Brussels, 20/11/2003 (Agence Europe) - France and the United Kingdom have proposed that Thursday's Telecommunications Council organise a Community round table on high bit rates. The aim will be to bring together all the economic actors in information society technologies (equipment manufacturers, network operators, internet providers, content producers and distributors) to identify the obstacles to speedy and secure development of high bit rate technology and work out common action to take for developing interactive services. During the press conference, Nicole Fontaine, French Minister of Industry, declared that this initiative had received the support of her colleagues and that it would probably be carried out in the first half of 2004 with the participation of the 25 Member States. This large scale European initiative, is the result of a Franco-British round table organised on 21 October in Paris by Ms Fontaine and Stephen Timms, British Minister for E-commerce. This round table allowed several success factors to be highlighted in relation to high bit rates, such as regulation stability and visibility, interoperability, user confidence in a secure informational technology infrastructure and safer internet use, and payment for intellectual property rights.