Speech in "Virtual Opportunity Congress"
Melbourne, Australia - State Parliament House 31.10 1997
Risto Linturi
Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen,
I must apologise that my English is even worse than yours - so bear with me. Otherwise I am very delighted to be here. I was though very much afraid when coming down from the airport as I noticed that You are driving the wron way and I thought that Your food might also resemble english - but You dont spoil Your food - it is very delightful. But let us continue.
There are two men who may have affected my thinking more than my father. One is Robert Heinlein who wrote marvellous science fiction stories. His basic theme was - Young man go west and try your best to be a decent human being. I must say as I have last week left Finland first to USA and then here that travelling west is a wonderful experience and if I still continue I will end up back home with my wife and my kids, which will be even better.
However Heinlein was not talking about this or about rockets. He was talking about actively pushing the human frontier further and further. This is what Internet is now all about. Internet is today’s frontier and that leads me to my second great teacher.
Alvin Toffler made great impact in seventies and early eighties with his books Future Shock and the Third Wave. Latter starts followingly:
"A new civilization is emerging in our lives and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it!"
I am not so much afraid anymore than I was a few years ago. I have here seen and heard an active search for the frontier. In Finland we also have cabinet ministers who are very actively involved in shaping the change. A couple of them even live the way they preach by using video telephones to be in daily contact with their kids.
I just arrived from the USA where I had the possibility to listen and talk to current leading American thinkers. I heard many very wise things and scenarios. It is very important to look forward. Otherwise we end up suppressing the new civilization. This was happening last spring in Finland. A cabinet nominated committee suggested a new legistlation for freedom of speech. It required saving every network broadcasted video for three months. This would have made enourmous effect on the future. I somehow managed to stop them by sending two hundred letters in Internet asking all the Internet friendly people to help. The committee had to back down because it roused a rabble in the tv and press and tens of thousands of letters circulated in internet.
We have now five million telephones for five million inhabitants and over two million of them are cellular.
We have 800.000 weekly Internet users from our five million populations. We are pushing our frontier and next vision is video telephony and citizen television. These require industry action, decicive action from the teleoperators and very wise and insightful legistlation. Otherwise our new civilization will be suppressed.
Let me now show you what technology makes possible and what we have decided to do about it. We have now fully digital telephone network and it costs You 100 dollars to get ISDN-service installed. Then the cost of telephony is the same - Europes cheapest - as the plain old telephone.
->Show ISDN-videotelephone demonstration
This is the quality of video call over ISDN. Cheapest add on equipment to your home PC costs about one hundred dollars and the software is standardised so that Internet, ethernet and ISDN-based videocalls can interoperate. Even Microsoft is following this standard and naturally they distribute their software for free so that all of us benefit who do not wish to argue with them.
I expect that 50% of households in Finland will have video telephones by the year 2005.
Next I would like to point out a very important message. New PC’s start to be powerful enough to receive TV-quality bitstreams with free sotware from You guess who. With these new digital technologies it is possible to send TV-quality over telephone lines from media companies to You so that You can watch video on demand when You wish.
And this very false vision has for several years shaped our technology, legistlation and thinking. For these false visions it may be that real advancement will be suppressed, as Toffler was afraid.
I have for the past three years tried to convince others that this might lead into something totally different. In Finland we just had our richest man get himself a TV-channel. Within few Years our company will make this possible for just anybody. In Finland it will be possible to send TV-quality programs from your home to other homes because we want to build these things symmetrical - I believe in enabling technologies and freedom and wisdom of most people that we will learn to use these things properly. This seems not to be the case in other places where centralized asymmetric technologies are favoured and the power of media is considered to belong to the media and not to every citizen. Internet will be very different if broadband capabilities will be built with asymmetric cableTV- or asymmetric ADSL-technology or if instead it will be built with symmetrical DSL-technologies.
->Show near TV-quality Video demonstration
Today You need to buy a digital video camera wort 2 thousand dollars and another two thousand dollars worth of compression hardware and then You are all set to have Your own TV-station If the operator will let You.
You can show other people your kids birthday. You can show how to change the carbonator in your car. You can set the camera in front of your aqarium - and certainly it will be better than most other programs you get from television.
Incidentally - If you get more than ten people watching - we might pay you because You got us so many customers. Usually we have only one person listening while the other talks.
