Chapter 218 Internet Construction Conference

12 month 18 day.

Liu Zhicheng went out early in the morning to attend the official opening ceremony of the Hong Kong Research Network organized by the Hong Kong government.

The Hong Kong Scientific Research Network is the local Internet in Hong Kong.

As early as the first half of last year, Orange Technology began to promote the construction of this local area network using supercomputers as a starting point.

After nearly a year, Orange Technology's supercomputer has completed construction and has officially been put into operation, attracting universities in Hong Kong to cooperate.

The Hong Kong Research Network was jointly applied for by several universities in Hong Kong to the Hong Kong government, and Orange Technology borne all the construction costs of the backbone network project.

This backbone network was basically completed two months ago, enabling network interconnection among all colleges and universities in Hong Kong.

After a period of practical testing, the Hong Kong Scientific Research Network has now been officially announced to the public.

In fact, in this era, apart from universities and technology companies like Orange Technology, not many people in Hong Kong understand what the Internet is.

Not to mention the Internet is still far from commercialization, that is a very long way off.

However, the construction of this scientific research network is a basic communications project approved by the Hong Kong government, and the project was driven by Hong Kong's colleges and universities and Orange Technology.

The Hong Kong government also needs political achievements, so it wants to use this project to show its support for the development of Hong Kong's education.

It can also be said that the Hong Kong government organized this opening ceremony just to make its presence felt.

This ceremony became a face-saving project for the Hong Kong government. Liu Zhicheng was not very interested in it, but the plan could not be separated from the support of the Hong Kong government.

This ceremony is a win-win situation!

After the ceremony, scholars from various universities in Hong Kong will organize a seminar to discuss the follow-up promotion plans for the Internet in Hong Kong.

The construction of the Hong Kong LAN was driven by Liu Zhicheng, but it also relied on the support of the whole society.

Therefore, Liu Zhicheng responded very much to this seminar and decided to sponsor it with all his strength and attend it in person.

The Hong Kong LAN is actually just the foundation of a series of long-term plans. Only with the Hong Kong LAN can Liu Zhicheng move towards the real international Internet.

This time, Liu Zhicheng wants to use this seminar to once again unite the universities in Hong Kong and continue to promote the development of the Internet.

On the day of the ceremony, Liu Zhicheng and a team of more than 20 people including Huo Haiqing attended the ceremony, which is a rare occurrence at Orange Technology.

The launching ceremony was a show put on by the Hong Kong government. Liu Zhicheng naturally would not try to steal the limelight. He just stood by with a fake smile on his face, supporting the Hong Kong government.

It was not until the seminar began that Liu Zhicheng really perked up.

The Internet is a very cutting-edge technology, and the format of this kind of seminar is basically for everyone to express their own opinions and exchange views in a pragmatic manner.

After the meeting started, representatives from various universities spoke first. They were just scholars and the content of their speeches was based on their own feelings.

Some talk about theoretical viewpoints, some talk about usage experience, and some talk about technical ideas.

Only after all the scholars had finished their speeches did Huo Haiqing, a representative from Orange Technology, take his turn to speak.

The theme of Huo Haiqing's speech was: Promotion of social application of Xiangjiang Scientific Research Network.

The scientific research network was funded and built by Orange Technology. The ownership of all backbone fiber optic networks also belongs to Orange Technology. The subsequent network settings and maintenance are also undertaken by Orange Technology.

It can be said that in this scientific research network, Orange Technology is the real leader, and those universities are just early network users.

"Based on the existing scientific research network, we at Orange Technology will launch a series of promotion plans for social applications.

First, we will connect the existing scientific research network with the fiber optic communication network of Hong Kong Telephone to expand the coverage of our scientific research network so that more people can enjoy the benefits brought by the scientific research network. "

Hong Kong Telephone is the only fixed-line telephone service provider in Hong Kong and began building its fiber optic network as early as 1981.

Xiangjiang Telephone Company has been acquired by Liu Zhicheng, so it is natural to connect the scientific research network with Xiangjiang Telephone's fiber optic network.

When Huo Haiqing finished talking about this plan, the whole audience burst into warm applause. This move by Juzi Technology was highly approved by the participants.

“Secondly, after the two networks are connected, we will invest funds to upgrade the communication network of Hong Kong Telephone and provide interconnection access services of the scientific research network to all Hong Kong citizens.

After this transformation is completed, all Hong Kong citizens who have a telephone at home will be able to log on to the scientific research network, surf the Internet, and enjoy various information services on the scientific research network."

