EU and Japan working on 100Gbps internet

The European Union and Japan joined forces to help work on projects that will enable internet speeds of up to 100Gbps (or 100,000Mbps). The average broadband speeds in the EU region is estimated to be at 19.7Mbps.

Some member countries of the EU are already among the fastest in the world, like Bulgaria (32.1Mbps), Belgium (32.7Mbps), Romania (37.4Mbps) and Latvia (37.5Mbps). Japan, on the other hand, sits at No. 3 in the world at 42.2Mbps, after South Korea and Hong Kong.

The European Commission and Japan today announce six research projects aiming at redefining internet architectures to increase the efficiency of networks in carrying data. One project aims to build networks 5000 times faster than today’s average European broadband speed (100Gbps compared to 19.7Mbps).

There is a pressing need for new and more efficient networks in light of a massive online data explosion that is expected to continue over the next decade.

The world generates 1.7 million billion bytes of data per minute; data traffic volumes doubled between early 2012 and early 2013 and are expected to grow 12-fold by 2018. Such big data is growing faster than networks’ capacity to carry it.

The projects, will receive around €18m in funding, and touch on challenges such as cyber security, network capacity, storage, high density data traffic and energy efficiency.

Only in April this year, Sony in Japan launched the world’s fastest internet service. Called Sony Nuro, the home broadband has a peak speed of 2Gbps downlink and 1Gbps uplink.

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