With the year 2000 almost upon us, I am delighted to extend to you personally my very best wishes. The year 1999 has been spectacular in many ways. Let me thank all ITU Members for contributing to that success.

We have continued to work long and hard to develop a global flexible radio access standard for third generation systems under the brand, International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 (IMT-2000). An important goal of IMT-2000 is to provide wireless access to multimedia services at very high data rates.

Our meetings in Fortaleza (Brazil), Beijing, Helsinki and Geneva paved the way for the approval of a comprehensive set of terrestrial and satellite radio interface specifications for IMT-2000.

As well as meeting specific needs of operators of new satellite and terrestrial systems, these specifications offer the flexibility required by existing mobile operators to seamlessly migrate to third generation (3G) service capabilities through a variety of migration paths according to their strategic, business and technical requirements.

A key highlight of the Fortaleza meeting held in March was the unanimous agreement reached on candidate bands for the very much needed additional spectrum for IMT-2000. Endorsed by the Conference Preparatory Meeting (CPM) held in November, the agreement recognizes that some of the required bandwidth will almost certainly come from refarmed and reused spectrum made available as second generation systems are gradually taken out of service.

Considering that it is preferable, from an operational and performance viewpoint, to target frequency bands that are contiguous to those already identified for IMT-2000 and given that these bands are heavily used by a wide range of terrestrial services, spectrum experts have to ensure that all services can co-exist without causing harmful interference to one another.

Finding the right mix will be the work of the next World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-2000) to be held in Istanbul from 8 May to 2 June where all players will need to agree on globally harmonized spectrum for IMT-2000. The stakes are very high as the speed, affordability and performance of third generation services will essentially depend on the availability of sufficient spectrum.

The economic benefits of the IMT-2000 standard will be felt by all ITU Member States as IMT-2000 can offer an effective alternative to wired local loops in urban areas and can provide a cost-effective solution to the "telecommunications gap" between developing and developed countries.

In the case of the "millennium bug" that has been long-feared to cause some systems to malfunction during the changeover from 31 December 1999 to 1 January 2000, we have been playing our part to help the telecommunication community enter the new millennium without any major glitches.

Launched in March 1998, the ITU Year 2000 Task Force has made every effort to raise awareness on all Year 2000 problems. In particular, it has advised on compliance standards, established the position of operators, shared information within the telecommunication community and promoted Year 2000 best practice amongst the membership.

Inter-carrier testing has been one of the top priorities of the Year 2000 Task Force, which reported in November that more than 140 global inter-carrier tests were successfully concluded across numerous combinations of international voice data and switches. These tests were carried out using the guidelines released by the Task Force in February this year. What is remarkable is that this testing programme was voluntary and self-financed. The programme complemented the thousands of extensive tests conducted by telecommunication companies on their domestic inter-connect and local networks. Although it is unlikely, in the vast majority of cases, that any difficulties will be experienced, a number of countries have either not shared their Y2K readiness plans or are experiencing difficulties in assessing their readiness, particularly in the developing world.

We have also taken an active part in international discussions and initiatives on Internet issues. In July, ITU signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and three other organizations, making it one of the founding members of the ICANN Protocol Supporting Organization.

Another area where ITU has been extremely active is in standards-setting for IP-based networks. Some 40 recommendations were approved this year in that domain alone, illustrating clearly a real market need for interoperability between public switched networks and networks using Internet Protocols. The bridges which ITU provides through a host of standards are critical if real-time services can be provided over IP-networks with the speed, capacity, ease of use, reliability and integrity of the public telephone networks in use around the world.

On 26 November, the CPM approved a major report to the World Radiocommunication Conference. The purpose of the 350-page report is to assist ITU Member States and the Radiocommunication Sector Members in their preparations for WRC-2000. The report represents the best information on technical, operational, and regulatory/procedural issues on the wide-ranging WRC-2000 agenda.

We will not rest on our laurels. The outlook for 2000 is just as promising. We will build on our achievements to prepare for another line up of major events. These include: ITU Telecom Americas 2000 (Rio de Janeiro, 10–15 April), the Radiocommunication Assembly (Istanbul, 1–5 May) followed by WRC-2000, Council 2000 (Geneva, 19–28 July), the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (Montreal, 27 September–6 October) and ITU Telecom Asia 2000 (Hong Kong, 4–9 December).

Also high on our list of priorities will be the work of the Working Group on ITU Reform and preparations for a World Summit on the Information Society.

My ambition is that these events and activities should result in a balanced and fair outcome for all our Members and the public at large. Let us continue to share the conviction of working together to reach our goal of extending the benefits of telecommunications to people everywhere. Let us look to the year 2000 with optimism.

Happy 2000!