This time, the network upgrade of Xiangjiang Telephone is not just a simple upgrade, but a comprehensive upgrade to an integrated digital telephone network system.

This means that Hong Kong Telephone will begin to launch ISp services, transforming the scientific research network from a large local area network between universities into a metropolitan area network serving the entire Hong Kong.

Xiangjiang Telephone is a fixed-line service provider and already has a communications license. This ISp business is a new form of service provided based on the fixed-line network.

Therefore, Liu Zhicheng no longer needs to apply to the Hong Kong government to build a metropolitan area network.

Orange Technology's plan is to directly borrow the communications license of Hong Kong Telephone to promote the ISp business first.

Hong Kong's urban communication network is monopolized by Hong Kong Telephone, so this kind of ISp business must be carried out through Hong Kong Telephone.

As soon as Huo Haiqing finished his speech, the audience below quickly became noisy, and some people even couldn't hold back and started asking questions directly.

"Mr. Huo, is this access service of Hong Kong Telephone a paid commercial service?"

The technology of using telephone lines and modems to connect computers to the Internet has long been mature.

However, large-scale Internet access by citizens must rely on the communication networks of telecommunications operators.

However, since the Internet was in its early stages and the number of users was too small, most telecom operators were not very enthusiastic about promoting this business.

“Internet access services require us to carry out large-scale equipment transformation of the telephone network, and we must provide commercial services in order to recoup our investment.

However, it is still in the experimental stage and cannot provide stable network services. Therefore, we will provide free trials to all citizens in the early stage.

As for when we start charging, it depends on the maturity of our technology.”

Hong Kong has a total population of only 500 million, but the number of installed telephone lines has long exceeded 100 million, and it has a very good communications infrastructure.

The so-called free service of Orange Technology is aimed at cultivating Internet seed users and making citizens dependent on the Internet.

The current number of computers is still relatively limited, and it will take a long time to achieve profitability through ISp business.

Although Orange Technology was actively launching its ISp business at this time, the commercial conditions were not yet mature and profitability was impossible to achieve in the short term, which would require a large capital investment from Liu Zhicheng.

This is also one of the reasons why Liu Zhicheng needs to make money everywhere.

The early Internet was driven by scientific research, with a low level of commercialization and no enthusiasm for the pursuit of commercial interests. The so-called Internet spirit is openness and sharing.

Guided by this open and sharing mindset, the scholars present here are very welcoming of upgrading the scientific research network to a true metropolitan area network.

The cost of this upgrade is borne by Orange Technology and its subsidiary Hong Kong Telephone. These early adopters of the Internet are actually reaping the benefits.

As long as Hong Kong Telephone can launch Internet access services, you don’t have to go to the office anymore and can access the Internet at home.

They are all very clear about the convenience involved, so there is no way they would object.

Moreover, the Internet is a cutting-edge field. For university scholars, Orange Technology is willing to continue upgrading Internet applications and provide better support for their academic research.

Currently, global telecom operators are not very enthusiastic about Internet communications.

According to Orange Technology's plan, Hong Kong's metropolitan area network may temporarily become the world's largest metropolitan area network.

In this kind of large-scale application, there will be many achievements in academic fields that can be researched and discovered first, which may raise Hong Kong's academic influence to a higher level.

Everyone knows that those who are close to water get to see the moon first. Many scholars immediately began to ask Huo Haiqing about some technical details and directions of the communication network transformation plan.

In the past two years, Huo Haiqing has also worked hard to acquire professional knowledge in communications and has made sufficient preparations before attending the meeting.

Now when answering the questions from these scholars, he can answer fluently and appears extremely professional.

During the discussion, the scholars felt that Huo Haiqing was very well prepared, which meant that Orange Technology would really make a large-scale investment in this plan. Many scholars directly proposed various applications for cooperative research and development.

Huo Hai had received instructions from Liu Zhicheng early in the morning and welcomed all applications for such cooperative research and development.

To promote the rapid upgrading of Internet communication technology, it is far from enough to rely solely on the limited manpower of Orange Technology.

This requires strong support from R&D personnel across Hong Kong and society as a whole.

These scholars are all excellent R&D talents if they were all introduced into this communication network upgrade plan.

For Orange Technology, it will also be a great help in accelerating the advancement of various R&D projects.

When the most active communication scholars had almost finished communicating with Huo Haiqing, the computer scholars attending the conference began to ask questions.

