Getting the message on communications

ONE of Judith Hann's first tasks when she started working for BBC TV's Tomorrow's World was a story about paperless office of the future. She says now that she went through the motions, dutifully reporting that everyone would soon have a PC on their desk, send e mail to one another and work on screen.

"I did it, but to be honest I didn't really believe it would ever happen, and certainly not as fast as it has," she told a crowd at the Telecom Eireann stand at the Communications 97 exhibition in Dublin yesterday.

"It is now impossible to predict what we will have in our lives by the second decade of the next century. The scale and pace of development are enormous," she said.

It was a point that many of her audience, including Telecom Eireann executives, were more than willing to accept. Back at the first Communications exhibition, in 1993, a GSM mobile telephone cost £2,500, and the State telephone company, feeling lucky, thought that demand on the first day could soar as high as 10.

"Now there are fellows going away with bags of them," mused Mr Billy Huggard, the director of Communications 97. "Deregulation and the liberalisation of the industry in Europe has pushed Ireland forward".

The biennial event, whose main sponsor is still Telecom Eireann, is now bigger than ever. Communications companies will have spent a total of around £10 million on stands and publicity, and an estimated 10,000 business people will have checked it out by the time the exhibition closes this evening.

"We have more display space than ever before, and we're now using the entire Simmonscourt area of the RDS," said Mr Huggard.

As well as the two mobile telephone licensees, Esat Digifone and Eircell, battling it out for trade customers with giant stands just a few metres from one another, there are dozens of mobile phone makers and retailers, all vouching for one model over another.

There are data transfer specialists, Internet service providers and security and electronic commerce experts.

An area of particular growth this year appears to be video conferencing and image sending. In one demonstration yesterday, a Swedish specialist took a photograph with a £350 digital camera, loaded the image into a laptop computer, plugged this to a mobile telephone and sent the picture to another phone and PC, all in about two minutes.

Spurred by the booming call centre business in the Republic, the exhibition has also seen for the first time an influx of companies servicing this market.