MURRAY HILL, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Huawei, a leading global telecommunications company, has joined the GreenTouch^tm consortium as a founding member. With the addition of Huawei, the consortium takes a step closer to reaching its goal of making communications networks 1000 times more energy efficient than they are today and builds on momentum that has propelled it to the forefront of the industry since its launch in January.

In addition to expanding its membership, this week the GreenTouch consortium reached a crucial milestone in its development – convening an inaugural meeting of its founding members to establish an operating framework, set out guidelines for intellectual property management and define technology parameters.

As a member of the consortium, Huawei will join fifteen other leaders from industry, academia and government labs who have come together to invent and deliver radical new approaches to energy efficiency that will be at the heart of sustainable networks in the decades to come. Videos describing the GreenTouch mission can be viewed at http://www.greentouch.org/index.php?page=videos

“The decision of Huawei to join the consortium is a clear sign that reducing energy consumption in ICT networks is an industry priority and that the consortium is on the right track,” said Gee Rittenhouse, acting lead of GreenTouch and head of research at Bell Labs. “Huawei will bring in-depth research expertise and insights that will strengthen the efforts of the consortium and enrich the activities of its members.”

“We regard reducing energy consumption through the development of green solutions as an imperative,” said Yingtao LI, President of Central R&D Unit of Huawei. “The future of our company and, for that matter, of the telecoms industry is inextricably linked with environmental sustainability and the GreenTouch consortium has a vision and a goal that is in line with our aspirations.”

The addition of Huawei brings the number of GreenTouch members to sixteen including:

Service Providers: AT&T, China Mobile, Portugal Telecom, Swisscom, Telefonica

Academic Research Labs: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE), Stanford University’s Wireless Systems Lab (WSL), the University of Melbourne’s Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES)

Government and Nonprofit Research Institutions: The CEA-LETI Applied Research Institute for Microelectronics (Grenoble, France), imec (Headquarters: Leuven, Belgium), The French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA), Foundation for Mobile Communications (Portugal)

Industrial Labs: Bell Labs, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT), Huawei, Freescale Semiconductor

About the GreenTouch Consortium

The GreenTouch initiative, a consortium of leading industry players, research institutions and non-governmental organizations to define the challenge, identify solutions and develop solutions with the goal to deliver the architecture, specifications, roadmap, and demonstrations of key components needed to reduce ICT energy consumption per bit by a factor of 1,000 from current levels within five years. www.greentouch.org