However, operator responsibility should also be considered beyond its own equipments. Here again, regulation and incentives are useful tools to envisage power efficiency and power consumption as a global challenge including network equipments at customer premises but also "over-the-top" actors such a s content providers.
As an example, operators have no direct advantages to adopt sleep mode policies in PONs because the power savings are achieved only at the customer premises, while increasing complexity and possibly cost at the operators premises. Furthermore, the implementation of these policies require investment and research to modify the hardware of ONUs and the existing protocols, as well as the sleep mode policies of Ethernet-based customer premises equipment. Thus, some initiatives that can reduce the energy consumed in the PON can be undertaken,but it is necessary to understand and reduce the possible impact of energy efficiency in the services and enhance collaborations between the operators and the vendors on this subject