The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.-- Marshall McLuhan
In the creation, retention, and enhancement of economic wealth for any community today, economic development strategies must consider the opportunities that information technology and telecommunications can offer. Equally, they must understand the implications of not considering them.
In many of Canada's telecommunications-rich communities, committees have been established to look at their futures. They will probably be told that they have evolved from a resource- or industrial-based economy to a new industrial paradigm dealing with an information-dominant economy.
This should not come as much of a surprise. Probably, most of the people they know process more information today than hard products. Even many of the manufacturing and resource related jobs have a significant percentage of information processing to do as part of their line of work or research going into resource management. Of course, publishing, banking, entertainment, broadcasting, transportation management, government, and education, among others, are heavy users of information and communication technologies. Increasingly, with international borders opening up and personal technologies reducing in cost, telecommunications has become an important business tool in marketing and processing information on a national and international scale. In fact, with our ability to communicate ideas and send large amounts of information by means of satellite, fiber optics, and wireless communications, we are able to find entirely new ways of creating economic prosperity for ourselves and our communities.
Look around you. How many of the companies that were dominant only a decade ago are still around? How many new ones have taken their place? Chances are that these new companies are doing something quite different, and it probably has something to do with the processing and delivery of data, text, audio, or video. In fact, 97% of all new categories of jobs created in the past seven years have been in knowledge-intensive industries. These require extensive telecommunications-related infrastructure to flourish and grow.
This change has occurred relatively recently and quickly. Traditional planning and economic development offices are only now beginning to look at these issues as part of their mandate.
An international conference dedicated to examining these opportunities and implications will be held this September in Toronto. Called Smart '95, it will look at the enabling infrastructure that telecommunications offers our communities to participate globally for social and cultural enhancement, for learning at great distances, for basic communications and entertainment, and for economic development.
While this may seem like a new idea, telecommunications manufacturers and service providers have been doing a brisk business for the past decade in Asia and Europe, where significant partnerships have been formed among government, business, and institutional sectors to develop knowledge-intensive centers geared to harness economic development in their regions. These facilities have been called everything from Infoports to Mediaparks and Technopoles to Telecentres and Teleports.
Originally, this idea was started in New York City under the name Teleport. This predates information highway jargon, and is not very well known in North American communities. But in Europe, Asia, and increasingly in developing countries, Teleports have become the seed, the symbol, and the focus of economic regeneration. Whatever their name, these telecommunications centers represent 11 basic elements that should be considered in any community's economic development strategy.
Technically, Teleports are defined as access facilities to a range of full-scale telecommunications media incorporating a distribution network as well as telecommunications business services to serve the greater community. In more general terms, they are telecommunications facilities which implement what Marshall McLuhan promised as the Global Village. They are real-life examples of the Information Age. Teleport proponents often use seaport and airport analogies to describe them. The latest promotion for the World Teleport Association's World Congress to be held in Toronto next September explains:
Envision, for example, the much-touted "Information Superhighway" as an international flight pattern that connects every country, city, town, and village throughout the world. In such a scenario, Teleports can be likened to air traffic control stations that create and manage the connections, enabling businesses and consumers to transport information from place to place faster, easier, and more economically than ever before.
This is an important analogy given that many industries and companies today deal with a relatively new cargo, one that is weightless and highly valuable: information. Information processing now counts for over 50% of many major regions' economic activities. Metropolitan Toronto, for example, is recognized as having over 55% of its workforce in information-intensive services. Teleports are facilities geared to meeting today's and tomorrow's new industry demands.
The next generation of Teleports are those which have a planned environment associated with them. These are facilities which incorporate satellite, fiber optics, microwave, and coaxial technologies as part of a planned enterprise. These are developed as intelligent buildings, clusters of buildings, and even as large-scale real estate business parks. Examples of these include projects in Amsterdam, Berlin, Seville, New York City, Rio, and Cologne, many of which will be further explained in this article.
