The competitiveness of the modern nations and that of the European states in particular leans on the technological development and the use of networked facilities. The advent of the traditional internet was a gigantic leap in the working habits and procedures in the organisations. However, the original model is depleting and the growing demands of bandwidth and complexity of services required hint that there must be a breakthrough in the infrastructure of the Internet soon. Acknowledging this fact, the EC do not want to lag behind the technological development but to lead the change to position Europe in a favourable situation to face the challenges of the future. Hence, the EC has made an appeal to European wide action to ensure the competiveness of the ICT sector in Europe. The conference recently held in BLED, hosted by the Slovenian Government is a first step to start building this initiative.
FAST is willing to strengthen its commitment to the development of the approach to the Future internet in Europe. Representatives of FAST attended the event in BLED and took part in the signature of the BLED Declaration. This manifesto states that (excerpts): “Building upon the obligations of our individual project contracts and the goals of the Strategic Agendas of the European Technology Platforms, we confirm our ambitions include:
- Fostering Favourable Conditions through Coordinated Action (…)
- Jointly Designing, Developing and Experimenting (…)
- Increasing Awareness at Policy Level (…)”
The signatory parties also state that “To help us meet these major challenges, we call on the:
- European Member States to strengthen and coordinate their national R&D efforts and initiatives towards the Future Internet.
- European Commission to stress the vision and amplify the related R&D in order to drive Europe ahead of tomorrow’s Internet transformations in the way we work, live, and interact.
- European Member States and the European Commission to support the creation and activities of the European Future Internet Assembly proposed in this declaration.”
Part of the work towards this end will imply the Coordination of transversal collaborative actions amongst different European Research Projects. FAST is taking an active role in this process and accepted the leadership of the “Service Front-End” working subgroup within the newly created “Internet Services” group.
