Abstract—One of the main challenges for the future of in-formation and communication technologies is the reduction of the power consumption in telecommunication networks. The key consumers are the home gateways at the customer premises for fixed line access technologies and the base stations for wireless access technologies. However, with increasing bit rates, the share of the core networks could become significant as well. In this paper we characterize the power consumption in the different types of networks and discuss strategies to reduce the power
consumption.