As PC Pro’s resident “Eco Warrior” – a term that’s used with more than a hint of sarcasm by the rest of the team – I was chosen to attend the recent Green IT conference in London.

All the speakers gave food for thought, but one stood out in particular; James Page has over a decade’s wireless engineering experience at Nokia, and is an active member of the Green Party, too. He was also speaking independently, so was probably free to be a little more forthcoming than those there under a corporate banner.

He was talking specifically about the environmental impact of wireless technology, in particular, mobile phones and the infrastructure that supports them. In the past it’s been the hardware that we, as consumers, interact with that gets the negative attention with regards to power consumption.

“We’ve had the finger pointed towards mobile phone chargers for a while, that’s something that I think we’ve absolutely cracked,” says Page, speaking of the so-called vampire power consumption of power adapters.

Handsets are also a solved (or at least improving) problem, he explained, as customers push the industry towards efficiency by demanding models with longer talk time.

The main problem is that the infrastructure is so inefficient. Much as your home computer’s energy use is just the tip of the iceberg, with power being consumed by servers all around the world to serve you in different ways, the network infrastructure consumes vastly more power than your handset does.

It’s not that the hardware itself is inherently inefficient, but that it’s duplicated several times over because of the way that networks operate in the UK. In fact, the total amount of power used by the four largest mobile operators in the UK exceeds that used by the entire rail network of the whole country.

“Should the regulator actually have the remit to start looking at energy efficiency as well? There’s a lot of duplication and redundancy in the group of networks as a whole,” says Page, and that “an enormous amount of energy could be saved”.

Unfortunately, that just isn’t the case at the moment. “They simply don’t believe that they’ve got the legal ability to take environmental issues into account,” says Page, who said he imagines that in certain circumstances they could themselves face legal troubles if they did attempt to.