Coming a long way

Dubbed the IT event of Egypt, the Cairo ICT 2005 trade show appears to deserve the title, writes Amira Howeidy

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Unfortunate Cairenes who were driving around the Nasr City Cairo International Conference Centre (CICC) on Tuesday must have felt quite miserable. As serious gridlock reigned all day in the streets surrounding the CICC, it was impossible not to see the irony of the situation. A huge sign standing above one of the only two open CICC gates (all the other gates are off-limits to the public) read "Accessing the World of Tomorrow", which is the slogan of this year's Cairo ICT 2005 International Telecommunication, Information Technology, Networking, Computing, and Broadcast Technology Trade Fair held at the CICC from 1-4 February. Next to the CICC, loudspeakers promoting "great deals" for furniture for soon- to-be weds emanated from a massive tent. A few metres away from all this, the exhibition halls were hosting the annual Cairo Book Fair.

Chaos, frustration, noise and double parking were the rule of the day which didn't quite match the broader message behind an ICT event which in theory should contribute to improving our lifestyle. That it actively contributed to an exceptionally terrifying traffic problem seemed bizarre at best.

Once inside the exhibition itself, the visitor is struck with an entirely different world from the one outside. There is order, calm, logic and state- of-the-art halls hosting 200 local, regional and international companies spread over an impressive area of 14,000 square metres.

Cairo ICT (previously known as Cairo Telecom) is nine years old, which makes it older than the ICT sector and the ICT ministry itself (formed only in 1999). On its opening -- led by the ministers of ICT, administrative development, transportation and higher education -- on 31 January, Akil Beshir, chairman of the government-run Telecom Egypt (TE) said that the exhibition has become "Egypt's ICT event". Everyone seems to agree. After both the Comdex and the Gitex ICT exhibitions discontinued their short-lived annual trade shows in Egypt, Cairo ICT was faced with the challenge of filling in the gap or making use of it. It seems to have done both, growing in size, impact and maturity.

Osama Kamal, managing director of Trade Fairs International, the company that organises Cairo ICT cites good reasons for the show's evolution. "After Comdex and Gitex left, we were the only local ICT exhibition and we were the only ones left to do the work," he told Al-Ahram Weekly. Despite the ups and downs of this new sector, ICT Cairo was the only uninterrupted event since 1996, "when there was no industry, the whole market wasn't regulated, the private sector was very small and when the telecom people and IT people didn't want to sit together because they didn't think they were related," he said. After nine years working in the local market and witnessing its growth, Kamal believes he knows what ICT companies want, "and that is our strong point".

At this point, ICT Cairo's regional leverage includes North Africa and the Levant (though Kamal has a "personal issue with Israel"). Approximately 2,000 visitors from the region are visiting the exhibition. "It's not one of our objectives to be an international exhibition in terms of visitors at least in this stage," says Kamal. "If I get to be covering a bigger region, I'd be happy if I cover half of Africa and two-thirds of the Arab world."

The Palestinian mobile operator Jawal and UAE's Itisalat were represented by their respective chairmen, Hakam Kanafani and Mohamed Omran. The trade show has also attracted global heavyweights like the German SAP which has recently become the second largest IT company in the world after Microsoft. Also present for the first time are international companies like Juniper Networks, LBF Sisitemi, Global Service Italia, Telecom Italia Sparkle and Hyundai Mobile.

The exhibition which is under the auspices of ICT minister Tarek Kamel is estimated to receive between 30,000-40,000 visitors. This time around, the exhibition expanded in size with a new 6,000 square metre hall occupied fully by ISPs and Telecom Operators, allowing for bigger, more impressive booths.

One of ICT's greatest achievements this year is a separate Shoppers' Mall, conveniently separating the professional exhibition from shoppers.

According to TE's Beshir, the exhibition will see the launch of the maritime fibre optic cable between Egypt and Jordan, which means better broadband conditions for both countries.

But companies present at the exhibition seemed more interested in VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), the new technology for transmitting ordinary telephone calls using IP instead of using the standard public switched telephone network. (This can avoid long distance telephone charges, as the only connection is through the Internet).

More intriguing for the high-tech consumer perhaps is the Triple Play (IP voice, data, video) technology which Alcatel is introducing in the show.

Despite the diversity of the business and services offered by the companies at ICT -- which launched the high-speed broadband initiative in its 2004 show -- the Internet seemed to be the dominating issue of both debate and services. ICT also launched the free Internet initiative in 2002 when President Hosni Mubarak personally attended the exhibition to boost this government- backed initiative. And according to Kamal, the Internet remains the only issue that is discussed in the exhibition's forum for the third year running.

According to TE Data President Mohamed El- Nawawi, the Internet is the dominant part of the ICT sector because it is people-driven, or in his own words has a "bottom-up" effect. "Go after the people and you win, this is the abc and z of the industry," he told the Weekly. The size of the Internet industry is to be about LE100 million for the free Internet and by next year, the broadband industry will be about the same size by his reckoning. According to the Ministry of ICT, Egypt boasts 3.9 million Internet users.