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Intel CEO sees Net boom in Asia-Pacific

Krishnan Thiagarajan

HONG KONG, Dec. 5

THE Asia-Pacific region is poised to become the key hub for Internet growth in the next three years, according to Mr Craig R. Barrett, President and CEO of Intel.

Delivering the special keynote address at the ITU Telecom Asia 2000, titled `Next Generation Networks -- Infinite Possibilities', Mr Barrett estimated that the region's Internet subscriber base, currently around 24 per cent, will surge to 46 per cent by 2003.

Given the high degree of convergence between the mobiles and the Internet, there is an overriding need to make them compatible, he added.

Mr Barrett called on leaders in the telecommunications industry to embrace open standards in building next generation voice and data networks.

``The telecommunications industry is struggling with traffic volumes and costs that are rising faster than revenues. We believe that the solution to this problem is to move the telecommunications industry from products and services based on closed, propr ietary technology to those based on standards.

``Adopting common standards will accelerate growth and the pace of innovation while lowering costs.''

According to Mr Barrett, in the next generation networks, distributed processing (connecting the mobile, PCs and other handheld devices) will soon become a rage in the IP environment and the evolving communication hierarchy supports this structure.

The key trends which are reshaping the telecom order are the transformation of circuits into packets (moving from voice to data traffic), electronics to photonics (from a low bandwidth to a high bandwidth environment), and from simple services to highly personalised services.

However, for this to happen, Government and industry leaders will have to work together to support the creation of an Internet hub in Asia, encourage foreign investment and deregulate in a fair way.

To reinforce his point, he said that less than 30 per cent of the bandwidth is available in existence in Asia -- most of it originates either from the US or Europe.

If the Internet hub is created in Asia, it will lead to a rapid decline in time to market, have the ability to provide highly reliable and scalable solutions, reinforce capability and reduce the cost of access to customers.