TELECOM 99 WAPs Up – as the Internet goes Wireless

Geneva, 17 October 1999 — Today was the final day of TELECOM 99 + INTERACTIVE 99, the eighth world Telecommunications Exhibition and Forum, held from 10 to 17 October at Palexpo.

TELECOM 99 + INTERACTIVE 99 was the meeting place for the whole communications society, and was the ITU’s most successful event ever. Around 200,000 visitors came to see the latest technology and services on display from more than 1,100 exhibitors from the Telecommunications, information technology and audio-visual entertainment fields. They met to do business and discuss the issues that will shape the future path of an industry which is now worth well over US$ 1 trillion dollars a year.

More than anything else, TELECOM 99 + INTERACTIVE 99 was marked by the huge changes being wrought by the convergence of mobile wireless access and the Internet. As Kurt Hellström, the President of Ericsson, said at the Opening Ceremony, "Everything now is about wireless and the Internet." Strongly in evidence at TELECOM 99 were numerous terminals enabled with the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), along with a strong focus on Internet security and broadband capacity and applications.

TELECOM 99 + INTERACTIVE 99, more than any event which preceded it, demonstrated the increasing importance of Telecommunications in the modern world. It was attended by visitors that were rated by exhibitors as being of both a higher level and quality than ever seen before. "The number and quality of the people at the show has been outstanding," said Don Listwin, executive vice president of Cisco Systems, quoted in the TELECOM 99 Daily newspaper. "I’ve been to these shows since 1983, and this has been the best one by far," confirmed Chris Unsworth, Nortel Network’s European vice president of marketing communications.

The event attracted leaders at the highest level, from ambassadors and government ministers to the CEOs of the front-ranked market players as well as the most respected industry analysts and commentators. The spectacular opening ceremony, which was sponsored by Ericsson, included keynote addresses from Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ruth Dreifuss, the President of the Swiss Confederation, Martine Brunschwig-Graf, the President of the State Council of the Republic and Canton of Geneva and Kurt Hellström, the President of Ericsson.

Yoshio Utsumi, the Secretary-General of the ITU, said in his opening remarks that the TELECOM event being inaugurated by the ITU was "a demonstration, at a global level, of the new technologies available today and tomorrow. Let us be inspired towards their further development. Let us share new wisdom in an effort to meet the goal we set 15 years ago, of bringing everyone within walking distance of a telephone. Let us commit ourselves, here at TELECOM 99, to making it happen."

More than 4,000 people took part in the Forum programme, which encompassed a total of five Summits and a number of combined sessions.

• The Forum Opening was chaired by Jean-Patrick Baré, President of ITU TELECOM, with keynotes being delivered by Yoshio Utsumi, Secretary-General of the ITU, John Roth, President and CEO of Nortel Networks and Erkki Liikanen, the European Commissioner for Information Technology.
• The Connected Society Roundtable was chaired by Musalia Mudavadi, Minister for Information, Transport and Communications, Kenya, with keynotes being given by Lou Gerstner, Chairman of the Board and CEO of IBM and Jichuan Wu, the Minister for Information, Transport and Communications, China.
• The Development Summit Opening was chaired by Chen Chimutengwende, Minister of Information, Posts and Telecommunications, Zimbabwe, with keynotes coming from Yoshio Utsumi, Hamadoun Touré, Director of the ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau, Tony Reis, CEO of Swisscom, and John Chambers, President and CEO of Cisco Systems. The Development Summit also brought 150 engineers and human resources specialists from 79 of the world’s lowest income countries to Geneva on a fellowship, in order to concentrate on issues of immediate importance to their specific countries, participate in the Forum, and visit the exhibition
• The Policy and Regulatory Summit Opening was chaired by Jean-Michel Hubert, President of the French regulatory agency, ART, with opening remarks coming from Roberto Blois, Deputy Secretary-General of the ITU, and keynotes being delivered by Michael Armstrong, Chairman and CEO of AT&T, Serge Tchuruk, Chairman of Alcatel, and Jens Arnbak, Chairman of the Commission of the Netherlands’ regulator, the Independent Post and Telecommunication Authority.
• The Infrastructure Summit Opening was chaired by Jozef Cornu, the President and CEO of Alcatel, with keynote speeches being given by Carly Fiorina, President and CEO of Hewlett Packard, Tadashi Nishimoto, the President of KDD and Werner Schmücking, a member of the board of Siemens.
• The INTERACTIVE Summit Opening was chaired by Jean-Patrick Baré, with keynotes being delivered by Bill Gates, the Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, Seiko Noda, a Member of Japan’s House of Representatives, and Larry Ellison, Chairman and CEO of Oracle.

TELECOM 99 + INTERACTIVE 99 was also marked by strong activity on the part of the ITU, with a major agreement being reached between the ITU, Nortel Networks and Canada’s Acacia Initiative of the International Development Research Centre to implement two Centres of Excellence in Africa (see www.itu.int/newsarchive/press/releases/1999/99-16.html). Also during the event the ITU signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Intelsat to partner to promote universal access (see www.itu.int/newsarchive/press/releases/1999/99-17.html) as well as signing an agreement with AHCIET – the Hispano-American Association of Research Centres and Telecommunications Enterprises – to create synergies between the two organizations.

Also at the event Sadako Ogata, the High Commissioner for Refugees, called on the Telecommunications industry to support the ICET-98 Convention aimed at saving lives and alleviating human suffering by helping speed emergency communications equipment across borders in the event of natural or man-made disasters. Ogata asked the industry to push for ratification of the convention as well as providing emergency aid in the form of communications equipment and services.

TELECOM 99 + INTERACTIVE 99 itself was different from its predecessors in being fully online. The show information was available to all participants by means of more than 300 TELECOM Information Kiosks (TIKs) which logged more than a million hits during the first five days of the event. The TELECOM part of the ITU’s web site registered more than 10 million hits during the first two weeks of October – and much of the press coverage achieved for the event came from users of the web rather than journalists at the show.

The event closed with a weekend dedicated to the Internet – the World TELECOM Internet Days. These two days, open to the general public, reinforced the enormous importance of the Internet in the world today and provided a bridge into the new Millennium, featuring debates, demonstrations and a chance for people to see the shape of the future.

TELECOM 99 + INTERACTIVE 99 statistics are as follows:

The TELECOM 95 event, which was one day longer than this year’s, registered 189,671 participants, including 1,066 exhibitors, 4,000 Forum delegates, nearly 700 VIPs and some 2,500 journalists. The conservative counting system used does not take into account increases in participant numbers due to multiple day stays or multiple visits.

Note

A participant is a physical person. Children are not counted. For example, a person who buys a season ticket which represents eight entries has been counted only once. The same rule applies to journalists and Forum participants. A participant who registered for all of the Summits of the Forum was counted only once.