Opportunities and challenges for telecommunications technology

Summary form only given. The telecommunications industry is currently in a position where long-awaited third generation technologies and services are coming into commercial use. This presentation discusses the opportunities and challenges related to this, and also gives a review of developments in the last five years. With the increase in the number of mobile phone users, another remarkable change in telecommunications has been the increase of broadband Internet connections. Together these two show good promise for the success of third generation mobile services. Services are expected to be the most rapidly growing business type, and here multimedia applications provide new ways for customers to exploit mobility. Both in developing areas and in industrial countries, the success of the technology is related to how open standards can be developed, so that all services are interoperable.