We’ve written before about the internal savings and efficiencies that Sprint has achieved since implementing Unified Communications and SIP trunking. But there’s one interesting statistic, in our latest news announcement, that’s worth some particular attention.

As we’ve noted, the SIP trunking aspect of our move to UC means we are phasing out 489 PBXs across our network. There’s a tremendous savings involved in not having to deal with PBX upgrades and maintenance, and that’s great, but what is really striking is the power savings that results.

We commissioned a study to determine the environmental savings of our PBX retirement plan, and found that the aggregate power use by these PBXs totaled 13.5 million kilowatt hours per year. The power usage by the SIP trunking system consumes only 237,600 kilowatt hours per year. That is a 98 PERCENT reduction in power usage.

Cost-wise, that saves Sprint about $1 million a year. For the environmentally conscious, that translates into a reduction of 10,300 metric tons of carbon dioxide, or what is produced by 1,900 passenger vehicles in one year.

So we save on the PBX maintenance, we save a million dollars on electricity, we avoid hundreds of thousands of dollars on local access fees by using SIP trunking rather than the PBXs, and we help the environment. Plus, we benefit from all the UC features and functions. If there’s a downside in here somewhere, we’re not seeing it.

By the way, as our news announcement also pointed out, embracing UC has also enabled 4,000 Sprint employees to work outside the traditional office, resulting in millions of fewer commuting miles driven. And we have eliminated more than a million square feet of office space, with savings on power there as well, along with reduced leasing costs.

And I can’t forget to mention that Newsweek magazine recently ranked Sprint as the 15th most eco-friendly company in the U.S. The ranking was based on companies’ environmental impact, green policies and performance, and environmental reputation.

Maybe our trademark color should be changed to green.