Luxembourg has successfully embraced the IT revolution while strengthening its position in the media sector linked to the long-term presence of two home grown European giants in the field, namely RTL Group in media and SES in satellite transmissions. Other multimedia and telecommunications companies have since followed suit, leading to the growth of Luxembourg's vibrant and closely-knit ICT network.

 

With its first-class infrastructures and telecommunication networks, as well as a culture of trust and security reflected by an appropriate legal framework, Luxembourg thrives as the ideal place to serve as a global hub for the distribution of digital audiovisual content, such as music downloads, video-on-demand, pay TV and digital radio and television transmissions.

 

Home to the 'stars' of the ICT sector, Luxembourg hosts Amazon, iTunes, eBay, PayPal, Vodafone, RealNetworks, Rakuten, Skype and many other ICT companies which elected the Grand Duchy as a platform to access worldwide markets. Having a listening and responsive government has played an important role in all these establishments. For example, seeing that the private sector supply may not keep pace with demand, the government is backing the Luxconnect fibre optics project which will guarantee that local players have all the bandwidth they need to serve their clients. Equipped with fully redundant backbone connections to Paris, Frankfurt, Brussels, London etc., a first rate supply of data centres and a range of business incubators, the infrastructure is now in place to allow e-commerce to thrive.

 

ICT expertise has also helped other sectors. For example, the requirement for banks to keep their data safe has seen the growth of sophisticated data centres and business continuity facilities.

 

Since 2005 Luxembourg has been the first country in the European union, with a national Public Key Infrastructure (LuxTrust PKI, a private company), providing online certification (based on qualified certificates) both for e-government applications and for the private sector (e-banking, e-commerce, etc). These electronic certificates address the companies (professional certificates for B2B) and the citizens (private certificates for the B2C) and allow both of them to use legal online authentication and work with an internationally recognized electronic signature.

 

Furthermore, this ICT know-how has been an important factor for the biotech industry which, too, relies on confidentiality of medical data.