Green-Software-Foundation / Green-Software-Foundation/sci-guide
[Bug]: Network energy consumption value is misleading
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- TypeScript
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Description
**Describe the bug**
On the [Network Infrastructure Energy Calculation](https://sci-guide.greensoftware.foundation/E/NetworkEnergy/) page, it states:
> For example, [we calculated the energy spent/GB](https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/sci-data/issues/13#issuecomment-1123962142) and came out with 0.001 KwH/GB.
However if you read the cited thread, it's clear that the 0.001 kWh/GB value is for data transfer *within a hyperscaler network*. This critical piece of information is missing from the page, and people can easily assume this to be the energy consumption of the whole end-user-to-server flow.
In reality the end-to-end transfer is several orders of magnitude larger. For example the largest mobile provider in Finland [Elisa states](https://static.elisa.com/v2/image/2tqybbhjs47b/1YMdO0ku6M2GjbfCM1N6it/Elisa%20Green%20bond%20report%20September%202024.pdf) that in 2023 only the mobile networking part consumed 0.082 kWh/GB, with backbone data transfer excluded.
While it can be hard to get good, clean numbers directly to the page (as indicated by the long investigative discussion thread), the first clear improvement would be to include a mention on what the provided figure is. As a minimum change, I propose adding to the phrase: "... we calculated the energy spent/GB *within a hyperscaler network* and came out with ..."
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