Earl Main, who began his journey on Memorial Day (30 May 1999) from San Francisco (California), will pass through 13 States and is expected to return to his home base in Washington, D.C. on Labour Day (6 September 1999), where other INTELSAT employees will greet him. They will join him in the various stages of the run in the metropolitan area and finally to Ocean City (Maryland).

INTELSAT is supporting Main's lifelong dream to run across the United States and to benefit children's causes, by allowing him the time required to complete his run and making donations to the cause. Main is personally funding the trip, which costs some USD 15 000. — INTELSAT.

According to IDC, the value of the total IT market in the region is expected to remain unchanged for the period up to 2000. However, 2001 is forecast to experience high growth, reaching the levels achieved in 1997 by Western Europe. The Russian market alone is expected to grow from just under 1 million to more than 3 million users. Sources of IT market growth in Eastern Europe include economic reform and growth, foreign direct investment, IT technology change, and telecommunication development. Major obstacles to growth are a small home market, high access costs, and security issues. — IDC.

• SingTel and StarHub sign interconnect agreement. The Telecommunication Authority of Singapore (TAS) has announced that it has received a complete interconnect agreement signed by Singapore Telecom and StarHub. As a first step, the two companies had submitted the main interconnect agreement to TAS on 31 March 1999. Both companies have now completed their discussions for the operational details relating to interconnection capacity requirements and provisioning, interoperator billing and settlement procedures, interworking test specifications and testing, as well as the leasing of the local loop. These details have been included as annexes to the main agreement.

Efficient and effective interconnection between Singapore's two fixed network operators will enable consumers to enjoy transparent and seamless telecommunication services, regardless of the networks to which they are connected directly. Consumers can all look forward to a wider range of services at more competitive prices when competition in the country's basic telecommunication market starts from 1 April 2000. — TAS.

The contract calls for three Proton and three Atlas launches, with options for five additional launches on each vehicle. In addition to Proton-M and Atlas-V, the company is evaluating other launch vehicles from leading providers around the world.

Meanwhile, Teledesic has completed and signed its system agreement with Motorola, the company's prime contractor, after more than a year of close collaboration and detailed design work. Motorola is responsible for leading the engineering and construction of the Teledesic Network, the world's first advanced telecommunications network designed to provide high-speed data connections to businesses, institutions and individuals on a global basis. Details of the agreement and the enhanced system design will be made public once Teledesic and Motorola complete their ongoing three-month high-level review and finalize the programme's major domestic and international subcontractors.

Motorola has made a USD 150 million cash payment to Teledesic, following the completion of the system agreement, as part of its previously-announced investment in the company. Teledesic has made a down payment of 250 million to Motorola for its work as prime contractor. The privately owned Teledesic company has raised additional equity investments, bringing the total amount raised to more than 1.5 billion. — Teledesic.

This unification and concentration of resources is expected to provide a powerful driving force in taking paging markets forward by introducing the services needed to attract new customers and maintain the current user base. For too long, the growth of the European paging industry had been inhibited by internal wrangling. With the merger, technical developments in paging can be implemented more quickly, bringing increased benefits to operators, manufacturers and customers. — EPPA.

• Cap Gemini and INTERSHOP to jointly market electronic commerce solutions. Cap Gemini, a systems integration and management consultancy, and INTERSHOP Communications Inc., a developer and distributor of software for business-to-business and business-to-consumer solutions, have announced a joint marketing agreement where the two companies will share sales opportunities worldwide on a non-exclusive basis. Earlier collaborative work which the two companies have undertaken for some of their Internet service provider clients include a project in which Cap Gemini and INTERSHOP integrated virtual navigation features into an on-line directory service, ticket-purchasing, publishing of government communications, and the creation of a regional gateway for Internet retailers.

According to Cap Gemini, telecommunication operators must provide more than communications bandwidth to electronic commerce players. They need to provide value-added services such as electronic commerce site hosting and content aggregation, either by building infrastructure themselves, or by partnering with service providers. Through the agreement, the two companies will help telecommunication operators and service providers define their electronic commerce strategies, and design their online services by providing them with the expertise to integrate INTERSHOP's technology into their information systems. The INTERSHOP software suite is designed to meet requirements of single store merchants as well as those of large Internet service providers hosting thousands of online stores. — Cap Gemini/INTERSHOP.

