The EPA welcomes the effort, according to Andrew Fanara, product development team leader in the agency's Energy Star division, who spoke at the event Tuesday.

"This is a very good first step and may become a formal standard," Fanara said. The EPA may try to create an Energy Star program for network devices in the future, but it has many other areas to look at, Fanara said.

IT vendors have to balance efficiency against many other demands in future products, said Vic Alston, senior vice president of product development at Ixia. Unlike in some businesses, such as consumer electronics, networking products are expected to improve tenfold in areas such as security, reliability, scalability and performance with every product cycle, Alston said. It's hard for vendors to justify sacrificing any of those improvements for efficiency, which doesn't give them a sexy specification to list on the product, he said.

The bad news of the economic downturn, along with the good news of lower oil prices, will further shift attention from power consumption, the EPA's Fanara predicted.

"We'll probably see energy consumption drift down a bit" in importance when vendors are designing products and customers are buying them, Fanara said. However, this may be a good time for vendors to retool for energy woes that are sure to re-emerge, he added.

Efficiency is beginning to factor into the buying decisions of customers, such as some carriers, Juniper's Ceuppens said. His company is already getting requests for proposals that include power requirements.

"They're fairly broad. They state maximums rather than ideals. But there are people who say, 'I want to get rid of this piece of equipment because it costs me too much to run it,'" Ceuppens said.