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The world has faced yet another massive threat
to the mankind in the recent history – Coronavirus
disease 2019 (COVID-19). Although
the initial impact was mainly on China, now it has become a global threat as
the virus has speared outside the Great Wall. The situation has created much
concerns for all the countries and governments in the world.
Not like in the past, with the development of
new technologies, we say that the world has become a global village, making
everyone close to each other, not just using communication, but also making
global travel easy. As a result, people travel more for different reasons. Global events, especially the ones related to
technology and telecoms are held in numbers around the globe all across the
year. These include global events and regional events.
While the coronavirus’s impact to the world is multi-fold, one of the areas relevant to the telecom and tech are the global
events. There are many organizations in the world organizing annual and
regional events and these events are important for the right balance of the
ecosystem. Some key examples are GSMA,
PTC, Terrapinn,
Layer123, Informatech,
Linux
Foundation, MEF and TM Forum.
These organizations produce many flagship events including Mobile World
Congress (MWC)-Barcelona, MWC-Shanghai, Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC),
Telecoms World, Next Generation Optical Networking & Data Center
Interconnect (NGON & DCI) World, Broadband World Forum (BBWF), Network
Virtualization, Open Source Summit (OSS) and Digital Transformation World (DTW).
Even though today's technologies and
advancements in communications does not require us really travel to discuss and
share knowledge, these events over the years have proved that the industry
still like to meet in person at least once a year – for many reasons. This
requires travel – mostly on air. One of the hardly hit industries with
coronavirus is the travel industry. For example, take Singapore – a main travel
hubs in the world and according to this report,
it was empty few days back. Airports and airplanes, no matter how good you keep
them hygienic and clean, are susceptible for the spread of the virus. Many
people have cancelled their travels and many organizations have imposed travel
bans for their employees.
As a result, many global tech events have been
cancelled or postponed, biggest news being the cancellation of the MWC 2020 – an event started in 2006. Another example
is Telecoms World Asia 2020. Going forward, we may see many other events
too will be either postponed or cancelled. After all, we all agree that the
safety of everyone is paramount.
As already mentioned, we can use technology
like remote meetings, webinars, virtual reality, holograms etc., but they won’t
be that effective compared to the overall experience you get in attending an
event physically. While the world goes dark, the telecom and tech events
landscape will also be dark, hopefully temporally. Till then let’s be patient
and keep the industry moving.
Anuradha Udunuwara, ARC Tube | @AnuradhaU
Photo by Dimitri Karastelev on Unsplash