Common among this typology is the attraction of people and businesses to the facilities, especially small to medium-sized businesses, that are so very important to fueling jobs and being the creative backbones of nations. While several in this typology aim to attract large-scale ventures such as Merrill Lynch in the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's Staten Island Teleport, others are quite happy to cater to a myriad of small businesses in a business center environment. Essentially real estate driven, this typology offers a new look and feel to developing real estate, no matter whether it is for business, industry, government, or residential uses, as each sector is being influenced more and more by telecommunications.
The final typology has identified the Teleport as the intelligent city or region itself. Also known as the wired city, this perhaps is the closest that the information superhighway comes to being physically recognized. The Paris-Ile-de-France region is practicing the global village phenomenon in its development of a wide area network linked to interactive nodes in the region. It is their intent to collectively work together to compete in the global marketplace. Incorporating both prior typologies into the Teleport mix, this regional connectivity will catapult the Paris region into an unsurpassed position to market the Paris region globally as we approach the next millennium.
Telecommunications infrastructure and the related technical facilities located at strategic nodes are deemed to be cornerstones for the development of new-economy activities. The shift from resource-based enterprises to knowledge-based activities requires high-speed, high-capacity communications access. For businesses involved in national and international activities, access to secure and affordable communications capabilities is essential. In developing nations, for instance, telecommunications centers are clearly catalysts for growth, bypassing inefficient and outdated local facilities to attract hard currency investment by multinational firms that need high-quality, high-capacity global telecommunications in secure environments.
In developed nations, telecommunications infrastructure is harnessed to create new industrial ventures, replacing old-economy activities. The extreme is Tokyo Teleport Town, where a consortium of public and private sector interests is creating a 1,000-acre community around the Teleport theme. Cologne's Mediapark was a development on 50 acres of former railway lands based on the integrated telecommunications infrastructure available at the complex. Amsterdam Teleport, a 6.5 million sq. ft. development near Schiphol Airport, is focusing on data and international call and reservation centers. Numerous other communities are basing their futures on knowledge-based industries and activities requiring telecommunications infrastructure, namely, Osaka, Singapore, Yokohama, Berlin, Paris, Montreal, San Francisco, and Rio, among others.
At the local level, telecommunications infrastructure, especially available in centers where affordability and accessibility to all modes and capacities is promoted, considerable interest is generated by potential end users. In Montreal, for example, where the Teleport de Montreal offers access to high-capacity telecommunications in a shared use and synergistic environment, a highly-successful Teleport complex has been created, reinforcing the success of Montreal's broadcast district.
In Poitiers, France, some 300 kilometers southwest of Paris, a futuristic community has been developed around technology and telecommunications. At the heart of the 1,000-hectare (2,500-acre) industrial complex is the Futuroscope Teleport. The Teleport concept seeded the technopole and supports all of the industries, convention facilities, and adjacent theme park, The European Park of the Moving Image, allowing broadband linkages worldwide to Poitiers facilities. As a result of the development of this Technopole, the project has also been able to attract the University of Poitiers' training and research institutions, the National Centre of Long-Distance Learning, and the International Institute of Long Term Forecasting.
These telecommunications centers are also acting as symbols in themselves to promote community excellence and the level of its infrastructure capabilities. For instance, Panama's Teleport will position the country as a premier location for establishing businesses in Central America. The Teleport in Rio is meant to reinforce its ability to serve international headquarters.
Many eastern European communities are developing Teleports as symbols of their advancement, as much as helping to establish physical linkages. And every major Asian community is in the process of developing a Teleport, or else it is not deemed at the same high level as its neighbors. Even the original Teleport, developed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on Staten Island in the early 1980s, was very much symbolic of the Port's pre-eminence in the world of international trade and the emergence of electronic commerce, especially in shipping, highway transport, and air traffic.
