[news release] Improved Internet connectivity and skills have helped many countries to cope with the health and economic crisis from COVID-19. Yet the pandemic has raised the bar for the digital transition and underscores the need to close the digital divides that risk leaving some people and firms worse off than others in a post-COVID world, according to a new OECD report.
Australia’s national broadband network will roll out fibre “deeper and closer to homes and businesses” under a $3.5bn upgrade package to be announced on Wednesday.
Universal broadband access is the vital catalyst needed to drive global economic recovery and accelerate lacklustre progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals, according to a new report released by the UN Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has published Connecting Humanity – Assessing investment needs of connecting humanity to the Internet by 2030, a comprehensive new study that estimates the investment needed to achieve universal, affordable broadband connectivity for all humanity by the end of this decade.
The European Union’s highest court has given its support to the bloc’s rules that stop internet providers from charging customers for preferential access to their networks.
A team at the Optical Networks Group at University College London has sent 178 terabits per second through a commercial singlemode optical fiber that has been on the market since 2007. It’s a record for the standard singlemode fiber widely used in today’s networks, and twice the data rate of any system now in use. The key to their success was transmitting it across a spectral range of 16.8 terahertz, more than double the the broadest range in commercial use.