WIREDGOV

The European Commission and Japan have recently announced four research projects developing new technologies for high-speed networks in highly-dense user areas. Joint investments amount to €12 million and more than 40 partners are involved. Researchers will notably deliver more than 1 Gigabit bandwidth for each member of the crowd at the Tokyo Olympic Stadium, right in time for the 2020 Olympics.

We need fast mobile internet because the growth of smart phones and tablets has dramatically increased mobile internet usage. At the same time people use these devices more and more for real-time video-streaming, which old networks can't cope with. The number of mobile broadband users is expected to reach 4 billion by 2017.

We are facing daily drops in our internet connections in many public areas of our cities, in public transport, stadiums, shopping centres, conference centres, and concert halls.

Increasing the throughput of communications per user in such situations is difficult because of many restrictions relating to the conventional communication systems for densely located users. In Japan, for example, one major challenge is to maximise the total capacity of communications towards the 2020 Olympic Games in stadiums, trains, or other public areas. Not only in Japan but also all over the world and here in Europe, we need more network capacity to realise seamless communications.

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