CONVERGENCE WAS THE KEY TOPIC AT THE OPENING SESSION OF EURESCOM SUMMIT 2002
22 October 2002 - European Institute for Research and Strategic Studies in Telecommunications GmbH (EURESCOM)

Dr. Claudio Carrelli, director of Eurescom Heidelberg. The underlying theme at the first conference day of Eurescom Summit 2002 was 'integration'. In his opening speech, Dr. Claudio Carrelli, director of Eurescom, declared network integration to be the crucial factor for the success of future networks: 'Fixed-mobile integration will be more and more necessary.' This would be the basis for the multimedia services of the future, which make use of the abundant bandwidth in the telecom networks. However, Dr. Carrelli warned against overrating the importance of bandwidth: 'The value is not in the megabytes, the value is in the service.' He appealed to the over 140 international conference participants to focus on human needs in developing advanced technologies. 'Technology will have success, if it improves the quality of life and is easy to use.'

Keynote speaker Kurt Dahm from Cisco Systems argued that new network technologies would only create revenue, if they increase productivity. He envisions the convergence of software and telecoms networks to make this productivity gain happen. His concept of a converged service infrastructure is based on OSS architecture with programmable network layers. The second keynote speaker, Shane Wall, general manager at Intel, also focused on the vision of convergence between computing and communication. He described a scenario of ubiquitous access with devices that could seamlessly switch networks. Through improved bandwidth and more advanced chips, multimedia services on mobile devices will be much richer than today, he predicted. As an example, he demonstrated a Personal Video Player from the Intel Labs, which can display 70 hours of high-quality video.

The bottom-line of all speeches was that the network technology for profitable services is there. However, there is a major challenge included, as Andreas Antonopoulos, research director of Working Knowledge Inc., explained, 'traffic, cost and revenue growth are not associated.' The discussion of this and further challenges at the Eurescom Summit 2002 will be continued until Thursday, when the conference ends with a panel discussion on broadband access.

http://www.eurescom.de

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