Carlson also spoke of the potential for improving health care, education and other areas through improved telecommunications, and said this, too, could contribute to a more stable world.

He said the world would "truly become one" if all the potential benefits of telecommunications could be harnessed for the benefit of mankind.

In his inaugural address, ITU Secretary-General, Pekka Tarjanne singled out the new generation of satellite systems known as the Global Mobile Personal Communications by Satellite" or GMPCS as the best illustration of modern "technological imagination. "The implementation of GMPCS is of enormous symbolic importance", he stated. "It means that the members of the ITU have succeeded in establishing the technological basis for achieving the goal of universal access to basic telecommunications which was established in 1984 by the Independent Commission for Worldwide Telecommunication Development – otherwise known after its chairman as the Maitland Commission" he added. He said that with GMPCS in place, we were perhaps 90% of the way there but also cautioned that although GMPCS and many other developments are providing the technological basis for universal access to basic communications and to information services – what he likes to call "the right to communicate" – the real work was only beginning.

He recalled the role played by the ITU in providing sufficient spectrum to allow these services to operate, in agreeing on the technical standards that will interconnect and interoperate GMPCS with other telecommunications networks in the seamless, transparent fashion that customers demand and in forging partnerships for development of telecommunication networks, services and applications between developing markets and GMPCS operators and in brokering the agreement for users to roam freely across borders with their GMPCS terminals and use these services in countries where they are authorized. He however warned that delegates not to be complacent. "With the technological problems solved, our challenge now is to ensure that access is affordable, and that applications are available to support the full range of human development needs – whether these needs are individual, social, cultural, political or environmental" he stated.

Other speakers on the programme were Minneapolis Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton and US Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota.

Earlier in the morning, the Conference elected Ambassador Thomas Siebert as Chairman of the Conference. His main role will be to keep the Conference on track and act as a "backroom" negotiator to bring diverse views to a compromise. Most decisions taken at the Conference are expected to be taken by consensus. Ambassador Siebert brings with him a solid experience in soft diplomacy and in tough negotiations, having been both US Ambassador to Sweden and a telecoms attorney specializing in practice before the Federal Communications Commission in the area of new technologies and in particular in the exploding sector of mobile communications and convergence.

The Conference also elected the Vice-Chairmen of the Conference and the Chairmen and Vice-Chairmen of the seven Conference committees as follows. The mandates of each committee can be found in the press kit or in the PP98 newsroom: