TELECOM Interactive 97 – A Step Towards The New Millennium

TELECOM Events to Increase Frequency from the Year 2000

Geneva, 14 September 1997 — Today was the final day of TELECOM Interactive 97, the first global interactive multimedia Forum and Exhibition, which was held from 8-14 September, at Palexpo, Geneva. The event attracted over 20,000 participants including a large number of highly-placed VIPs from both government and industry, who came to see the latest technology on display from the telecommunications, information technology and audio-visual entertainment sectors. TELECOM Interactive 97 was the first event of its kind to be organized by the ITU.

The Forum encompassed over sixty sessions and featured more than 400 speakers, who came from all over the world to discuss the challenges facing the telecommunications and Internet communities. The Forum opened on Monday 8 September with speeches from Pekka Tarjanne, Secretary-General of the ITU, Martin Bangemann, Member of the European Commission, and Pier Carlo Falotti, Senior Vice President of Oracle Corporation, and continued with a session on the Universal Right to Communicate, which featured Craig McCaw, Chairman of Teledesic Corporation.

During the week many of the Forum discussions focused on the human face of telecommunications and multimedia and its implications. One session was dedicated to The Arts and Artists in the New Info-communication Society, and featured the Charter for Art and Industry which was signed at Souillac, France, earlier this year, while another dealt exclusively with Education and the Internet, and was open to the general public.

Of special interest, too, was Empowerment 2010, a session of the Forum held at the Interactive Theatre. This featured Manal Ahmed, the youngest ever orator to be invited to a TELECOM event. The 12 year-old girl from Lahore, Pakistan, said, while co-presenting with her father, Munawar Ahmed, "I learned HTML with the help of cyber-friends from around the world – and although it was not hard, it required a lot of interaction. Interaction with other people, on the Internet, has led me to learn more and more."The Forum closed with the Internet Weekend, which ran over the weekend of 13-14 September, and the Computer Animation 97 Film Festival Awards Ceremony, which resulted in a prizegiving for the Grand Prix of the Festival to Sylvain Delainen and Jacqueline Mariage of Movida SA, Belgium, for their film Superstition.

A TELECOM Development Symposium was also organized, in conjunction with the Forum, which brought 70 telecommunications specialists from 40 Least Developed Countries to TELECOM Interactive 97 on a fellowship to discuss the Internet, the services and applications that can run on it, and its impact on culture and society.

The TELECOM Interactive 97 Forum papers will be on sale on CD-ROM from the end of November. Contact Hugues Deposier for further details.

An Interactive Opening Ceremony

The Opening Ceremony, held on Monday 8 September, featured several speakers from government and industry, but was most notable for encompassing a number of innovative and interactive presentations, including a live hookup with the MIR space station, and an on-line music performance from the stalactite xylophone, far underground in the caves at St Cézaire sur Saigne, in France.

At the Show

The Exhibition at TELECOM Interactive 97 was unlike any previous TELECOM Exhibition, in that it featured, for the first time, Thematic Pavilions, which focused on the specific areas of Networked Communities, Education and Healthcare, Networked Services and Intelligent Living. At the thematic pavilions and around the whole Exhibition were to be seen demonstrations of the latest benefits of technology, and how these could be used in the future to enhance the lives of all the world’s people. At many stands brand new videoconferencing facilities were used to enable interactive discussions to take place between people on every continent around the world, along with demonstrations of interactive medicine, education and tele-working, and even international chess. On display around the Exhibition were tomorrow’s consumer products – ranging from the latest digital cameras, with radio-controlled facilities to upload pictures to the World Wide Web, to futuristic wristwatch telephones.

During the event, Prof. Dr Mark Krivocheev, who made history on 3 September 1948 when he pressed the button which inaugurated the world’s first 625-line television transmission, was given public recognition of his lifetime contribution to radiocommunications by Dr Pekka Tarjanne, Secretary-General of the ITU and the satellite operator Hispasat.

Challenges to the Network

TELECOM Interactive 97 was also the venue for the launching of a new ITU publication, Challenges to the Network: Telecoms and the Internet, which examines the relationship between the telecommunications and Internet communities, and provides the latest statistics concerning the Internet and its use. At the Opening Press Conference, on Sunday 8 June, Dr Pekka Tarjanne said that it was time to globalize the Internet, and to encourage all people to work towards the creation of a fairer society. "The Internet today is a grotesquely unequal place. It is almost exclusively reserved for the richest, best-educated people in the wealthiest, most developed nations. By July 1997, nineteen of the world’s nineteen and a half million Internet hosts were to be found in the 29 OECD countries." He went on to cite a number of stark statistics concerning the global distribution of Internet hosts. "The whole continent of Africa, excluding South Africa, has fewer Internet hosts than Estonia. South Africa itself boasts five times as many Internet hosts as China. And there are nearly four times as many Internet hosts in Iceland, with its population of 250,000 as there are in India, with its 930 million inhabitants."

Dr Tarjanne went on to stress that the ITU would not want to control the Internet, even if the Internet were controllable by any one organization.

Challenges to the Network is available from the ITU Sales Service at +41 22 730 5194 (fax) or from the ITU Electronic Bookshop.

TELECOM Interactive 97 Event Statistics

TELECOM Events in 1998 and 1999

The next TELECOM event will be Africa TELECOM 98, which will be hosted by the government of South Africa and held at the Expo Centre in Johannesburg, from 4 to 10 May 1998. The eighth World TELECOM Exhibition and Forum, TELECOM 99, will be staged in Geneva from 10 to 17 October 1999, in conjunction with Interactive at TELECOM 99.

TELECOM Events to Increase Frequency from the Year 2000

In the year 2000, following increased demand from the industry and the ITU’s Members, there will, for the first time, be two regional TELECOM events – Americas TELECOM 2000 and Asia TELECOM 2000. Following this, in the year 2001, there will be Africa TELECOM 2001 and TELECOM Interactive 2001, with Americas TELECOM 2002 and Asia TELECOM 2002 following the year after. In 2003 the ninth World Telecommunications Exhibition and Forum will be held, in conjunction with TELECOM Interactive 2003. From the year 2004 onwards it is tentatively planned that all three regional TELECOM events will be held together in one year, and repeated in even-numbered years, starting with Americas TELECOM 2004, Asia TELECOM 2004 and Africa TELECOM 2004.