As I allready told you, in 2005 we expect that 50% of homes in Helsinki will have video telephony and they all are potential tv-stations. We expect to have several thousand stations transmitting quality video regularly. These will be churches, theatre clubs, freelance musicians, teachers, dog shows or karaoke bars.
This does not come by itself. We have to be determined to invest millions, perhaps hundreds of millions to our networks - like we have done to the old networks. We also have to design and provide this so that each signal can be multicast to as many others as want to watch. This is possible if the networks are designed carefully to allow media democracy. Top down comes byt itself - this requires effort and determination and it seems to require travelling abroad to convince others to join the crusade. But this is possible and we will do this in Helsinki.
And now I would like to return to Ira Magaziners message. These things cannot come by themselves. If we let market forces themselves dictate the future of networks we will have very grave problems. Imagine if everybody can send threats and blackmail without any risk of getting caught and imagine if they could also enforce the threats by broadcasting material that is valuable to you or which would destroy your commerce. Imagine if they could also collect money for this without any risk of ever getting caught. Look here - I have one of your notes - it has an individual serial number. Should we now decide that we do not need these precautions anymore? I think that this would lead us back to the situation where only those institutions respectable enough would be aloud to broadcast. I would just hate that scenario - if we want to enable everybody we must at the same time create tracing technologies and legistlation or common practice. This is not very costly now because multicast capabilities are only starting to emerge. But this will be very hard or almost impossible after Bill Gates and others have sent thousands of their satellites in the sky. It was very clear that Clinton administration has not thought about this and my question to Magaziner got an insequre and somewhat open answer. I hope that we somehow get him to think more about this.
We have decided to change our basic telephone network into a multipurpose broadband network.
This network transfers bits with Internet protocols. You can use it for voice or video but you can also connect other things to it.
I am just building a new house. I got my light bulbs and even water taps connected to house automation network. This is connected to Windows NT server, which in its turn is connected to internet. Now I can open my Nokia 9000 mobile communicator and check wether I left lights on or water running - this sounds stupid - It just happened as a by product and now I have a security problem. I need a firewall to stop hackers turning my lights on and off. But my frizge I really want to connect to Internet. It will have a small web camera inside and then when shopping I can look with my 9000 Communicator if I need more milk home or not.
We have a large consortium with the City and various others including IBM, all local universities, Nokia, largest bank, newspaper, cable tv-company to build service infrastructure and basic services to our local broadband island of internet. But we expect that tens of thousands of people will start doing their part to supply content and communication services to this second generation Internet.
->Show demo from virtual (3D) Helsinki
We do not believe that distance has lost its meaning. You can send text and even voice cheaply over long distances. But I have a two-megabit connection to my home and within three years the same will be possible for everybody in Helsinki. This connection would cost me hundreds of times more per minute over Atlantic than just inside Helsinki. Oh - I should have changed Atlantic to pacific ... but anyway. Highest quality and lowest price can only be achieved locally.
We believe that physical communities will have increasinly important meaning in the networks of tomorrow. We are creating a face - a user interface to our network that supports this. What you now sill see is our first trial. It runs smoothly in fastest
PC’s of today. You can navigate whereever you like. You can watch the buses go in real time. You can go to your friend door and push the doorbell and we connect a telephone or videophone call for you or open her homepage or you can look at her fridge if she lets You. Possibilities of this kind of living maps are endless.
Internet has standards for this. PC’s are ready for this and in Finland there is a company that has developed tools for this for the past eight Years. Modelling all of Helsinki including suburbs so that all 500.000 citizens feel that they belong to this network costs about 2 million dollars whic is only 20 % of what it costs to print our telephone catalog every year.
As you saw - the city was empty. This is not our intention - we want people to meet there. New networks enable communication and their user interfaces must reflect this. It just takes time to engineer hundred thousand people into the streets. Currently the virtual meeting places are all inside.
We do expect that tecnology develops so fast that we can provide all this with the
average cost of a local busfare per day. Fro us this would still mean very big increase in turnover and profits. And for our society as whole I expect this will mean even more.
Now as a last thing I would like to read a short greeting from the Lord Mayor of Helsinki to all atendees of this fabulous conference. Lord Mayor Eva-Riitta Siitonen is the only lady among all the Mayors of European Union capitals.
Show second virtual demonstration