World Wildlife Fund cuts emissions with videoconferencing

World Wildlife Fund practising what it preaches

The UK arm of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has rolled out a managed videoconferencing system to help reduce its carbon dioxide emissions.

The environmental wildlife charity is also trialling thin-client computing systems to further cut its IT power consumption.

David Southern, WWF UK head of IT, said: “We have to practice what we preach, and we need to ensure that our staff can work in a collaborative and effective way wherever they are.”

WWF UK’s business ADSL network was reaching capacity and had too much latency to deal with the demands of videoconferencing.

Videoconferencing needs sufficient bandwidth, low latency and quality of service (QoS) for users to experience a sufficiently real-time experience for the service to be useful and effective.

To achieve this, Southern chose telecoms provider Telstra International to implement a multi-protocol label switched network (MPLS).

MPLS can deliver a low-latency premium QoS service so that videoconferencing traffic is given priority over less time-sensitive data such as email.

The label switching in MPLS allows routers to map a direct path from one end point on the network to another. The routers check the traffic labels and not the data inside, before forwarding it to its destination.

Implementing MPLS for other latency-sensitive applications, such as IP telephony, rather than just for videoconferencing, makes rolling out an MPLS network easier to justify financially.