Old, faded photographs representing kind ladies in dark work coat, sitting at a switchboard to manually connect the early phone customers, remind us an ancient image of telecommunications (the plain, old telephone services...), that has been canceled in the following decades, under the pressure of an urgent evolution of technology and services. Increasingly sophisticated transmission and switching equipment have fostered the diffusion of a new way of communicating, with a strong impact on everyday life for all of us, either living inside our houses or doing business in factories and offices.

In particular the appearance of the Internet, about 20 years ago, has rapidly found favor with the public, becoming the new paradigm of communication and pervading nearly all areas of human activity. This success has led to an exponential growth of traffic throughput, nearly independent of economic and social boundary conditions, and it is expected that this growth will continue for the coming years.

Furthermore new, potentially disruptive applications are on the verge of appearing, and will soon spread, side by side with the Internet. In the residential market we will see for instance ultra-high definition video, 3D Internet, 3D-multimedia, and multimedia supported social networking; additionally, advanced business services and other demanding applications such as tele-medicine will eventually gain huge momentum. This implies that in ten years from now many houses will be connected to the network by real “data highways” offering a huge capacity, in the order of 1 billion bits per second: i.e., 5 orders of magnitude larger than required by plain, old telephone services.

This will obviously have a dramatic impact on the “last mile” (the peripheral segment of network connecting subscriber premises to the operator's local exchange), requiring that optical fibers will progressively reach houses and multi-tenant buildings, beside, obviously, offices and factories.

But, in parallel with the evolution of the last mile, also metropolitan networks and long backbones (the inner segments of a nation-wide network, ensuring to anybody the possibility of being connected to anybody else) will have to grow, to keep the pace with an increased hunger of bits that is pervading the whole society, from individual citizens to large corporations.

Beside capacity, other features of these new networks require optimization: energy consumption, for instance, is a global problem, jeopardizing the future life of our planet. From this viewpoint, telecommunication networks must give their contribution, becoming much more power efficient than nowadays. This can be achieved by designing new transport networks where optical transmission, that is inherently energy efficient, is used whenever possible, while the use of IP routers (the complex electronic equipment, being the base of Internet, that switches connections and forwards data gathered in “packets”) is limited as far as possible.

Furthermore, in a global society, world-wide interconnections must be quick and efficient: this calls for the evolution of an artificial intelligence (the so called network control plane) governing any connection in its entirety, and ensuring the highest end-to-end quality, whatever are the countries, operators and technologies that have to be passed through.

Finally, as a general rule, customers expect more bandwidth at about the same price, because the budget they can dedicate to telecommunication expenses is limited (and they are already used to pay roughly the same for broadband services as they were originally for dial-up access, which offered several orders of magnitude less bandwidth). In the future, as the service bandwidth delivered to customers will increase by yet further orders of magnitude, the core network capacity will have to be upgraded by the same factor. As the end-user prices for these bandwidths will not increase in the same order of magnitude, any network upgrade must come at a significantly lower cost than today. 

To give an effective answer to all these needs, major European industrial players, leading telecom operators, universities and research centers joined in a consortium, originating the STRONGEST project, that was approved and funded by the European Commission (in the Seventh Framework Programme) and is operating since January, 2010. The goal of this Project is, consistently with our previous discussion, to design and demonstrate an evolutionary ultra-high capacity transport network, based on optimized integration of optical and electronic network equipment, governed by an advanced control plane ensuring excellent end-to-end quality over different countries, operators and technologies, being power efficient and cost effective.

From the viewpoint of European citizens, the design and deployment of a more efficient transport network with reduced cost per bit, and the particular attention paid to energy efficiency, will turn into benefit to the entire Community. And, not less important, STRONGEST will strengthen the position of European industry in the field of future Internet and will reinforce the European leadership in optical networks technologies.