Global communications is becoming more and more intensified through electronic media facilitating trade contacts and international projects. The intensive cooperation between the European nations and the strive for economic and currency union in the EC clearly shows the world-wide trend towards cooperation over frontiers. National thinking must increasingly be shifted to the background and the consciousness for a joint responsibility for the world must continue to increase. Urgently necessary is therefore a world-wide communications system which facilitates at the same time fast information exchange and communications.

The key words for the future are multimedia and mobile telecommunications. Multimedia communications straddle the traditions of both telecommunications and information technologies. As the technology evolves, it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify the boundary of networks. Now computers, in the form of personal and portable devices, have penetrated broadly in the marketplace. We can anticipate further revolutionary changes in the way computers are used in connection with telephony.

Now computers are able to do all kinds of telecommunications, telephone, data transfer and videophone communications and email, when the computer contains a modem and is connected to the telephone network. Teleshopping and telebanking are also possible. Today and especially tomorrow you can do everything from home. The only problems are now the transmission speed of networks, especially telephone network. Therefore it is necessary to build a new or a better second world-wide network beside the existing telephone network.

World-wide industrialized nations are deploying the Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN). That offers speeds of more than a megabit per second using specialised copper and fibre optic wire. Researchers, consumer video services and network element providers will have collaborated to create a comprehensive platform for the interactive video services delivery to consumers homes via standard television. These services will include movies on demand, interactive television, teleshopping, telebanking, databases and videophone. One cable to the home or one network for all is the target of this development. The origin of this fever was the Internet. The Internet can carry these real-time traffic types, to a limited degree today, to a larger degree tomorrow. And the new communications system will able to contain all of these features.

Now, the researchers have to solve the problems of connection between different networks. There are LAN's (local-area-networks) and WAN's (wide area networks) and these networks will be able to be connected together. Network externalities are essential; that is, the recruitment of end users, the compatibility of signal protocols and electrical interfaces, and the reliability and full-time availability of the infrastructure. If we want to build a world-wide network with the same coherence as the telephone network, then we need an international organisation for standardisation of the protocols.

Also necessary is fault-tolerant software and the possibility for customers to define services and manage them in a supportive environment. The network operator will manage each desktop component of customer equipment separately, offering transparent client and server computing through network services. The concept of self- provisioning lets customers buy network capacity like electricity. Just plug in.