The critical mass of users and tenants also supports innovations in urban design and urban engineering. Yokohama's Teleport community has developed an underground city of municipal services, thereby assuring that municipal streets in the development will not be interrupted for municipal works. The building designs, urban landscaping, and other physical amenities at Seville's Teleport are outstanding; and Amsterdam's Teleport affords exceptional transit facilities for its 4,000 workers.
Without the synergistic and cooperative relationship developed at the Teleport, this facility would not be available to small businesses in Montreal. Other synergistic activities include work sharing, multi-business product development, and new business incubation. Individually, these companies may have prospered in their own right; however, by banding together, they were able to achieve higher purpose elements that now form part of the greater community. Conclusion: the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
As the costs of popular technologies, such as PCs, are increasingly reducing in price, the other end of the spectrum dealing with advanced technologies continues to be of significant expense. Add to this the ever-changing nature of the technologies, and it has been difficult for many companies, especially small to medium-sized enterprises, to keep up. First, it was ISDN technology, now it's ATM, and so on. High-speed, high-capacity broadband technologies are very expensive and will not soon be at prices that the average business can readily afford. High-technology related businesses, especially those with high costs in distance and international communications, are always seeking means to reduce costs and improve on servicing their customers. The brief history of Teleports has been to offer high-quality services and secure the most efficient communications capabilities at lower costs for its tenants.
Described as shared-use facilities in unique business center environments, Teleports have sprung up over the last decade, especially in Europe and Asia. In these regions, the majority of businesses fall into the small and medium-sized categories. In Japan, for instance, more than 75% of employment falls within these categories. Their size is also reflective of their ability to be responsive and seek innovation. These are the firms that also seek the most affordable means to achieve their competitive edge. Teleports appear to meet many of their goals, especially the ability to have access to technical facilities and telecommunications choices at affordable rates.
Teleports can also offer brokerage of the most competitive or appropriate information technologies and telecommunications, based on tenant requirements. They also offer coordination among a number of end-users sharing in the facilities. Coordination may also extend into synergy-building. Montreal's Megapoint coordinates business development initiatives. Others coordinate efforts to seek financing and approvals for common projects.
Similarly, the Amsterdam Teleport has been able to benefit significantly from its call center focus. Major reservation and telemarketing services take advantage of the Teleport's telecommunications facilities and the region's multilingual capabilities. Rio's City-Centred Teleport will promote its secure and reliable telecommunications facilities to attract and retain multinational head offices in Brazil. Cologne's Mediapark has developed a unique niche within the EEC related to media ranging from broadcast to publishing. Yokohama's Minato Mari 21 waterfront development utilizes the Teleport as a gateway for international telecommunications traffic.
Marseilles' Teleport will also focus as an international gateway. Calgary's Infoport promises to have a similar approach. Others will work in coordination with its World Trade Centre cousin to be unique showcasing and international exhibition facilities, promoting on-site presentations as well as unique international interactive functions. Each develops in its own way as a result of the unique aspects and circumstances of the community in which they are located. Like any successful enterprise, the niche that it developed and maintained reflects the strength and knowledge that is inherent in the community it serves.
Teleports can also act as showcase centers, promoting the community-at-large to the wide world through physical presence on site, as well as utilizing the telecommunications capabilities at the Teleport to be interactive with off-site service and manufacturing facilities regionally, as well as with potential customers at distant locations.
So important, and timely, is this idea right now that, in Toronto, a collective of industries, service providers, government agencies, and institutions have formed a precompetitive and proactive assembly to study the telecommunications strengths and weaknesses, seek proactive solutions, and ultimately implement them. Several ideas that have been raised include:
Teleports can add value, and in specific cases, they can act as the seed, the symbol, and the focus for economic rejuvenation of an area or region, and in some instances, an entire nation.
This article is reprinted with permission from the City of Vaughn Economic Development Department, Ontario. This article appears in the Economic Development Journal of Canada, 1995 Edition. -- Ed.