Israel’s Gigabit Internet Gets Green Light

Tel Aviv.

A group led by Sweden’s Viaeuropa plans on upgrading Israel’s Internet connections to gigabit-class fiber-optic connections by 2020 or so. The increased front-end data consumption could very well place additional stress on the back-end data centers serving up cloud services.

As reported by Reuters, the Viaeuropa group had been granted a license by the Israeli government to begin work. While Viaeuropa holds half of the consortium’s shares, four other companies—including Israel’s Rapac Communications and Infrastructure and BATM Advanced Communications—will reportedly hold 12.5 percent each.

The project will cost billions of shekels to deploy some 25,000 kilometers of fiber optics, 70 percent of which will be above ground to keep costs down, Reuters reported. The government seeks to cover two-thirds of Israel by 2020.

The new network will apparently provide fiber-optic connections to homes; Israelis are already serviced with fiber-to-the-curb, with companies such as Bezeq supplying fiber-optic connections to a local switching point, while copper lines traverse the rest of the distance to the customer. That connection is akin to AT&T’s u-Verse here in the United States. (Bezeq is thought to be one of the company’s largest ISPs, and also owns a pair of data centers, connected to Italy and Europe via Interoute’s 7-terabit undersea cable.)

It’s a common thought that higher data throughput translates into higher data consumption. In 2011, the shift from 3G to 4G technologies sparked studies and anecdotes suggesting that users with higher-speed connections burned through data like never before. Access to a faster gigabit network would presumably do the same, with a corresponding increased load on data centers.


Image: Protasov AN/