Europe - Swedish MEP calls for broadband speeds of AT LEAST 1 Gigabit per second

Public Service reports the views of Gunnar Hökmark MEP:

Europe cannot afford to be reactive and hesitant on this issue, if we want to take the global lead. Our policies must be forward-looking, instead of conserving old structures. Moreover, Europe needs a real push for the deployment of ultrafast broadband - which can deliver speeds of at least 1 gigabyte and beyond. The European Union's current digital agenda targets that stipulate that all European households should have access to 30 Mbps, with 50 per cent of the households having access to at least 100 Mbps, is already outdated. Other global actors, including Japan and South-Korea, are already moving ahead with much higher speeds. If we do not want to continue to lag behind, we must set targets in gigabytes instead of megabytes. Some 50 per cent of EU households should have access to 100 Mbps by 2015 and not by 2020. That should be our target. In the same vein, we need to sharpen the high-speed target for 2020.