On the occasion of the EU-India Leaders' Meeting in Porto and via video conference, the EU and India have concluded a comprehensive Connectivity Partnership, confirming their commitment to collaborate on supporting resilient and sustainable connectivity both in India and in third countries and regions.

The EU-India Connectivity Partnership is the second such partnership. EU-India Connectivity Partnership covers cooperation in the digital, energy, transport, and people-to-people sectors. It is fundamentally rooted in support for the twin digital and green transitions, adherence to and development of international standards, as well as the shared norms and values of social, environmental, economic and fiscal sustainability and level playing field.

The Commission adopted a Communication on its Global Approach to Research and Innovation, Europe's strategy for international cooperation in a changing world. With this, the EU aims to take a leading role in supporting international research and innovation partnerships, and to deliver innovative solutions to make our societies green, digital and healthy.

The global approach to research and innovation reconfirms Europe's commitment to a level of global openness that is needed to drive excellence, pool resources to achieve scientific progress and develop vibrant innovation ecosystems. In view of this goal, the EU will work with international partners to create a common understanding of fundamental principles and values in research and innovation, such as academic freedom, gender equality, research ethics, open science and evidence-based policymaking.

CEN and CENELEC are putting significant effort towards integrating standardization with innovation and research in Europe. This strategic initiative was originally conceived in the CEN-CENELEC Innovation Plan (2018) and now supports Strategy 2030 objectives. The projects and actions to achieve this integration are focused towards 3 dimensions:

• New topics for standardization – deploying and reinforcing existing channels and sources to identify new standardization areas for CEN and CENELEC. Activities include working with the EC DG JRC (Joint Research Centre) later this year to identify possible upcoming topics for the common CEN-CENELEC – JRC action "Putting Science into Standards 2022’’ that will involve engaging with stakeholders (researchers, industry, policy makers, standardizers…) to initiate a discussion on opportunities and needs for which CEN and CENELEC can enable the development of the necessary standards.

The Commission is laying out a vision to build a new Joint Cyber Unit to tackle the rising number of serious cyber incidents impacting public services, as well as the life of businesses and citizens across the European Union. Advanced and coordinated responses in the field of cybersecurity have become increasingly necessary, as cyberattacks grow in number, scale and consequences, impacting heavily our security. All relevant actors in the EU need to be prepared to respond collectively and exchange relevant information on a ‘need to share', rather than only ‘need to know', basis.

The Recommendation on the creation of the Joint Cyber Unit is an important step towards completing the European cybersecurity crisis management framework. It is a concrete deliverable of the EU Cybersecurity Strategy and the EU Security Union Strategy, contributing to a safe digital economy and society.

ETSI introduced OSM Release TEN, the 11th Release of an Open-Source project which first announced its Release ZERO in 2016 with the vision of closing the gap between the traditional way of building telecom networks, and the use of cloud technologies in telcos emerging at that time.  Release TEN defines an inflection point in OSM evolution, shifting the main goal from the implementation of a vision to the operation of production deployments. The co-operation agreement recently signed between ETSI and the O-RAN Alliance is a new and significant step towards positioning OSM as the optimized open solution for the Service Management and Orchestration Framework.

This new OSM Release brings, among other improvements, a new design that allows OSM modules to be decoupled and distributed across the network for higher resilience, facilitating edge and geo-redundant deployments.

Many initiatives have been launched both at national and European level to achieve the European objectives for climate and energy by 2030 and for the Paris Agreement. One of these is now a reference about environmental policies and governmental actions: CEN Workshop Agreement 17675 ‘Mapping of the mandatory and voluntary Carbon Management framework in the EU’. Published last 17 March, it is based on  proposal by UNI, the Italian National Standardization Body, that involved European companies such as JRC, ADEME, CLEOPA, in addition to other National Standardization Bodies such as DIN and BSI.
The document collects the regulatory (voluntary) and legislative (mandatory) tools existing in Europe for carbon management, clarifying the relationships and increasing their synergy, in order to maximise the effectiveness of the mitigation actions of greenhouse gases (GHG), facilitating adaptation to climate change and making the path established by EU policies interacting with market dynamics.

The ETSI Non-IP Networking group (ISG NIN) has just released its first three Group Reports. The first one, ETSI GR NIN 001, details the shortcomings of TCP/IP for fixed and mobile networks; the second Report, ETSI GR NIN 002, considers testing Non-IP Networking over 5G cellular Radio Access Networks; and ETSI GR NIN 003 describes the networking model that is the foundation for the new technology.

The Report GR NIN 001, titled problem statement: networking with TCP/IP in the 2020s, describes the challenges of IP-based networking for fixed and mobile networks and ways in which new network protocols can result in improved performance and more efficient operation. ETSI GR NIN 002, implementing Non-IP networking over 3GPP cellular access, describes and recommends approaches to test Non-IP Networking (NIN) using mobile radio access.

ETSI published a White Paper titled MEC security: Status of standards support and future evolutions written by several authors participating in MEC and other related ETSI groups. This White Paper, the very first initiative in this domain, aims to identify aspects of security where the nature of edge computing leaves typical industry approaches to cloud security insufficient. 

Edge computing environments are by nature characterized by a complex multi-vendor, multi-supplier, multi-stakeholder ecosystem of equipment and both HW and SW devices. Given this overall level of system heterogeneity, security, trust and privacy are key topics for the edge environments.

Download the MEC security: status of standards support and future evolutions White Paper HERE

2021 is the European Year of Rail. On this occasion, CEN and CENELEC are proud to highlight the important role European standards play to ensure the well-functioning of a key sector for the future of Europe. Standardization on railways application is part of CEN and CENELEC’s wider work on transportation, a complex and large portfolio: it includes 1234 standards from CEN and CENELEC. These standards are mainly developed by two Technical Committees (TCs), CEN/TC 256 'Railway Applications' and CLC/TC 9X 'Electrical and electronic applications for railways'. In particular, standards on rail cover a wide range of topics specifically related to railways applications (products, processes and services), such as, among others, safety, rolling stock capacity, system efficiency, as well as cybersecurity, digitalisation, and automatic couplings. This work on rail contributes massively to the development of safe, innovative and efficient railway systems infrastructure, rolling stock and systems, and supports the EU in its strategic ambitions.