Byte Marks
Telecom council quietly leads the way
By Burt Lum
Special to The Advertiser
With the Asian Development Bank media frenzy nicely tucked away in the recesses of our collective memories, I wonder what we will remember about that event six months from now. Will it stand out as a major event of 2001, or perhaps be remembered for its parade?
I recall Hawai'i played host to the annual Pacific Basin Economic Council meeting in 2000. IMHO, Hawai'i is a great host to these international meetings. Unfortunately, most of the time we don't even realize it.
One international conference that gets little media attention is the Pacific Telecommunication Conference. The Pacific Telecommunications Council conducts its annual conference every January and is a magnet for the telecom industry throughout the Pacific. Amazingly, it has done this for 23 years without much fanfare. One does not think of protest marches and riotous demonstrations when thinking of the council.
What you do find are people from across the Pacific and Asia. They gather to talk about the future of telecommunications and the impact this has on people and culture. All the newspaper and magazine articles you now see about Internet bandwidth probably resulted from conversations that originated at a council conference.
The council Web site www.ptc.org also is worth looking into. The council has made available its flagship publication, Pacific Telecommunications Review, as a downloadable Adobe Acrobat file. I found the latest online issue particularly interesting. I had been looking for a good overview of satellite systems for Internet bandwidth. As it turns out, the entire issue was about that very subject. Needless to say, I found this timely.
Previous issues are just as informative, and I will be spending time looking through past issues on Internet commerce and Pacific submarine cables, among others. The PTC is gearing up for its mid-year conference in Seoul, South Korea, June 25-27, to cover another hot topic: broadband wireless technology. Leading-edge topics from an organization right in our own back yard. :-)
Burt Lum, cyber-citizen and self-anointed tour guide to the Internet frontier, is one click away at burt@brouhaha.net
