This in particular will encourage video-conferencing, helping to reduce both business and family travel".
Users know it as a global network of email, chatrooms, information exchange, music downloads, video-conferencing and more, without worrying about where it all comes from or how it gets to us.
Further afield, the British embassy in Buenos Aires cut its emissions by 33% in a year, with a 25.6% reduction coming through much greater use of video conferencing instead of flights.
They're now at work on a fresh venture, a video-conferencing application called Airtime, which seeks to pair up strangers who have similar interests.
There, having launched the construction of Asia's largest airport and completed the world's two tallest buildings (but not, alas, the world's longest, whose construction has, not surprisingly, been postponed), Dr Mahathir will conduct the world's first virtual cabinet meeting using the latest video-conferencing technology.
The costs of equipment, software and support have put off some small businesses from investing in video conferencing.
NOBODY was surprised at the growth in audio, video and web-based conferencing after the terrorist attacks of 2001.
The software giant's interest is an endorsement of the technology, but if it bundles conferencing into its Windows operating system smaller vendors could get wiped out.
Along with business conferencing, idle chit-chat and dating, peer-to-peer gaming might also become commonplace.
Business fliers are increasingly finding themselves travelling in economy class and sleeping on the cheap, developments which can only add to the lure of the video-conferencing suite.
The quality of video conferencing provided through, say, Cisco's TelePresence system is orders of magnitude better real-time, good picture quality, extremely reliabetter real-times available even a few years agood
