SCHOOL ON RADIO USE FOR DIGITAL AND MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATIONS 11th February - 1st March 2002 , Trieste (Italy)
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Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002
Prepared by: Dr. Prakash D. VYAVAHARE <prakash@ictp.trieste.it>

                                FIRST DAY DIARY
                                      of
         School on Radio use for digital and multimedia communication

                                                11 February 2002



The school was introduced by Prof. Radicella, Prof. Struzak and Mr.
Carlo Fonda. Prof. Radicella described in perspective the historical
background of radio propagation group activities in ICTP since 1990's.
He mentioned that the first workshop on applications of radio
propagation for communications has been held in 1997 and this school is
the 5th school in such a series. Over the period of time the focus in
the school has shifted from science to applications and systems, based
on the feedback from the participants of the previous workshops. He also
explained the collaborative projects that the group is doing with
Nigeria and other countries in terms of advise and sustenance of the
pilot projects apart from such training workshops.

Dr. Struzak emphasized the need and benefits of international
collaboration. He also thanked for the support these workshops have
enjoyed from various organizations in the field of telecommunication
such as ICTP, URSI, ITU, European Radiocommunication Office, and FCC, as
well as internationally recognized experts who kindly agreed to lecture
here.

Mr. Fonda emphasized the need of hands on experience to gain the
confidence and that during the practicals Linux will be used as OS due
to in-built networking features in it and also due to its "open system"
and "free distribution" characteristic. He also explained the teamwork
that is expected during the laboratory sessions.

During the day, Prof. Struzak delivered two lucid and highly informative
lectures, both of which were supplemented by video movies. In the
lecture opening the school, he gave a panoramic view of implications of
Information Communication Technology (ICT) on various facets of the
society leading to evolution of Global Information Society. He first
introduced about the technological progress and convergence of
telecommunication, computers and consumer electronics and how it has
resulted in new ways of interrelations among people, and relations
between the Government and citizens. Prof. Struzak also mentioned how
ICT has helped developing countries in increasing their GDP giving
examples of Costa Rica and India. He discussed the G8 Okinawa Charter,
Kofi Annan Millennium Report and also some critical views, such as those
of Chomsky, Fukuyama, and Rifkin. He mentioned that a UN World Summit on
the Information Society is currently under preparation.

His talk included wide range of topics including types of information
(free, paid and strategic), intellectual property rights (public v/s
private debate), production, access and interception of information. His
lecture was also supplemented by same statistics on information
produced, transmitted, stored, and consumed. The highest percentage of
information is now in electronic form, accessed via telecommunication
systems. To be able to benefit from it, electronic access is necessary,
and elimination of “digital divide” between the developing countries and
developed ones is crucial. He emphasized that the divide is
manifestation of poverty, and technology alone cannot eradicate poverty
and eliminate the “digital gap”. He concluded his talk with the remark
of Nelson Mandela that our generation may be unable to see the fruits of
ICT in developing countries, but we must create opportunity for our
children to participate fully in the future global information society.
He hoped that this school would contribute to the Mandela’s program.
Film “Internet on the Sky” on future low-earth orbiting wideband
telecommunication satellite technology able to offer access anywhere,
anytime, complemented his lecture.

In his afternoon lecture, Prof. Struzak introduced the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU) and its radio regulations. He presented
the ITU objectives, working methods, and history. Founded in 1865 as one
of the oldest international organization, the ITU is now a UN Agency,
supported by all the countries in the world (190) and by major
non-governmental telecommunications entities (600). The ITU activities
include development of treaties, regulations, standards,
recommendations, and handbooks, and collecting of statistical data. The
management of radio frequency spectrum resources, and assistance to
developing countries are major ITU responsibilities. The work is divided
in three sectors: radiocommunication, telecommunication standardization,
and development. The 4-yearly plenipotentiary conference is the apex
body. Study groups do technical work. Common efforts result in ITU
regulations approved by consensus of all members. Before the lecture,
each participant was offered two booklets: “The ITU &endash; an overview” and
“ITU Annual Report 2000”. A film on history of ITU and universal access
to telecommunication means complemented the lecture.