"Mr. Huo, you are going to provide Internet access services to citizens, which is of course a very good thing, but what can these citizens do after logging on to the Internet? Do you have any plans in this regard?"

“Your question is actually about the provision of application services. In this regard, we at Orange Technology do have some preliminary plans.

Many of you may have heard that we at Orange Technology Company started experimenting with some Internet applications on our intranet last year.

While opening up Internet access services to the public, we at Orange Technology will also migrate some basic Internet applications to the public network and make them available to all users.”

Many of Orange Technology’s employees are graduates of these universities. It is no secret that Orange Technology has set up many application websites on its intranet, and most of them have heard about it.

However, these application websites were previously built within the intranet of Orange Technology, and external users were unable to log in to these intranet websites.

Many scholars have long heard that Orange Technology's application websites are very popular internally, but have never been able to try them out themselves. When they heard that these websites would be migrated to the public network, they immediately aroused the interest of many people.

“We will provide PPS, online chat rooms, email, and game entertainment halls. I will not introduce them one by one here. I hope everyone will use them more in the future.

These network applications have been running on our Orange Technology's intranet for nearly a year, and have withstood the test of both technical stability and user popularity.

This time we migrated these applications to the public network because we wanted to use these applications as the basis for attracting users to log in to network services.

However, we believe that Internet applications will have huge room for development, and the few applications we have launched now are just a drop in the ocean.

We sincerely invite all elite talents who are interested in Internet technology to work with us to develop more Internet applications.

We believe that in future Internet applications, there will be not only various basic applications, but also various special applications.

Although the spirit of the Internet is openness and sharing, the establishment of these special application websites requires a lot of cost.

These special applications provide value, and in the future they must rely on commercial operations to recover costs in order to achieve a good capital cycle.”

The applications launched by Orange Technology this time were all carefully selected by Liu Zhicheng. They were all the applications that were most likely to attract users in the early days of the Internet.

With the current number of computers in use, the scale of Internet users is greatly limited, and it is almost impossible to make money commercially.

Therefore, Liu Zhicheng simply launched the service as a free service to attract more users to the Internet as quickly as possible.

The fact that Orange Technology has launched so many application services this time actually means that it has assumed the function of an Internet content service provider.

Liu Zhicheng's determination did not stop there. Huo Haiqing let the participants digest the application services he mentioned for a while, and then continued:
"I just said that we are willing to invite elites who are interested in Internet application development to jointly develop various applications. This is not just a casual remark.
In order to support the development of application development, we at Orange Technology will establish a public data center, in which Orange Technology will continue to invest in computers and storage devices.

We will provide these computers and storage devices to application developers. If you have any good ideas for Internet application development, you can implement them on the computers we provide.

This data center, like the Internet access service and Internet application service we mentioned earlier, is also free for the time being.

But again, when it matures in the later stage, we can’t rule out the possibility of charging for commercialization.”

The purpose of Huo Haiqing saying this was to lay the groundwork for charging fees in the future.

In fact, it is the Idc service of later generations, which provides hardware resource leasing and hosting services to various software developers.

If they never charge any fees, no matter how rich Orange Technology is, it will have no choice but to close down.

In order to attract Internet enthusiasts, Orange Technology is still free for the time being.

In fact, many scholars have their own ideas and concepts about the application of the Internet.

However, it is difficult for them to turn these ideas into actual application products because they cannot afford the high development costs and subsequent operating costs.

Now that Orange Technology is launching a free Idc service, it will be like another timely help for these scholars. What they will face is another round of detailed inquiries and cooperation applications.

Huo Haiqing's speech completely changed the style of the seminar, transforming it from a theoretical discussion to a pragmatic discussion on the Internet promotion plan.

Almost all the participants showed a positive and welcoming attitude towards the plans proposed by Huo Haiqing, and some even wanted to finalize the cooperation intention and sign a cooperation agreement with Juzi Technology on the spot.

Orange Technology almost single-handedly assumes the three important roles of ISP\ICP\IDC.

It is impossible for them not to welcome the series of plans launched by Orange Technology. It is equivalent to Orange Technology independently supporting the Hong Kong Metropolitan Area Network, which gives the Hong Kong Metropolitan Area Network a complete structure.

Whether they are majoring in communications or computers, as long as these scholars actively participate in this process, they will be able to write more papers and enhance Hong Kong's influence on the Internet.

(End of this chapter)