• The Netherlands: Nozema selects ECI Telecom for its digital terrestrial television network. ECI Telecom Ltd. has announced that it has signed a contract with Nozema N.V. (Netherlands) to supply a trial network for digital terrestrial television in that country. Under the terms of the agreement, ECI Telecom will supply its Hi-TVTM systems and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switches. Hi-TVTM is an integrated television over an ATM gateway that enables television professionals to transport studio quality television between sites in compressed, uncompressed, real-time and non real-time forms over permanent or dial-up wide-area network connections.

Hi-TVTM systems are designed for applications that require high-quality television to be transported over broadband networks. These applications include television contribution and distribution systems operated by telecommunication service providers or by television broadcasters. ECI Telecom's Hi-TVTM systems are located in Hilversum and Lopik for testing and will be brought into service in 2000 in Hilversum, Amsterdam and Haarlem, the densely populated western part of the Netherlands. — ECI Telecom.

• Motorola makes world's first GSM-connected Internet call. At a conference organized in London by Motorola Inc.'s Network Solutions Sector (NSS) and attended by more than 180 GSM network operators from 75 countries, the company gave participants a glimpse of the future. Motorola NSS customers were able to place the world's first voice calls via Internet Protocol (IP) links using a Motorola GSM cellular phone.

The first test call was made from Motorola's worldwide GSM headquarters in Swindon (United Kingdom) to a research and development centre in Chicago (United States), using the company's data intranet. The IP backhaul network was used to transmit both GSM signalling and voice packets within the GSM base station subsystem. Mobile voice and data signals are currently carried using circuit-switched bearers, with a channel set-up and maintained for the duration of a call. IP translates voice and data into a number of "packets", each sent separately.

The convergence of GSM and Internet technology is expected to have perhaps the greatest impact on the mobile market the world has yet seen, offering unlimited and rapid access to a wealth of information and services. Network operators will see the opportunity for numerous new revenue streams, and subscribers will experience total mobility. — Motorola NSS.

• Reuters, Sun and TIBCO expand their strategic business relationship. Reuters Group PLC, Sun Microsystems, Inc., and TIBCO Software Inc. have announced a series of global initiatives aimed at accelerating the momentum for on-line delivery of financial solutions and data. As part of the expanded strategic relationship, Reuters named Sun as a preferred vendor for its hardware, infrastructure and data delivery systems, which distribute information to nearly 500 000 people every day. TIBCO also named Sun as a preferred platform for itsTibco.net Web hosting service.

Sun meanwhile agreed to take a minority stake in the form of common stock at TIBCO's initial public offering and licensed an array of TIBCO products for possible inclusion in the Sun and Sun-Netscape Alliance product lines.

This expanded relationship should allow the three partners to meet many of the technical challenges behind delivering network-based information services at a time when the entire financial services market is racing to "dot-com" their industry. — Reuters/Sun/TIBCO.

• France honours Project Oxygen Vice-Chairman, Pekka Tarjanne. The President of the French Republic, Jacques Chirac, has conferred the title of Commander of the ordre de la Légion d'honneur on Pekka Tarjanne, Vice-Chairman of Project Oxygen Ltd., the Bermuda-based company building the global optical fibre undersea cable network known as Project Oxygen Network.

This very high distinction, the rough equivalent of a British peerage, refers in particular to the worldwide achievements of Mr Tarjanne during his nine-year tenure (November I989–January 1999) as Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union. The insignia of this decoration was presented by the French Consul General in New York, Richard Duque, at the residence of the French Honorary Consul in Bermuda, Edgar Humann.

Receiving the award, Mr Tarjanne stated: "This great honour is particularly meaningful to me because I have received it for work I believe in so strongly, such as the realization of a truly universal information society. I am happy to be able to continue my efforts in this area at Project Oxygen and am deeply grateful to President Chirac and the French nation for conferring this honour upon me." — Project Oxygen.

• Quintessent releases industry-first XML-based message adapters. Quintessent Communications Inc. has announced the availability of its eXtensible Markup Language-based message adapters. XML is a technology standard that is endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a group of technologists who develop Internet-related specifications. XML is considered as the language for Internet electronic commerce by the industry. It standardizes the description and inter-exchange of data describing electronic commerce documents.

XML allows developers to separate content from presentation and can store metadata (information about the content) along with the data itself. This enables developers to create self-describing data documents, providing a more powerful way to search key information in electronic commerce transactions. The XML-based message adapters are the first to utilize XML as a meta-language to define and generate the electronic data interchange for trading partners and are expected to improve significantly the way carriers build, translate, validate and modify their electronic commerce data transmissions. — Quintessent.

