| << Back to the contents of "About NHH" Byte, 8 August 2000 The IST in practiceThe National Host of Hungary undertook to demonstrate the recent achievements of Hungarian manufacturers and service providers and the trends of development. By Miklós Varga A "movie" of 21st century technologiesNowadays, we speak much of the information society, the service providing sate, intelligent settlements, telework, e-business, life-long learning, easily accessible sources of information, education and other opportunities offered by the new technologies. We frequently hear of new IT and telecommunications means, increasing bandwidth, peak performance and the solutions accessible to the citizens of the Central and East European countries. But today it is still difficult to view these means and the useful, forward-looking potentials of their application in the same competition-neutral environment. It is difficult to compare the performance, applicability and costs of newly announced products and services. It is not accidental that research, technology development, application, their presentation and demonstration appeared one after the other and now constitute a consistent system in the programs of the European Union. The National Host of Hungary undertook to demonstrate the recent achievements of Hungarian manufacturers and service providers and the trends of development. The society which was formed in 1998 by bringing together infocommunications companies is understandingly interested in the development and popularisation of the information society technologies (IST). Initially, the Society promoted Hungarian participation through training, exchange of views and other traditional means. After ordering and evaluating the expert studies, collecting nearly two years' membership fees and winning the development tenders of KHVM (Ministry of Transport, Communication and Water Management) they arrived this year at the implementation of the demonstration laboratory. They mainly build upon wire technologies because a wide range of innovative solutions from common to professional applications can be brought to most of the homes through the existing telephone lines, quickly spreading cables, cheaper ISDN, ADSL-xDSL delivered via traditional copper lines, the Internet whose use triples or quadruples each year, ATM which is the second most rapidly developing technology after IP as well as through X.25 and Frame Relay networks, affordable mainly to big customers. And it is not once and for all that mobile phone technologies and the wireless solutions are left out of the "basket". The Host invited a tender to procure the equipment that meets the goals of the near future and started to enlarge and convert its rented property at Munkácsy Mihály utca 16 to develop a studio with lighting and acoustic capabilities. By the time this article is published, the 34 megabit Alcatel switching centre capable of ATM transmission will certainly be available, ensuring quick data transmission between the Host and Antenna Hungária, GTS Hungary, Matáv, Vivendi and other service providers. Synergon's video equipment, coding and encoding units, screens, cameras and control panel are also expected to be installed. Managing Director Zsolt Balassy hopes they can welcome the first visitors already in September. The visitors to the demonstration laboratory will actually drop in a video studio where they can hold state-of-the-art, widely realisable videoconferences that satisfy all requirements. Educational, health, administration and other experts less familiar with the latest results of infocommunications technologies can survey the actual IT and telecommunications supply in a competition-neutral environment, they can select the technology that best suits their needs and show, jointly with their newly selected partners, the realisation of their ideas to their industries or the future users of the new product or service. It will be possible at a later time to compare the choice of infocommunications applications used by educational, health, administrative and other users as well. The National Host of Hungary is interested in the widest possible use of its demonstration capabilities by IT and telecom manufacturers, service providers and the representatives of other industries needing new infocommunications applications. This is how the future users can be encouraged to notice the new potentials of the information society and choose from them according to their goals and means and this is how the equipment of the Host can follow the development of state-of-the-art technologies. We want to function as a technical movie theatre and offer our visitors new things each day.
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