17 June 2010 - Speech by Mr Lui Tuck Yew, Acting Minister for Information, Communications and The Arts, at the Launch of the Infocomm Experience Centre (iExperience) on 17 June 2010, 2.30 pm
Speech by Mr Lui Tuck Yew, Acting Minister for Information, Communications and The Arts, at the Launch of the Infocomm Experience Centre (iExperience) on 17 June 2010, 2.30 pm
Mr Arthur Fong, MICA GPC Member,
Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Good afternoon,
1. I am delighted to join all of you here today for the opening of the Infocomm Experience Centre, or iExperience in short.
2. Many people have asked questions as to what the Nationwide Broadband Network is about. "Should I allow these people to enter my home to fix up this infrastructure? What benefits will I get from bringing on board this NBN? What services will ride on it? How will it change my life?" Well, the iExperience centre provides some of the answers to the questions that have been asked. It is a joint IDA-industry collaboration, to showcase some of the many services that will ride on the Next Generation Nationwide Broadband Network, or Next Gen NBN. It is on track to be deployed nationwide by 2012 and we can look forward to island-wide ultra-high speed broadband access of up to 1Gbps and beyond. This infrastructure and services it carries should transform the way we live, work, learn and interact in the years to come.
3. The interactive and engaging exhibits at iExperience seek to inform, to excite and to inspire visitors with the exciting possibilities that will be made available with Next Generation infocomm services. The exhibits will be updated regularly to showcase new and emerging applications and services that are being developed and introduced.
4. Let me highlight some examples of how consumers and businesses can benefit from our future Next Gen infocomm services.
5. The interactive Internet Protocol television, or IPTV, will offer consumers innovative services such as personalised healthcare and immersive e-learning delivered through their television sets located in their homes. IPTV will also provide consumers with high definition entertainment programmes at their finger tips as well as real-time information and access to common e-government services as and when they require it.
6. Companies can re-engineer their businesses, how they distribute their personnel, how they manage their resources, how they manage their services, as the ultra-high speed connectivity will make it more convenient and faster for companies to engage in real-time face-to-face communication with their local and overseas clients. And this can be done through high definition video conferencing. IDA and the Ministry of Manpower are also looking at how they can leverage on the Next Gen NBN to possibly increase the number of home-based jobs where more employees will have greater flexibility to work from home, and where homemakers can consider how they can participate or rejoin the workforce and yet allow them sufficient time to be at home with their loved ones.
7. The Singapore Education Service is also harnessing the power of infocomm to transform the learning experience for our students. One of the exhibits features a future classroom, where the use of a Classroom Management System enables students to learn from home or to share and interact with their classmates and teachers at the same time. The 'Future Classroom' will also allow parents to be more actively involved in, and to better monitor their child's progress in school. Some of these are already happening in our schools and the demo is in fact, based on a recent deployment in Crescent Girls School, a participating school in MOE's FutureSchools@Singapore programme.
8. Speaking of Crescent Girls School, I remember visiting the school when I was in MOE. Watching a demo in the classroom, it was the first time I experienced what it was like to be in a Future Classroom. The entire class was using tablet PCs, and when I stepped into the classroom, they were in the process of running a quiz. In many schools, in times past, the way you run a quiz, you hand out a piece of paper, that would take a few minutes, students will read the questions, you put down your answers and it gets collected. The teacher will spend ten minutes trying to mark it, grade it, find out how the students are doing and so on.
9. As I sat in the classroom, I could see what the future classroom could be like. She downloaded the questions within two minutes, which the students had completed, and within 30 seconds, she was able to display the consolidated answers of how the students had performed, who was fastest, who had gotten the most answers correct, which question was the most difficult. All these in a space of ten minutes, she managed to get feedback on how the students were performing. She spent the rest of the lesson running through the quiz, with the students, engaging them, and it was truly a very efficient use of time and space. This is but one of the possibilities in such a classroom and I am sure there are many other innovative ways in which they can use such infrastructure and introduce more services. And so, I think the education service will possibly be able to benefit significantly as we roll out the NGNBN throughout Singapore.
10. The potential that the Next Gen NBN offers is only going to be limited by our imagination. We know that IDA has already introduced Calls-for-Proposal, and they have selected seven for the first round. Later this year, they will introduce yet another round for Calls-for-Proposals so that more companies have the opportunity to dream up new services, new applications, new innovations that over time, we may be able to introduce over the NGNBN. So I think this is but a start of a very exciting journey that will transform the way Singaporeans interact, live and play in the years to come. It is now my pleasure to declare iExperience open.
11. Thank you.
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