It is an honor to be with you this evening. I have great respect for Synergos and for the impact that it's having on the developing nations around the world.

We are clearly at a unique time in history. The growth of technology and its pace of change, especially in information technology, are unprecedented. The work that will be done in the next decade to expand and to improve communications networks in every part of the world has the potential to boost national economies and the quality of life for people in every sector of society around the globe. But that is only today becoming a possibility.

We are witnessing no less than the third revolution of society. The first was characterized by agrarian reform, the second by an industrial revolution. The third is a knowledge revolution - one based on access to and manipulation of information.

You can see the impact this revolution in thought, ideas and creativity is having in so many places. And that impact is being felt in ways that both can help close and, as the First Lady warned, extend the gap between rich and poor.

Traffic on the Internet is doubling every three to five months on a worldwide basis. There are eight billion e-mail messages sent every day. There are 350 million users on the Internet today, and that number will more than double by 2005. The number of Internet users in the Caribbean and Latin America is doubling every three months. The 50 million Internet users in Asia will grow to 250 million over the next few years.

As more people do business using the Internet, more people want to be involved. It becomes part of their fabric of life.

The job of companies such as Lucent is to create the technological breakthroughs that make it easier and faster to facilitate these changes. The silicon chips and optical components that power computers and communications continue to shrink in size and expand in capacity following Moore's law - doubling the capacity of silicon every 18 months, and of optical systems every nine months - creating what was unthinkable a few years ago.

But other technologies are moving very fast as well. Today, for example, optical networking systems can move the equivalent of five encyclopedias every second on a single strand of glass. But this will profit us nothing unless there is broader distribution of and access to this information. Achieving the promise of promoting and enabling initiatives that benefit all society requires more collaboration. Access to knowledge via the Internet is becoming essential, but must be co-mingled with advances in education on a worldwide basis.

While I was at MIT last week, a professor told me that he had just published a rather complex scholarly paper on technology and received a critique via the Internet. It turned out that the individual writing to him was an eight-year-old doing a home study on the Internet to meet his needs for educational advancement. Clearly both children of privilege and those less privileged must have access to this tool as a way to advance their learning and become contributing members of society.

As we move to a knowledge-based world, we must improve cooperation between governments, NGOs and industry. If we don't, it is more likely than not that the poor and the near poor will be completely left behind.

Internet access can be provided in even the poorest areas of all the world's countries - including the United States - through community centers, schools and houses of worship, where children and adults can be taught Internet skills on a 24-hour-a-day basis. And if highways are a priority in a given country, then we should lay down the information highway simultaneously. Clearly they must both be part of the fabric of life if countries and individuals want to continue to grow.

We've already seen powerful examples of this, such as electronic networks linking schools in extremely remote areas. In Chile, a network connects more than 400 rural and urban educational institutions across the country. Internet connections allow universities in that country to provide assistance to schools that would never know this kind of knowledge in the absence of the network.

This past year, Lucent launched the Partnership in Global Learning, a program to produce distributed learning on a global scale using technologically enhanced distance learning techniques. It's a partnership between Bell Labs and universities in Mexico, Brazil and the US that will focus on Internet-based distance learning, delivered to primary and secondary schools throughout Latin America. Once this initial phase is completed, the program will be extended to universities in other regions of the world, including Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Africa.

A third example comes from a friend working in Asia. His story indicates the economic potential of communications networking for bridging the gap.

Two farmers from the interior of China went to Beijing to sell garlic on a blanket on the street. As it turns out, they set up their blanket outside an Internet cafe. They'd never seen such a thing. They were invited inside for a cup of tea, and the people there decided to put up a Web site for them. Two days later, the farmers got their first order for organic garlic from Germany. They are now employing all the people in their village to grow more garlic than they ever thought was possible to sell. They are now Internet entrepreneurs.

If they didn't have knowledge of and access to the Internet, none of that would have happened. The vast majority of people will face that problem unless governments get on the education and knowledge bandwagon.

These are just three examples of the power of knowledge and the importance of access to that knowledge. Geography need no longer be a barrier to building a better life.

We're proudly part of an ecologically friendly industry that is delivering technologies that add value to society. And even more proud of the promise the next generation of networks holds for people around the world.

 
 

Report Contents	Chair & President's Letter	Plenary Remarks	Recommendations	Synergos
Sponsors	Table Topics & Faculty	Organizations	About University for a Night