How does an ISP try to do it’s bit for the environment?

Switching to an environment conscious Internet Service Provider is as easy as selecting one that has chosen to base itself and it’s employees in a pristine regional area of Australia.

Our core business started as a hosting business where most of our infrastructure is co-located in a world class data centre. To run an ISP this is a necessity. When choosing our data centres and after moving our equipment numerous times in the past, we have currently settled on using a data centre that won Australia’s Greenest Data Centre award taking into account the life span of the data centre.

Other than this our regional focus for internet services including nbn™ is a major differentiator…this is because we live regionally too (although we offer services anywhere in Australia). Based in the Northern Rivers of NSW, it is very much an eco friendly lifestyle compared to big city and big corporate attitudes, and whilst to be a competitor in the telco space, we cannot avoid dealings with other bigger suppliers and corporates…we do our bit on a local level.

Localisation or supporting the economy on a local level in our opinion is probably the biggest environmental impact initiative anyone can have, with many knock on effects, such as reducing waste and transport. We support a variety of local clubs and sponsor small clubs in our community, we support and sponsor small permaculture businesses and generally eliminate unnecessary waste, e.g. almost zero printing, recycling in our office and supporting other local businesses as much as we can.

At one point we were carbon neutral, purely from offsets, but currently we don’t pay offsets as I am not sure these were necessarily doing what they said they were doing and it can be interpreted in so many different ways, so at the moment we will rather spend that money sponsoring local clubs and minimising our own impact where we can.

Also, unlike some of the major Telco’s in this country, we only provide you with a modem/router if you purchase one and need one on our contract free plans. Our modems can be used with any provider on any NBN service. We don’t send you one, two, or even three “locked” modems without you requesting them! Most of these will end up in landfill as they are not great quality and they are locked to that single big telco provider, rendering useless if anyone moves to another provider.

If this post has sparked any suggestions or ideas let us know, Gavin Payne (NewSprout MD)