Orange is one of Europe's greenest telcos

Verdantix analysed the entire portfolios of sustainable telecoms solutions offered by Europe’s 17 biggest telcos across Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Scandinavia, Spain and the UK and found that customer demands for improved performance on sustainability criteria have resulted in a big increase in investment - but by only a few committed operators.

In other words, there's a lot of lip service being paid to sustainable IT and green issues and a lot of hype being generated but the reality is that many players are doing no more than going through the motions for appearances sake.

The Verdantix report, entitled “Green Quadrant Sustainable Telecoms Europe 2010,” shows however that some leading telcos are spending considerable sums in marketing the green benefits of their services and are also developing new sustainable solutions such as smart metering, mobile handset recycling and machine-to-machine remote monitoring for utilities, fuels and human health.

The report concludes that in Europe, AT&T, BT and Orange are best positioned to win increased share in fast-growing new markets such as smart meter connectivity and telepresence. These three telcos are at the top of the pile because of the executive leadership of their sustainability programmes and the coherent strategies they have devised for meeting customers’ sustainability goals whilstalso  offering a broad range of green  solutions and allocating more money to marketing their sustainability benefits.

For example; AT&T’s sustainability programmes range from the recent addition of a 1000th 'alternative fuel' vehicle to its fleet and cutting energy usage by very close to 24 percent over the course of last year. 2009.