• Is the carrier industry at a crossroads?
• What are the fundamental challenges and questions to be addressed by carriers in the CEE region?
• The financial challenges of dealing with the over-optimism of the past
• Combating the rapid rise of the mobile market
  

• Carrier trends and possibilities in the region and beyond
• Advantages of global reach, premium quality and comprehensive portfolio
• How to meet the rapidly growing expectations of the region
• Creating a win/win situation: how flexible solutions help telcos of all sizes
  

• Establishing the right infrastructure to address increasing costs as network heterogeneity increases management cost while users demand more performance, applications and integration.
• Ensuring enterprise security while opening up critical information systems, applications and data to more and more users, and
  Serving and retaining customers as their expectations rise.
  

• How to prioritise the changing agenda
• Transforming the legacy networks
• Taking advantage of volume and scale to achieve a cost leadership position
• Should carriers be placing their bets on converged services and packet infrastructure?
• Migrating from existing systems to newer technologies with minimum risk and maximum return on investment

• The importance of the continuity of supply and long-term market intentions of potential suppliers
• Quality of service and reliability are fundamentally important in carrier relationships
• Leveraging existing assets as well as partnerships with other carriers (voice, IP and data)
• Developing the mechanisms to communicate and to continually gain feedback from your customers
  

• Are the demands of the customer ignored?
• What will be the key services in the homes and offices of the future?
• Becoming adept at recognising customer requirements, understanding their demands and translating that into an effective business model
• The importance of meeting and exceeding service level agreements in retaining a satisfied client base
  

• Broadband - a major launch pad for service development
• Developing new services and targeting new revenue sources
• The award winning IPv6 service
• The success story for euro2004.com
• Total security solution

• The emergence of new applications and customer segments are driving demand for bandwidth
• The open network model – offering the opportunity to enter the market without the burden of network investment
• Declining access prices combined with increasing penetration, the difficulties of recouping the cost of customer acquisition
  

• Broadband access services have quickly emerged as a key driver of growth in CEE's telecoms market as dial-up users migrate to faster DSL options
• Reaching its full potential – while the number of broadband connections is increasing quickly, prices remain high for a large segment of the market 
• Increased pressure to lower prices for access and increase bandwidth availability
• Reducing prices to accommodate the price-sensitive nature of the CEE market
• Investing in value-added services to overcome declining average revenues per connection
  

Join us for an evening of great food and informal networking at the Karpatia Restaurant in the heart of Budapest.

The networking dinner is a great way to wind down after a long conference day and to meet speakers and attendees in a relaxed and informal setting.

The Karpatia Restaurant, one of Budapest’s best restaurants, is located in the heart of the historic downtown of Budapest, close to the Pest Side of Elizabeth Bridge, next to the Franciscan Church and within the business and cultural centre of the city.

• Are carriers failing to dominate this market?
• How a converged market can play a critical part in generating revenues
• Strategies for meeting customers’ needs and opportunities from VoIP
• Focusing business planning from traditional voice services and circuit-switched networks to the delivery of converged services over efficient networks
• Developing the network infrastructure for the 21st century
  

• The voice landscape - an introduction
• Disruptive technology - Acceleration of an existing trend rather than a revolution
• The business case for broadband

• VoIP evolution strategies: slowly migrating versus a more radical full replacement strategy
• Delivering a cost-effective solution to help customers receive a high quality service
• Establishing a foundation for the delivery of future services
• The need to offer value added services
• Developing an open standard network and overcoming interoperability challenges
  

• The development of and recent changes in the IP transit market
• Additional criteria to the ISP transit purchase decision-making process
• Growth of broadband deployments and new applications used by consumers including peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, gaming applications
• Quality of service and reliability are fundamentally important in ISP selection
• The importance of the continuity of supply and long term market intentions of potential suppliers
  

• The infrastructure challenge: creating architectures that support a wide range of Ethernet services
• Developing a profitable service for providers
• Meeting the wide range of subscriber demands
• Offering value added services to drive revenue
• Creating efficient metro Ethernet services that are competitive with other telecommunications services
  

• Introducing greater competition to the local access network
• Is local loop unbundling feasible in today’s environment?
• Convincing the current incumbents of the benefits of local loop unbundling
• The options available for gaining access to the local loop
• The challenges facing the process of liberalising the local loop
  

• Achieving transparency and harmonisation within the industry
• Enhancing the benefits of competition for users
• Regulating to ensure the consumer interest
• Ensuring prompt and effective implementation of new regulatory packages

• Empowering regulators to deal with lack of full and fair competition
• Regulating to ensure the consumer interest
• Competition in the provision of broadband services
• Access and interconnection
• Universal service and users’ rights
• Ensuring the interests of the consumer are at the heart of national and global policy making
  

Sonus Networks, a pioneer in the voice over IP industry, will lead a full-day, interactive workshop dedicated to VoIP, covering the operational, business and competitive implications of this exciting technology. Clearly, VoIP is no longer the technology of the future – it is a reality today. Introduced in the late 1990s, carrier-class VoIP infrastructure solutions deliver the robust qualities and features that service providers require and have come to expect. In a relatively short period of time, many major carriers and service providers have successfully transitioned their voice networks from a circuit-switched architecture to the packet-based softswitch model, and many more will in the years to come. 

The move to a truly converged network, where applications and voice services are transport-independent, is fundamentally changing the way carries compete to serve their customers, and has the potential to redefine the structure of the industry. And VoIP is at the heart of this transformation.

This interactive pre-conference workshop day will provide an overview of the opportunities and threats, and will address a variety of issues facing carriers today, including:

• The new economic model of the VoIP business
• Voice over IP technology – are the barriers falling?
• VoIP from core to edge: how can VoIP benefit you?
• The operational challenges of delivering on VoIP
• Generating additional revenue – how can IP carriers deliver toll quality voice at IP prices?
• The realities, cost and complexity of deploying a voice network
• Thriving in a multi-protocol, multi-service environment: providing the scale and quality for VoIP