LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - Top U.S. phone companies are demanding more energy-efficient equipment from their suppliers, as the costs of maintaining networks and data centers rise due to surging Internet traffic and energy prices.

The chief technology officers of phone companies attending the NXTcomm conference in Las Vegas this week told Reuters they were looking for better power management from routers, switches and other network equipment supplied by companies like Cisco Systems Inc CSCO.O and Nortel Networks Corp NT.TO.

"We've made it clear to them that we need breakthroughs in those areas," said AT&T Inc T.N CTO John Donovan, estimating that Web traffic is growing 60 percent a year.

“We’re not going to go out and just buy features and capabilities without looking at the total cost of ownership and the environmental impacts,” he said.

AT&T, the largest U.S. phone company, recently boosted the capacity of its backbone, or main Internet pipeline, to 40 Gigabits per second amid growing popularity for movie downloading, video streaming, Web-based voice and video calls, and mobile Web surfing.

Donovan said the company was already eyeing an upgrade to 100G and beyond, and studying the potential impact on power consumption.

“When we sit down with the lab folks and say what happens at 400G, they come back and say, there’s so much power consumption that everything melts,” Donovan said. “We need to fundamentally rethink how routing is done on the Internet. We have to fundamentally reshape it.”

Verizon Communications Inc VZ.N, the second-largest U.S. phone service provider, has set a target to improve the efficiency of the equipment it procures by 20 percent starting January 2009.

The target would apply to the two or three dozen suppliers of routers, switches, optical transporting equipment, and servers in its network data centers, Verizon said.

“We have taken a leadership position, to put a stake in the ground with the number on it,” Verizon CTO Mark Wegleitner said. “Most of this flew under the radar for decades. But now it doesn’t.

Pieter Poll, CTO of Qwest Communications International Inc Q.N, said he had not set a numerical target but was looking more closely than ever at what the industry calls the "total cost of ownership."

He said he examines SWaP (space, watts and performance) metrics, often used to measure the efficiency of data centers. This is calculated by dividing performance, or output, by space and power consumption, so an improvement would require a reduction in space or power, or an increase in performance.

“We see, when we evaluate vendors A, B, C and D, what the environmentals look like, the cost of power, the cost of cooling, what the cost of ownership differential is,” he said.

He and the other CTOs also said they were looking to eliminate toxic materials like lead from their networks.

TECH’S BIG FOOTPRINT

Equipment vendors are taking note.

For example, Cisco’s Nexus 7000 switching product launched this year billed energy and space efficiency as key strengths. By combining Ethernet switching and storage capabilities, and improving air flow, Cisco says the product helps large data centers use less power to run and cool equipment.

Nortel also highlighted energy efficiency in a recent advertising campaign, which boasts that its data networks outperform larger rival Cisco’s kilowatt for kilowatt.

But it's not all about rivalry. Cisco, along with Verizon, Hewlett-Packard Co HPQ.N, Microsoft Corp MSFT.O, Sun Microsystems Inc JAVA.O and several others, jointly sponsored a study on the technology sector's energy consumption.

The report by The Climate Group, an international nonprofit organization, shows the technology sector -- including personal computers and peripherals as well as telecom networks, devices and data centers -- accounted for around 2 percent of all emissions from human activity in 2007.

While The Climate Group forecast the tech industry’s emissions to grow in coming years, it also said that the sector could cut emissions by 15 percent by 2020 if it improved monitoring and accountability for energy consumption.