EU & Japan Team Up for 100Gbps Fiber Optic Internet

Unhappy with your current Internet broadband speed? Well, fingers crossed for this new project to succeed: the European Union and Japan have joined forces to build 100Gbps fiber optic Internet, about 5,000 times faster than the average broadband speed in Europe – 19.7Mbps.

The project is called STRAUSS and is just one of a total of six research projects that the EU and Japan have partnered for.

More details about the six projects were recently unveiled by the European Commission. The partnership is aimed at finding ways to increase the efficiency of data transfer networks, given the massive online data explosion. The trend is expected to continue over the next ten years.

According to a press release from the European Commission, up to 1.7 million bytes of data are generated worldwide every minute. Moreover, the volume of data traffic has already doubled since last year and is believed to grow 12 fold by 2018, but current networks are not able to keep up with this growth rate.

Besides the 100Gbps fiber optic Internet project, the EU and Japan will also tackle issues such as network storage, cyber security, energy efficiency and high density data traffic, both for terrestrial and wireless networks. The six projects will receive 18 million euros in funding over the next years.

Let’s take a closer look at the six projects:

– STRAUSS, geared at obtaining 100Gbps fiber optic Internet would do so by combining optical transceivers, packet switching technology and new controlling software. It would then have to be tested on a large scale, so don’t expect to personally benefit from such data transfer speeds any time soon.
– MiWEBA, aimed at boosting ultra-high speed and mobile connections by enhanced use of radio frequencies.
– NECOMA, designed to enhance cyber security, especially in sensitive areas (for instance medical records) by developing new metrics.
– GreenICN, aimed at ensuring efficient use of information networks energy, designed to improve network reliability, especially in post-disaster situations.
– ClouT, integrating Cloud Computing and Internet of Things, so as to enable smart city operations such as traffic flow, emergencies, energy use.
– FELIX, designed to set up EU-Japan research and testing platforms.

The EU-Japan partnership is the latest effort to develop more efficient terrestrial and wireless data transfer networks. A team of German scientists recently achieved a record 40Gbps wireless data transmission rate, while American network equipment giant just unveiled new core router technology designed to double the Internet speed.

[Image via sisystems]