European telecom ministers agreed earlier this month on a joint roadmap for the development of 5G networks.
Although the Council is eager to frame it as a detailed action plan, it really represents a missed opportunity, as it is essentially a roadmap without any recognition of what is truly necessary to follow through - namely, a coordinated and harmonised rolling out of key spectrum bands across Europe, along with long term commitments to investment certainty.
Everyone from the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to tiny start-ups and leading politicians gathered in Lisbon for the Web Summit conference earlier this month. Billed as a talk shop which “connect[s] the technology community with all industries, both old and new,” the event has now grown to become the largest tech conference worldwide.
But the fact that this event, dubbed by one writer as the “Olympics for geeks,” should take place on European soil this year is perhaps a little ironic, given that the continent is certainly not at the top of the food chain when it comes to new technologies. Despite its better efforts and the size of its economy, Europe still lags behind the US and China in terms of digitization.
EU leaders have agreed to speed up digital policy-making and agreed at their summit in Brussels to complete the Digital Single Market legislation by the end of 2018.
Despite considerable progress, work in this area needs to be accelerated in order to meet this deadline, the European Council said in a statement. The Council of telecom ministers will discuss at its next meeting 24 October how to accelerate the process and prioritise work on the Digital Single Market.
Read more: EU leaders agree to speed up work on Digital Single Market legislation
Health IT is not sufficiently funded and supported at most European healthcare provider organizations, according to a HIMSS Analytics survey of health IT professionals.
The HIMSS Analytics Annual European eHealth Survey garnered responses from 559 eHealth professionals from more than 15 European countries. Close to half of the respondents (42 percent) were from health facilities, 11 percent were from governmental health authorities, 18 percent were IT software vendors and 28 percent represented “other.”
Read more: Survey: Health IT is Underfunded at European Healthcare Organizations
EU can help break encrypted messages but countries want more.
The European Union will boost its law enforcement agency and free up funding to help police break encryption for investigations, but the move is unlikely to satisfy Europe’s most powerful governments that want broad access to chat messages and data.
The Commission said Wednesday it wants to create a “toolbox” to help national law enforcement break encryption, provide up €500,000 to train European police and boost its police agency Europol’s ability to hack into phones, computers and private messages.
Read more: EU encryption plans hope to stave off ‘backdoors’