Philippines' city councilor: No more 'messy' cabling

In the Philippines' Davao City, councilor Leonardo Avila III is reportedly drafting an ordinance that will address the municipality's "messy" electric and communication cables. Speaking in a recent public forum, Avila said that salient features of a new ordinance will be a provision for underground cabling and requiring buildings to have a service entrance for communication cables.

Avila, who also chairs the city's Committee on Transportation and Communication, noted that current building permit requirements in Davao specify only a service entrance for electric cables. "The service entrance for communication cables will be a new requirement for acquiring a building permit," he added.

The newly mandated service entrance will serve as a point of entry for communication cables, which will be connected to service equipment. Users can then connect to the equipment by connecting to an outlet that is connected to the service equipment. "This will benefit the establishment because they do not have to install a lot of cables but instead they can just connect to the outlet," said Avila.

Related:  More Tales of Cabling Spaghetti

The service entrance for communication cables will be required for new buildings; older buildings will be given a grace period of two to three years to adopt the new service entrance.

The new draft ordinance also initially includes provisions for underground cabling, including right-of-way and its importance for future city planning. "The underground cabling [provision] will be mainly for electric distribution and communication companies," Avila stated. He also explained that use of underground cabling will lessen the number of utility poles located throughout the city. When passed into law, the new measure will allow one pole per a specified area.

Avila said his committee is currently preparing a report for the new city ordinance, after having studied similar ordinances, such as those in the Philippines' Tagum City and Cagayan de Oro City. "We expect that the ordinance will be passed this year," he concluded.

Source:  SunStar (Phillippines)

Greenpeace grades greenest mega-data centers

A new report by the environmental watchdog group Greenpeace grades the efforts of the world's Internet technology giants toward greening their data centers. The report presents a "clean energy index" -- based on data from the companies or otherwise publicly available information -- that determines how much clean energy, on average, a company uses to power its data centers.

The report states that Apple, Google and Facebook have all made significant strides in applying renewable energy sources within their data centers to drive their Internet services. Amazon and Twitter's data centers? Not so much. Among the tech giants, Oracle is also singled out for its lack of enthusiasm for clean energy usage within its data centers.

Oregon receives special attention in the report because of the state's concentration of mega-data centers, drawn by the region's relatively low power prices.

See also:  Amazon data center outage casts cloud over cloud

And as noted by The Oregonian's Mike Rogoway, "Amazon.com, which operates a big server farm in [the state's] Morrow County, gets an F grade from Greenpeace for concealing its sources of its electricity and for lobbying, successfully, to relax Oregon’s clean energy laws during the last legislative session. Amazon disputed Greenpeace's analysis, and said it runs environmentally friendly, energy-efficient data centers."

Meanwhile, at the other end of the grading spectrum, Apple was lauded as the most improved company in terms of green energy usage, since Greenpeace's last report in 2012.

Read the new report from Greenpeace: Clicking Clean: How Companies are Creating the Green Internet - April 2014