Archive notice: This article was originally published on December 11, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Data traffic on the Internet is increasing at an impressively high rate – by more than 50 percent per year. Being able to manage this increase in future as well is a major technical challenge. With the support of the federal government, leading companies in the field of communications technology have now joined forces in an innovation alliance that is to develop a future technical standard for the Internet of the future. ADVA, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks, as well as Deutsche Telekom, want to invest around 200 million euros in research and development for transport services for the future Internet. The research projects are now starting with around 30 further partners in Europe. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) will support the research with 30 million euros.
“Europe will make a decisive contribution to the future standard on the Internet”, Federal Research Minister Annette Schavan said in Berlin on Tuesday. “Together with our partners from Finland, France and Sweden, we are setting standards for a secure, reliable and fast Internet. The pressure to innovate for European companies in global competition is very high, the minister said: “I therefore welcome the fact that the leading suppliers of communications technology in Germany and the partner countries have agreed with research policy on a European innovation alliance.” The framework for the project is provided by the EUREKA initiative CELTIC.
The driving force for the research is the increasing use of the World Wide Web. Existing communications networks are therefore rapidly reaching their limits. This is about much more than downloading music and videos: services in medicine and care provision, electronic business processes, video conferences or parts of education and further training are just a few examples. Such new Internet services and applications place growing demands on transmission capacity, security, robustness and quality of network connections.
The technical aim of the innovation alliance is to create an integrated basis for data traffic in the core, metro and access network that is based on Ethernet. The aim is a standard with which a data stream of 100 billion bits per second can be transmitted over Ethernet at high quality. In technical jargon, the innovation alliance is also called “100 Gbit – Ethernet”. In addition, scientists are testing new methods to make the flow of data on the Internet more secure against unauthorised access and free of disruption.
