CeBIT 2008

New concept of CEBiT - a success? This year's CEBiT in Hanover - the world's largest trade fair for IT and telecommunications - took place between 4th and 9th of March.

There were about 5900 companies (by 5 percent less than last year). For the first time in the history of the fair, China had the largest representation, surpassing in numbers the previous leader, Taiwan.
Among the notable absentees were Sony, Sharp, Philips, Lenovo, Dell and Nokia.

After several years of decrease of the number of exhibitors, the organizers decided to increase the number of conferences - to attract professionals, and shorten the event by one day - to cut the costs of exhibitors. But probably the main focus was to define the objectives of the exhibition.

Unfortunately the organization efforts didn't seem to refresh the event. They couldn't eliminate the feeling of deficiency, a want for new technologies and for an impulse to stop the decrease of investments in European telecommunications.

During the trade fair we could see a steady factor in European industry - expansion of red tape. The organizers, using subsidizing, invite national exhibitors that, instead of products, are showing travel brochures, and grassroots movements - promoting projects like Green IT.

In this situation the most interesting trends seen at the fair were network and mobile solutions for television - as an extension of offers of telecommunication operators. The solutions are based on technologies that improve data transfers, especially those of mobile telephony. The example is LTE technology presented by Sony Ericsson and T-Mobile.

LTE (Long Term Evolution) is the newest transmission system for mobile applications, developed according to the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). The specification accepted in January, 2008, adopts theoretical limit of 326 Mbps (practical speeds reach 100 Mbps).