misinterpreted, and he has filed his concerns with the universities behind the report. What prompted him to dig deeper was that “the estimates for the Netherlands were too low by a factor of 4 and Finland too high.”
When he scrutinized their data, he found they misquoted the OECD and IEA data and the work of a Finnish researcher. The OECD doesn’t collect fixed broadband usage data. The OECD has had mobile usage since 2010, and growth is not linear.
“Measuring network energy by how many gigabytes are transferred is like working out how much energy is consumed by streetlights by counting how many cars pass underneath them,” van der Berg said at a conference recently.
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