Hasta La Gadget!

The European Commission and Japan have just announced a series of research projects to help speed up replacement of their soon-to-be-antiquated internet backbones. One of them, the STRAUSS project, will be shooting for 100Gbps fiber optic speeds — a whopping 5,000-fold gain over current Euro data rates. It’d do so by combining new optical packet switching technology, optical transceivers and other hardware with updated controlling software. The next step will be testing it on a large scale at sites across the EU and Japan. That project, along with five others aimed at boosting terrestrial and wireless bandwidth security and capacity, will receive €18 million in funding over the next several years. The EU commission estimates that traffic will increase 12-fold in the next five years, so if you don’t want any more internet lag than you already have, you may want to wish them Godspeed.

Filed under: Science, Internet

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Source: European Commission

Virtual crime can lead to very real damage, and the European Parliament knows this well enough to have just issued a draft directive toughening up the EU’s penalties for internet-based violations. Get caught running a botnet and you’ll face a minimum of three years in prison; dare to attack critical infrastructure and you may spend five years behind bars. Don’t think of hiring someone for corporate espionage, either — the directive makes whole companies liable for online offenses committed in their name. EU nations will have two years to adopt the directive as law, although an existing, unofficial agreement suggests that at least some countries won’t wait that long to enforce the new rules.

Filed under: Internet

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Via: Reuters

Source: European Parliament

Starting today, anyone hopping between EU member countries with their smartphone will see roaming charge caps substantially cut across networks and services. As promised by the EU Commission’s VP Neelie Kroes last week, new price caps will drop call charges by “at least 17 percent,” while receiving calls are reduced by 12 percent per minute starting today. Text message costs are down 11 percent, while (perhaps most importantly) data charges across networks in Europe have been cut by 36 percent, down to 45 Euro cents per MB — 91 percent cheaper than they were in 2007.

The commission says it has managed achieve price reductions of over 80 percent across mobile services in the last six years, but it isn’t done there. Further price caps are promised for the same time next year too, as you can see after the break, with roaming data charges set to be further halved (down to 20 cents) by July 2014, with voice calls and text charges also seeing further, admittedly less substantial, reductions. Now, let’s see how the EU fares on those ridding the old country of throttled data speeds.

Image credit: Die Bundeskanzlerin

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile

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Source: Europa (EU), @NeelieKroesEU (Twitter)

Apple revised its warranty policy in Italy last year after being hit with a €900,000 fine for not complying with an EU-mandated two-year term, and it looks like those changes are now starting to spread further throughout Europe. The company has today revised the terms of its warranties in France, Germany and Belgium, specifying that customers are entitled to repairs and replacements of their Apple products for a full two years after purchase, and not just one as previously stated. No word yet on when the rest of the EU will see those changes, but it would now seem to be just a matter of time before other countries get the new terms as well.

Filed under: Cellphones, Laptops, Tablets, Mobile, Apple

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Via: Electronista

Source: ZDNet, 9 to 5 Mac

Europe may be enjoying deeper and deeper integration, but that doesn’t extend to mobile connectivity; citizens are still whacked with hefty roaming rates. European digital commissioner Neelie Kroes hopes to change this, telling business leaders that she’s planning to push through a single mobile telecoms market before she retires in 2015. Speaking at the European Business Summit, she said she had “no intention to retire until [she’d] knocked down all the barriers to a single market,” which was her “major priority” for the rest of her term. Hopefully those on that side of the pond will never again have to fork over $8 per day just to check Vine.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile

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Source: EUObserver