Telecoms expo casts light on ‘ubiquitous’ life

BUSAN ― What possibilities can technology add to our everyday lives? Companies are answering that question in their own way at the International Telecommunication Union Asia 2004 conference, taking place here, as participants from 27 countries exhibit their ideas on the implementation of information and communication technology to daily life. By far the most popular keyword is “ubiquitous.” Using the term in the context of accessing a network anytime, anywhere, firms showed how their products could achieve ubiquity. KT, Korea’s largest fixed-wire telecommunications firm ― which is aggressively making its way into the wireless industry, including digital broadcasting ― dedicated an entire pavilion to the changes a radio frequency identification, or RFID, chip can make in our lives. One example is its “intelligent station” ― a large panel of mirrors, which can be activated with a transportation card that contains an RFID chip. A sensor reads the chip, which contains information on the user. A variety of content for entertainment, news or traffic information then appears on the mirror, which functions as a display panel. Users can navigate the panel like an Internet Web site. “These panels can be set up at bus stations or within subway stations, so that people can use them while waiting,” said KT official Park Ki-ho. “They are too expensive to be commercialized right away, but you could see them in your neighborhood in about five years.” KTF introduced a system of using RFID chips to identify food products such as meat. Consumers can look up information on meat that is tagged with such a chip through their cellular phones, to find out how fresh it is, where it was processed, or even what kind of feed was given to the animal. In the home network sector, SK Telecom exhibited a high-tech home environment where all appliances and other items in the house can be controlled through cellular phones. For example, using the phone like a remote control, one can feed one’s pet by activating a digital food dispenser. An additional factor in this home network system that differentiates it from prior models is that household information can also be shared with such organizations as hospitals, security firms and electric companies through wireless Internet. “We hope to commercialize this service early next year; currently, about 100 houses are going through test services,” said SKT official Kim Sang-heun. Japanese firm NTT DoCoMo displayed “mobile wallets,” or cellular phones that contain all the functions of a conventional wallet such as transportation card, credit card and key. Mobile phone manufacturers came up with newer, savvier models. Samsung Electronics produced the first mobile phone to contain a hard disk drive, replacing a memory chip, enabling the phone to store up to 1.5 gigabytes of data ― around 10 times the capacity of former cellular phones. Other new phones include those with vibration functions, where the phone vibrates according to the level of sound, like the woofer system on a speaker. NEC, a world leader in third generation communications technologies, displayed some of its newest WCDMA phones. by Wohn Dong-hee, Yoon Chang-hee