BONE ist ein Forschungsnetzwerk des 7. Rahmenprogramms der Europäischen Union. Englische beschreibung: This Network of Excellence has brought together over several years the research activities within Europe in the field of Optical Networks and the BONE-project intends to validate this effort by stimulating a more intensified collaboration, exchange of researchers and building on Virtual Centres of Excellence that can serve to European industry with education and training, research tools and testlabs and pave the way to new technologies and architectures. The Network of the Future, which is the central theme of this Call, will have to cope with a wide variety of applications running on a wide variety of terminals and with an increasing number of connected devices and increasing speed and data-loads. The BONE-proposal does not look into issues as convergence between mobile and fixed networks, nor does it consider issues regarding the optimised broadband access in the last mile using a wide variety of technologies such as DSL, cable, WiMAX, WiFi, PLC, etc. The BONE-proposal looks further into the future and takes as the final "Network of the Future": - a high capacity, flexible, reconfigurable and self-healing optical Core and Metro network which supports the transport of massive amounts of data - a FTTx solution in which the "x" is as close as possible to the home, at the home, or even in the home. From this point the user is connected using terminal-specific technologies (wireless to handheld devices, fiber to home cinema, wireless to laptop, fixed connection to desktop, etc.). BONE clearly identifies the existence of the current technologies and also recognizes the fact that users also require the mobility of wireless access, but this mobile connection ends at a gateway or access points and from there a fixed connection is required and this fixed connection will finally be an optical link.