€22.3M photonics research to accelerate high-speed broadband

The projects were jointly selected by the European Commission, Austria, Germany, Poland, the UK and Israel, which are together contributing €22.3 million towards them. The research projects will run for two to three years.

The research will underpin one one of the key objectives of the Digital Agenda, which is to give every European access to fast and ultra fast broadband by 2020. Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission for the Digital Agenda said, "I'm very happy that research on technology relevant to delivering super fast Internet speeds to the homes and businesses of 500 million Europeans is taking off. Such technology could have a crucial role to play in meeting Europe's broadband needs far into the future."

The research projects all focus on how components, including. transceivers, amplifiers, routers and IT systems can deliver speeds of 1Gigabit/second and above to the subscriber at home, whilst reducing the operational cost for ultra-fast broadband. The objective is to give customers a faster service at no extra cost.

The Commission is contributing one third of the funding, with national funding agencies covering the rest. This joint approach will enable participating countries to develop high speed optical broadband networks much faster.

The thirteen projects are part of the European Commission's 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7). Examples of projects include ADDONAS, aims to deliver better quality for mobile video and real-time applications such as cloud computing by optimising the switching technology for super fast broadband circuits. This would allow data traffic to be sent only where it is needed, therefore removing bottlenecks on a router's performance. At the same time, the technology aims to reduce the total energy bill for operators and users by over 50 per cent.

Meanwhile, the ALOHA project aims to upgrade the transmission capacity of broadband semiconductors to 10 Gigabit/second transmission rates.

More information about the research projects: http://www.pianoplus.eu/projects.html