The European Commission and Japan have just announced a series of research projects to help speed up replacement of their soon-to-be-antiquated internet backbones. One of them, the STRAUSS project, will be shooting for 100Gbps fiber optic speeds -- a whopping 5,000-fold gain over current Euro data rates. It'd do so by combining new optical packet switching technology, optical tranceivers and other hardware with updated controlling software. The next step will be testing it on a large scale at sites across the EU and Japan. That project, along with five others aimed at boosting terrest