• The ITU meeting hosted by INTELSAT concludes with new draft recommendation. The International Telecommunications Satellite Organization has announced that the meeting of Working Party 5/11, Study Group 11, of the ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU–T) concluded successfully with the development of a new draft recommendation concerning the convergence of traditional telephony and Internet protocol-based networks. Initiated by INTELSAT, the meeting was intended to extend a key broadband signalling protocol to allow the efficient operation of traditional public switched telephone network applications over the Internet, extranets and intranets. Commenting on the proceedings, Michel Garreau, Vice-President of Engineering and Programme Management at INTELSAT, stated: "We believe that the adoption of this recommendation will help ensure the continued viability of satellite-based telephony, conferencing, intelligent network, and transaction processing applications."

According to Kurt Waber, Chairman of Working Party 5/11 and Head of Engineering at Swisscom, "this recommendation will help bridge the gap between ITU and the Internet communities by streamlining the emerging Internet network protocols". Mark Neibert, Director of Technology and Standards at COMSAT Corporation, added: "This is a milestone agreement that will expand access to IP-based networks worldwide." — INTELSAT.

• WTO agrees on Director-General succession. Member governments of the World Trade Organization have agreed that Mike Moore, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, be appointed as Director-General for a term of three years, beginning on 1 September 1999. The General Council, WTO's executive body, further agreed that Mr Moore would be succeeded by Supachai Panitchpakdi, currently Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Commerce of Thailand, also for a three-year term beginning 1 September 2002.

The decision on the successor to departing Director-General Renato Ruggiero was agreed by 134 member governments and comes after a year-long effort to appoint Mr Ruggiero's successor. Member governments have stressed that this unprecedented term-sharing arrangement does not constitute a precedent for future appointments of the Director-General and have agreed to work towards establishing "a comprehensive set of rules and procedures for such appointments" by the end of September 2000. — WTO.

• Alcatel signs a contract with i-21 for a pan-European network. Alcatel has concluded a contract worth USD 1.5 billion with new European operator i-21 Future Communication for the provision and integration of a pan-European optical fibre telecommunication network. Alcatel will provide i-21 with a full turnkey solution and will be responsible for all aspects of integration of the network, the greater part of which will be completed by December 2000.

Using Alcatel's dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) technology, the 20 900 km network will connect 70 cities in 17 European countries, with 200 points of presence and over 8 million km of the latest generation of optical fibre. It will constitute a major broadband infrastructure for Europe and will offer operators and Internet service providers with a full range of services, including "dark" fibre, managed fibre and managed bandwidth. — Alcatel.

• EUTELSAT and SES coordinate their satellite systems. The European Telecommunications Satellite Organization and the Société européenne des satellites have concluded a comprehensive agreement for the coordination of their systems that will make for optimal use of the frequency spectrum for satellite broadcasting in Europe. The agreement, signed with the active participation of Deutsche Telekom AG, covers the current and planned use of certain orbital positions in the Ku frequency bands allocated to the two companies for transmissions over Europe.

The aim of this coordination is to create new markets for the two European satellite operators while continuing to ensure interference-free broadcasting over Europe for the enhanced benefit of millions of users. — EUTELSAT/SES.

• Nokia paves the way to the mobile information society. Nokia has announced excellent results for the second quarter of 1999 thanks to rapid and sustained growth. Net sales totalled EUR 4493 million, an increase of 45 per cent compared to the second quarter of 1998. Operating profit increased by 56 per cent to EUR 881 million, resulting in an operating margin of 19.6 per cent. Net sales for the first half of this year totalled EUR 8363 million. Sales continued to grow rapidly in all geographic regions, with Europe accounting for 56 per cent of net sales, Asia Pacific for 23 per cent and the Americas for 21 per cent.

Orders for Nokia's infrastructure products have developed positively with increasing demand for its broadband and data transmission solutions. To keep up with the demand associated with strong GSM subscriber growth, operators have continued to expand the capacity of their networks and to upgrade them in order to offer emerging value-added data services.

At the same time, strong demand for Nokia's range of mobile phones has continued. Moreover, the Connecting people approach, an essential element of the Nokia brand, appears to have been very well accepted by the markets. — Nokia.

• Telemedicine — a regional first in Caen (France). A gynaecologist guiding a midwife from a screen located several kilometres from the ultrasound room, students in a lecture hall following the birth in real time — telemedicine is taking its first steps in Normandy. Known as Topnorm, the project to network all maternity units takes off in 1999 in six units and is due to be extended to 19 others in 2000.