ITU Telecom World 2015

ITU Telecom World attracted 4,000 participants including 239 leaders from 129 counties who attended the sessions of 247 speakers and visited the stands of 238 exhibitors from 54 countries and the 23 National Pavilions. The congress occupied altogether 35,000 sqm space at HUNGEXPO, the largest multifunctional event venue in Hungary. The exhibition took place in the interconnecting Hall G and F over 13,000 sqm while the conference was held in the 20,000 sqm Hall A, the largest hall of the venue.

The bid proposal for the congress by the Hungarian Government was prepared last year with the professional support of HUNGEXPO and the result was announced at the ITU Telecom World 2014 in Doha. Hungary won against Mexico, Italy and Hong Kong to host the event in 2015.

The event was organised by the International Telecommunication Union that was celebrating its 150 anniversary in 2015 and that held the first ITU Telecom World congress in 1941. Being a specialised agency of the United Nations, ITU’s goal with the congress is to gather ICT industry professionals from all over the world in order to exchange ideas and inspire each other to create a better, more sustainable future for information and communication technology.

One of the challenges was to provide the essential separate spaces, since the halls originally do not have any pre-built breakout rooms. Altogether 11 temporary separate spaces (Lunch Room, Ceremony Hall, Conference Rooms, Workshop Rooms) were needed with no interference, so parallel sessions could be scheduled in them.

The other challenge the venue was facing was the fact that the event – arising from its nature – had a huge need of seamless internet access at all times. Taking into consideration that the participants were coming from the field of IT, it was expected that they would bring multiple gadgets that would need to be connected to the internet.

HUNGEXPO used this flexibility to the conference benefit, resulting in the most efficient flow of the congress by providing the best variation and set-ups of the session rooms. The rooms were built from a special soundproof panel structure that had already been tested during a previous international event. The new panel system now allows HUNGEXPO to build rooms between 50 and 1000m² in a highly cost efficient and competitive manner.

In order to fulfil the internet related needs of a large-scale international IT congress, HUNGEXPO decided to invest in the development of a more effective and modern system, although there was a wireless network built already. During the event 3,620 different devices were connected to the WIFI (1/1 Gbps bandwidth) without any shut-down, thus it can be concluded that the investment was successful and will be advantageous for future events as well.