A study recently conducted by the Research Group for Telecommunication Networks at the Frankfurt am Main University of Applied Sciences (FU Frankfurt) has proven that snom’s VoIP telephones are the most economical in terms of power consumption. Over a 3-month period research assistants and engineers at FH Frankfurt tested a total of 23 VoIP telephones by seven well-known manufacturers. In every use scenario investigated – idle mode, conversation, idle mode after a conversation, and three-way conference – snom telephones were found to have the lowest power consumption in each comparable product class. This means that companies and private users are not only saving electricity costs, but are also contributing towards the responsible use of energy resources, in keeping with today’s green IT strategy.
Dusan Aleksis, who heads hardware development at snom, sees the study as confirming the work done by the Berlin-based VoIP specialist: “When developing our telephones we have always attached great importance to implementing sophisticated technology in an energy-efficient manner. It has always been an important goal of our development activities to keep the power consumption of the phone sets as low as possible.”
The readings taken by the FH Frankfurt research group show that IP telephones with large illuminated displays as a rule consume the most power. Yet in this respect also, snom’s products prove to be the most economical – not least because the display illumination automatically turns off 30 seconds after a phone conversation.
For example, the switch in standby mode, the snom 370 uses up to three and a half watts less than comparable telephones by other manufacturers. To create realistic usage conditions for the different readings, the FH Frankfurt tested the VoIP telephone on two different switches: the ALL8084, an eight-port switch 10/100 Mbit half/full duplex, four of these ports with automatic PoE Classification Recognition, and the ALL8089, an unmanaged layer-2 switch with eight Fast Ethernet ports and maximum PoE support on all ports.
To obtain additional results which – depending on the efficiency of the utilisation – do not include the changing consumption of the switches, the test engineers subtracted mean values to allow for the power consumption of the switches.