EU Launches BuNGee Business Partnership to Boost Mobile Broadband Speeds

The European Union (EU) has announced the launch of a new initiative, called the Beyond Next-Generation Mobile Broadband (BuNGee), which is aimed at developing mobile broadband technologies to boost infrastructure capacity and download potential. The 4.7-million-euro (US$6.4 million) initiative, largely funded by the EU executive arm the European Commission (EC), will form a collaboration comprising European operators, telecoms equipment vendors, and universities and research organisations. The group has set an initial aim of a tenfold increase in mobile broadband density across Europe, targeting a goal of 1 Gb per second per square kilometre. It will be organised under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7), and WiMAX vendor Alvarion will take a leadership role, working with representatives from Centre Tecnologic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (Spain), Cobham Antenna Systems, Microwave Antennas (U.K.), University of York (U.K.), Thales Communications S.A. (France), Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium), Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa (Poland), Siklu Communication Ltd (Israel), and ARTTIC (BE). The BuNGee project is initially planned to continue through until June 2012.

The project is currently aiming towards a live test in the Spanish city of Barcelona, based on a below-rooftop deployment of access base stations leveraging existing telecoms infrastructure, in co-ordination with self backhauling of these base stations by wireless links. The consortium predicts the use of the existing infrastructure has the potential for huge savings for operators, and will provide a cheap and easy way of drastically boosting mobile broadband coverage in under-served regions. A week ago, the EU launched a consultation on the telecoms universal service laws, with a view to extending the fundamental right to Internet access to cover broadband services, as it seeks to bring broadband services to the estimated one-third of residents of the bloc who are still without high-speed Internet.

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