We're a green company

In addition to our focus on renewable energy for broadcast sites, Uber Group also takes other steps towards reducing our impact on the environment.

Energy efficiency

A key component to providing our awesome broadband service is our NOC, or ‘Network Operations Centre’. This is where we house the servers and other key equipment that makes providing our service possible. Typically, because these centres are home to a lot of equipment they also produce a huge amount of heat, requiring even more energy to cool them!

A relatively new approach to dealing with the immense power and cooling requirements of a NOC is to ‘virtualise’ servers – this allows multiple server operating systems to run on one piece of equipment allowing greater utilisation of the hardware, therefore reducing the amount of hardware required.

Less hardware + less heat = less energy consumption.

We employ this method in our NOC – with a handful of hosts, running dozens of ‘virtual’ servers, our energy consumption is around that of an average household (with teenagers!).

Going digital

As an innovative company doing what the big guys can’t (or wont) it made sense for us to lead the way. Last year, Uber sent out about 20,000 paper invoices! That a lot of paper (and envelopes)!

In mid 2009 Uber released ‘my.ubernet’ – the wicked customer portal which makes viewing customers phone account online possible – this almost overnight reduced the number of pages printed by over 60%.

In late 2009 when the transition was made from Uber Networks to Uber Group the decision was made to send all invoices electronically – We figured all of our broadband customers have e-mail, why not use it?

This one simple step reduced our paper consumption by nearly 1 tonne per year!