Warehouses full of waste, remember that? Let us cast our memories back to crowded boardrooms of decision-makers, hell-bent on maintaining the “we do not use second-hand hardware” stance. Fast-forward to 2022, this common objection in many scenarios is but a distant memory.

The last, quite unique 24 months, has shown Telecoms & Capacity networks to be both pandemic proof but happily shameless in its adoption of re-use & refurbished assets. The resulting chip-demic has served to provide the “ICE” ing on the network cake.

Countless networks which for multiple decades shunned the dubbed “grey” market have benefited from increased engagement and taking part in the green network economy and it’s benefited every single touchpoint in the telecoms ecosystem.

As OEMs have been challenged with unforeseen bottlenecks, the domestic & global carriers have taken initiative and pride in staying brand loyal to some of the greatest (aging) optical platforms, Infinera, NOKIA, CIENA & Juniper to name a few, and simply re-mapped a number of capacity & RAN data offerings to embrace the existing hardware with the pre-chipdemic deliveries. Perhaps the slowdown has done us all good, it’s stretched our technical expertise, reduced emissions but as a consumer, we’ve not felt the pinch as such and should proudly grin to ourselves when we know the mobile call we just made, or on-demand documentary we watched may have been indirectly delivered via a 5-10-year-old piece of hardware…now that is cool

The sustainability race is a race worth winning.

A massive thanks to the Carrier & OEM community for embracing re-use and the green market during the last 24 months.

Tony Warren.