“You liked the Green Deal, our goal is to make you love the package for a digital decade”: with this appealing formula, the European Commissioner for Internal Market, Thierry Breton, introduced the proposal for a EU Council regulation on high-performance computing and the draft recommendation to accelerate the deployment of 5G.
These two initiatives were announced mid-week by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in her State of the Union address (see EUROPE 12561/7). She announced several actions to make technological progress by 2030.
5G: a toolbox for March 2021
In their 5G Action Plan, Member States had given themselves until the end of 2020 to allocate the frequencies necessary for the deployment of 5G (700 MHz, 3.6 GHz and 26 GHz). “We are clearly behind schedule”, admitted Thierry Breton. According to him, the Covid-19 pandemic has “frozen, postponed or even cancelled” private investment to the tune of 800 billion euros.
The Commission’s draft recommendation aims precisely at accelerating investment in broadband connectivity, such as 5G. Specifically, the institution calls on Member States to identify best practices for the rapid deployment of high-capacity fixed and mobile networks by 20 December 2020 and to consolidate them in a list by 30 March 2021.
The document also puts forward guidelines to facilitate licensing (respect of the 4-month deadline, accelerated procedures, single access point), increase transparency with regard to existing infrastructures, extend access rights to existing publicly controlled infrastructures and improve the dispute resolution mechanism.
It also announces several new initiatives, such as updating of the 5G and 6G Action Plan in 2021 and revision of the Broadband Cost Reduction Directive, which will start with a public consultation in autumn 2020 and will then be complemented by a roadmap.
Eight billion euros for supercomputers
The European Commission then proposed to update the European Joint Undertaking for High Performance Computing (2018/1488) of the Juncker team, which was due to run until 2026.
In concrete terms, the aim is to increase funding for this project, which serves to develop ultra-powerful computing systems, from 1.1 billion euros in 2019-2020 to 8 billion euros for the period 2021-2033. For this package, 3.5 billion will be drawn from the multiannual budget (Horizon Europe, Digital Europe and the Connecting Europe Facility), 3.5 billion euros from the participating states (EU27 minus Slovakia and 6 associated countries) and 1 billion euros (in kind and cash) from private organisations, explains the Commission.
By 2021, the European Union is expected to have eight supercomputers: three preexascale systems (capable of at least 1017 calculations per second) installed in Italy, Finland and Spain, and five petascale systems (capable of at least 1015 calculations per second ) in Bulgaria, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Portugal and Luxembourg. Links: supercomputers: https://bit.ly/3cdkkZj and connectivity: https://bit.ly/35MvOSD (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)