E-Mon@co wants to spread on the Net

Looking for activities with a high added value, the principality wants to develop services in touch with the Internet. She gave to herself the means to reach her project.

The principality of Monaco, looking for activities generating a high added value but without taking to much space, directs herself towards the new economy. The seventh 'Monte Carlo Investment Forum' is an example. Last year the Internet had been represented by the teacher Serge Miranda, director of the Master in Database of Sophia Antipolis. But this year, for this important meeting for private banking, which took place during March 30 and 31, it was an invasion of the Internet. Among the contributors, with Serge Miranda, there were Net economy people as Michael Bloomberg, founder-CEO of Bloomberg L.P., John Gage, responsible for the research at Sun Microsystem, and one of the 'guru' of the Silicon Valley, Russel Artzt, one of the founders of Computer Associates, etc…Banks are sensitive to the Net revolutionWhereas all the stands turned around the 'Internet, the new border', 'the bank and the Internet', with some problems that this technological revolution implied as security, new applications, etc. John S. Reed, director of CityGroup did not hesitate to say that the Internet was a revolutionary force, but he added that because of this revolution a lot of risks were now above the banks.But banking is not the only activity to be sensitive to the NTIC wave (new technologies in information and communication). The Monaco economy (a 50 billion turnover in 1999) believes in the development of teleservices. A field to which they have been prepared thanks to the efforts they have done since the middle of the 1980s to have impressive telecommunications infrastructures.Remarkable telecommunication infrastructuresSome fifteen years ago, the Monaco Bureau for telecommunications (OMT) put in service an electronic telephone exchange and connected Monaco to the satellite Telecom1 to make easier the transcontinental communications. Since that moment, the OMT has never been late to make the teledistribution by cable (1992), build a teleport (summer 1993), and begin its privatisation (March 1999).Now in the bosom of Cegetel, the new group Monaco Telecom has experimented since January 2000, The Internet with a high output by launching the ADSL, and it created in March a subsidiary: Monaco Télécom Multimédia with a vocation of publishing (2 information channels on the web will be brought into service), and of development of the e-business. With an advantage that maybe worldwide cannot be found: at the same place are subsidiary, ADSL, mobile, cabled, undersea networks and maybe soon the mobile network of the third generation (an UMTS licence was asked).The principality can be proud of her telecom ratios totally out of the common: 109 phone lines for 100 inhabitants (68 in Sweden, 60 in the USA, 51 in France); 21 cellular phones for 100 inhabitants (29 in Sweden, 4 in France); a ratio of line equipment reaching 16% (8% in Germany, 6% in France and a traffic by installed line among the highest used in the world. These are strong good points to enter the new economy.