Business Segments

Telekom Austria is focused on becoming an exemplary customer-oriented organisation. At the end of 2001, the supervisory board approved the new Wireline organisation, which became effective at the beginning of 2002. The company is now no longer divided into the technology-oriented fixed line, data communications, and Internet business segments.

These segments have been merged into a customer-oriented structure, which includes a wholesale division targeting telecommunications operators and a retail division for end-user customer services. The Internet segment focuses on content and portal services. As part of this process, Telekom Austria AG reintegrated its wholly owned subsidiaries.

Research activities

Innovation is the combination of creativity, technology, and marketing leading to new or enhanced products. We believe that research and development are important to our continuing success and to keep innovation leadership. Co-operation is a very concrete thing for Telekom Austria; it is about the transfer of results and knowledge. In the research sector today, Telekom Austria enters into co-operation ventures in specific areas in the form of `Partnerships of Excellence'. This is manifested in numerous co-operation projects with universities, research institutes, technical colleges, well-established industrial partners, but also by participating in research programmes in Austria as well as on an international level. The operative backbone of the Wireline research activities is located in our strategic product and technology development division.

Our participation in projects within the research initiatives of the European Union with focus on information technology as well as participation in Eurescom projects is of considerable importance to us. However, R&D activities on national level, such as participation in the Research Center for Telecommunications Vienna within the government's K-Plus Programme, are also important to us. Besides Telekom Austria's multilateral activities there are a number of bilateral initiatives.

Research highlights

The cultural change in Telekom Austria has also manifested itself in the strategic orientation of research and development. Until recently, research was only technology driven. Within the past years there was a considerable shift to consumer oriented topics. Thus, our current research programme covers both technology and market aspects.

To assure technological leadership in the future, Telekom Austria see the further study of changing user patterns as an integrated component of its innovation management.

• Study of new content and new forms of communication

The social and cultural area has changed considerably through new technologies and vice versa. Young people find partners for their interests and ideas less frequently in the neighbourhood or school class, but in new forms of community such as the youth scene or in cliques. Due to the close relationship between market and technology aspects we had an in depth investigation on circulation and use of multimedia content and value added services, which goes hand in hand with the availability of broadband networks.

• In depth analysis of media streaming and broadband portals

With the development of the Internet from an information source to an interactive multimedia-platform, audio and video content may be delivered `on mouse click' now. Telekom Austria looked into the challenges of broadband portals in terms of customer acceptance, service bundling and content delivery network infrastructure.

Our technical focus areas include the wide range of Broadband Access, All Optical Core, Service Platforms, Applications & Services, and Security and Support.

Telekom Austria and Eurescom

Telekom Austria has been committed to Eurescom's reseach work since its early days. We value the principle "more value for money" by sharing knowledge and experience with other operators.

Our participation in recent Eurescom projects has covered various technical areas such as voice technologies, quality of service, IP networking and evolution, and more.

Just to mention some of our recent activities:

• Over the years, the challenges of network-integration testing have been addressed by Telekom Austria in several projects. It has started with various ISDN projects. Recently, the adoption of the P1016 MINIT project results by ETSI has stressed the value and reputation of the results achieved in this project.
• The future of IP networks is key to operators like us. In order to be prepared for the challenges that will go along with the introduction of the next generation Internet protocol IPv6 we participated in P1113 Tsunami, which investigated the planning and building of IPv6 networks.
• Managing end-to-end QoS in a heterogeneous IP network is a significant challenge to network operators. In P1115 Saltamontes we evaluated issues related to QoS, implemented by the Differentiated Services approach and Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS).

Telekom Austria Profile

Telekom Austria is Austria's leading provider of telecommunications services and one of the top 5 companies in Austria. The group has two main business areas: the Wireline segment encompasses fixed line telephony, data and Internet; the Wireless segment comprises mobile communications. Telekom Austria has international operations in the Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovenia, and Liechtenstein.

With approximately 15,280 employees (end of September 2002), the Telekom Austria Group had total managed revenues of €3.9 billion in the business year 2001 and revenues of €2,899.8 million in the third quarter of 2002.

Further information on Telekom Austria is available at www.telekom.at