This is an announcement for the paper "A lower bound for the equilateral number of normed spaces" by Konrad J Swanepoel and Rafael Villa. Abstract: We show that if the Banach-Mazur distance between an n-dimensional normed space X and ell infinity is at most 3/2, then there exist n+1 equidistant points in X. By a well-known result of Alon and Milman, this implies that an arbitrary n-dimensional normed space admits at least e^{c sqrt(log n)} equidistant points, where c>0 is an absolute constant. We also show that there exist n equidistant points in spaces sufficiently close to n-dimensional ell p (1 < p < infinity). Archive classification: Metric Geometry; Functional Analysis Mathematics Subject Classification: 46B04 (Primary); 46B20, 52A21, 52C17 (Secondary) Remarks: 5 pages The source file(s), equilateral-lower3.tex: 14633 bytes, is(are) stored in gzipped form as 0603614.gz with size 5kb. The corresponding postcript file has gzipped size 39kb. Submitted from: swanekj@unisa.ac.za The paper may be downloaded from the archive by web browser from URL http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/math.MG/0603614 or http://arXiv.org/abs/math.MG/0603614 or by email in unzipped form by transmitting an empty message with subject line uget 0603614 or in gzipped form by using subject line get 0603614 to: math@arXiv.org.