Making Europe
the global digital leader

Making Europe the global digital leader

An ambitious approach is needed towards connectivity through advocacy amongst  EU member states and manufacturing  state-of-the-art optical fibre.

Is Europe ready to drive – rather than follow – the digital transformation? At the present time, fixed broadband is available to 98% of Europeans, and 76% of European households can access high-speed broadband of at least 30 Mbps. 4G mobile networks cover on average 84% of the EU’s population. Moreover, 74% of European homes subscribe to fixed broadband, and over one third of these connections are high-speed. The number of high-speed connections went up by 74% since 2014.

Those numbers show that Europe has created a solid basis for the current demands, but still not enough to sustain the expected development in the years to come. If the EU wants to be leader in the incoming digital revolution, larger-scale and sustained investments are needed. That is why Prysmian Group co-hosted, together with the Italian Permanent Representation to the EU, a meeting of national ambassadors, telecoms industry representatives, financiers, Commission officials and MEPs to discuss the EU’s ambitions for its telecoms networks at a crucial moment in the legislative process.

Philippe Vanhille, Senior Vice President Telecom Business at Prysmian Group, expressed at the event the hope “to see an appropriate level of ambition in these plans by the Member States, with targets in terms of coverage and connectivity that will place Europe in the position to become a global digital leader”.

Not just a matter of speed

Speed is usually rated as the most important goal to achieve: all over the world, internet users compare their digital experience mainly on this dimension. But Prysmian knows that the connectivity of the future demands much more than speed. Vanhille drew attention to the advantage of optical fibre not only for its capability to outperform other technologies in terms of download speed, but also on alternative key measures, including latency and reliability. The latter is very important, as any gain achieved through tackling the problems of latency or of slow upload and download speeds are entirely cancelled by broken connections.

Adapting to the digital age

It will be impossible for Europe without a dense optical fibre network to do so. Density starts with the development of core optical networks, which can provide fibre-to-the-node access, where central nodes transmit from fibre to more traditional technologies. However, the ultimate goal we are enabling with our constant technology upgrading is fibre-to-the-home, whose functionality and durability reside on high quality fibre, optical cables and connectivity. Prysmian leads the way in research and development of these key passive components that carry it. We make significant investments worldwide to ensuring that we remain at the forefront of technological innovation.

Prysmian want to remember that the 3 key parameters of a reliable network for the 30 to 50 years are: the quality of passive components, the quality of the installation and the network homogeneity. OPEX will be strongly dependent of these 3 parameters.