The SEDEC commission adopted today by overwhelming majority the draft opinion by Anne Karjalainen, Member of Kerava City Council (PES, Finland), on the European Cloud Initiative and ICT Standardisation Priorities for the Digital Single Market. It responds to two European Commission communications proposing a series of actions to secure Europe's place in the global data-driven economy and concrete measures to speed up the development of common standards in five priority ICT areas: 5G, cloud computing, internet of things, data technologies and cybersecurity.
"The common denominator of the two communications to which this opinion refers is the lack of interoperability in many different sectors, which results in researchers, industry, public authorities and policy-makers being unable to access the data they need", stressed the Rapporteur in her introductory remarks, pointing to the need for a standardised data architecture as a means of addressing this challenge. "Geographical differences in high-speed broadband accessibility are hindering completion of the digital single market, as well as the development and application of common standards", she continued, reiterating the CoR's call for projects for the development of broadband to be recognised as services of general economic interest.
The draft opinion urges the Commission to increase sharing of European data pointing to the important benefits for local and regional authorities. It highlights at the same time to the lack of information of these authorities of the potential of the internet of things (IoT) in healthcare, energy efficiency, environmental matters, security, real estate management or smart transport. "IoT, one of the Commission's standardisation priorities, will have considerable positive impact on the quality of services and productivity of activities for which local and regional authorities are responsible", argues the rapporteur.
The draft opinion emphasises that all five of the priority domains identified by the Commission for standardisation are interconnected, but that there is a particularly close interdependence between IoT and future 5G networks. It is therefore argued that, unless full geographical coverage is achieved for 5G networks, it will be impossible for the IoT to be used in the same way in all European regions.
