Hamina official: Google to be Finland’s biggest international investor

Internet search giant Google continues to make large scale investments in Hamina. The company has remained close-lipped about the latest deal, but city director Hannu Muhonen has referred to large sums being involved.

Google is ramping up its interest in eastern Finland.

Google inaugurated a new server farm in the eastern Finnish town of Hamina in autumn of 2011, after buying up Stora Enso's defunct paper mill buildings in 2009. The US company has already put 350 million euros into the centre and it seems it may release details on another round of investment in early November.

The building of operational data centres requires a construction crew some thousand-strong and hefty figures are thought to have been involved in the initial project. Hopes are high that more international investment will help boost the local economy.

Construction efforts got underway last year when Google announced a revamp of its Summa facilities to the tune of around 150 million euros.

Small city, big benefits

“At the moment it’s said to be the largest international investment in Finland,” says Muhonen. “We know that there has been just shy of 1,000 people put to work. In a layperson’s view, that’s quite a large amount and signifies something big."

Google’s first and second phase investments in Hamina data centres have totalled around 350 million euros. This includes the 40 million odd price tag on the former Summa paper mill property that houses the centre. Google has announced that the third phase of investment will commence in November.

"We’re not going public [on the specifics of the deal], as it’s the company’s own business," the city official adds. "But it shows in many ways in the region. There has been work for builders and also for national construction forms.”

While the search giant has undoubtedly brought plenty of business for Finnish contractors, international companies do not pay a high rate of corporate tax, points out Muhonen. However, property taxes and building permit fees do bring money to the city, he adds.

Google is bringing a ray of hope to the municipality, which has borne the brunt of the collapse of both its paper and wind energy industries in recent years.

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World’s fastest wireless network hits 100 gigabits per second, can scale to terabits

German researchers have combined photonics and electronics to create a world-record-breaking wireless network that can send and receive data at a heady 100 gigabits per second (Gbps). This beats the same team’s previous world record of 40Gbps. At 100Gbps, or a transfer rate of 12.5 gigabytes per second — ten times faster than Google Fiber — you could copy a complete Blu-ray disc in a couple of seconds.

To achieve such a massive data rate, researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) used a massive swath of bandwidth at around 240 GHz — close to the terahertz frequency range. To create the signal, two laser beams (carrying the data) are mixed together (using a photon mixer made by NTT Electronics). An electrical signal results, where the frequency of the signal (237.5 GHz in this case) is the difference between the two optical signals. A normal antenna is then used to beam the signal to the receiver, where a fancy chip fabricated out of fast-switching III-V transistors (pictured below) is required to make sense of the super-high-frequency signal.German researchers have combined photonics and electronics to create a world-record-breaking wireless network that can send and receive data at a heady 100 gigabits per second (Gbps). This beats the same team’s previous world record of 40Gbps. At 100Gbps, or a transfer rate of 12.5 gigabytes per second — ten times faster than Google Fiber — you could copy a complete Blu-ray disc in a couple of seconds.

Fraunhofer’s Millilink chip, with III-V transistors capable of switching at 300GHz

KIT’s 100Gbps wireless network is exciting for two reasons. The first is the most obvious: Yay, faster download speeds! Second, because the wireless signal is generated by a laser signal, it’s an ideal technology to tack on the end of a fiber network. For example, if you have high-speed fiber coming into a telephone exchange or mobile base station, you could then use KIT’s wireless tech to cover the last mile to your home. So far, KIT has only created a 100Gbps network over a distance of 20 meters in the lab — but last year’s 40Gbps world record was set using similar hardware over a range of one kilometer, across the rooftops of the city of Karlsruhe, Germany.

Perhaps most importantly, though, KIT transmitted 100Gbps using a single data stream. In the case of conventional WiFi, a single connection — between your router and laptop, for example — in reality consists of dozens of data streams, which are squeezed over the same channel with clever techniques such as multiplexing and MIMO (multiple antennae). These same techniques could be used on KIT’s 100Gbps data streams, boosting total link speed to terabits per second — or entire Blu-ray movies in just a fraction of a second. (See: Infinite-capacity wireless vortex beams carry 2.5 terabits per second.)

Both the 40Gbps and 100Gbps world record were part of the Millilink project, a project funded by the German government to bring broadband internet connections to rural and under-connected areas. The project’s entire budget was just two million euros ($2.7 million). It makes you wonder what could be done to the abysmal state of rural internet access in the US and elsewhere if we actually invested some money into it.

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