Both the lectures of Dr. Struzak were greatly appreciated and
intercepted by questions/answers and experience sharing by the
participants from various countries.

Dr. Luther explained how the experience of USA in information technology
and telecommunication can be effectively used in the field of education,
transport, health, social and business improvement in developing
countries. He proved through the survey statistics that in USA the use
of Internet by employees has increased the production by 15 percent and
a small percentage of loss due to personal emails/spam is affordable and
sometimes socially desirable. He described the domain names that have
been recently introduced for more classification among closely knit
groups/activities (e.g. aero, arpa, biz, coop, museum etc.) He also
explained the concept of universal access and told how difficult it is,
even for USA to get the remaining 5 percent of US citizens to be
connected. The Internet concerns, including the "no peer review" of the
material put on Internet and other such issues were discussed by him
said that these undesirable events exist in the world even otherwise but
Internet acts as an amplifier for them also. The global
telecommunication market today is 1 trillion US dollars and is expanding
very fast. He listed various facets of PSTN v/s IP telephony including
its technology, costs, government regulations and countries where IP
telephony is permitted. The digital divide was clearly demonstrated in
his slide that showed that only 6 percent of 5 billion of the world
population has access to Internet and 90 percent of them are from
developed countries. Some of the possible solutions given in ILO world
economic forum Davos 2001 included that countries should improve their
educational system and expand their telecommunication networks to
improve the health care and reduction on stress on transportation. He
also mentioned that 33 percent of Internet traffic in USA is about
health care. Various frequency bands that are in use today in satellite
communication (C, ku, ka) and that would be used in near future like
V-band (36-51 GHz), satellite digital TV and IP working principle were
also explained by him. He also gave list of most popular web sites for
general public and telecommunication sector persons. During the
discussions in the lecture he professed that every country should open
voice over IP since this change would be in their benefit in the long
run and appreciated on knowing that India would be opening for voice
over IP from 31 march 2002. He finally gave a home exercise on satellite
problem, which is to be submitted by Wednesday 13 February.

Mr. Grassberger, consultant of ICTP computer center, introduced the
computer center facilities available to the participants mentioning that
each ICTP computer has support for both Linux and win95 but after the
account has been created by ICTP the user should login on Linux machine
since all the data based of users are placed on Linux machines. He also
mentioned the use of small letters in the passwords in order to have
inter-os compatibility between Linux and windows and the importance of
setting up numlock on if one is using numbers in his/her password. He
demonstrated the gui based email facility (email via www from ictp home
page), setting up of printers including default printer, one day backup
facility at ICTP, quota (100 MB per participant), xlock and swing files
in Linux if you want them to be accessed by others (public/world). He
also emphasized that ICTP account can be accessed from outside with ssh
and recommended that since Linux configurations are stored in your
account but in windows they are stored in the computer, therefore for
security reasons it is better to use Linux while viewing your emails so
that others are not able to read it once you leave the computer.

Mr. Fonda gave historical and philosophical introduction to Linux. He
described the onion like structure of computer system with hardware,
kernel, shell and application, the difference between open system and
free system, advantages of open system and why the school and ICTP use
Linux. He also explained characteristics of workstation (network client)
and network server and how Linux is suitable for network server.  He
showed the popularity of Linux and its support to script languages (like
python, perl) used for web development and how open system and open file
formats offers the ability to deal with the data in a manner so as not
to lock them in a particular file format (like .doc does) so that they
can be used in future an still being able to translate that data on
demand for various present and future services.

The thought provoking, interesting sessions finally ended at 6.40 pm.
All the sessions were held in a very friendly and interactive manner.
They were very informative, educative and stimulating to set up
inquisitive and learning atmosphere in the school for the coming three
weeks.


prakash@ictp.trieste.it

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