ITU, UNESCO Launch Digital Development Commission

The economic crisis means that achieving all Millennium Development Goals “will be near-to-impossible,” said Supachai Panitchpakdi, secretary-general of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development. Followup this week to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) came midway between the 2005 summit and the target of 2015 for reaching its goals.

"We stand no chance of fulfilling” the “promises made at the turn of the millennium if we do not harness the power of ICTs,” ITU Secretary General Hamadoun Toure said. At least 161 national economies, 84 percent, have already met the WSIS targets for adopting an ICT strategy, he said.

The first decade of the millennium was dominated by mobile growth, Toure told reporters, but broadband, especially in mobile, will dominate the second. Mobile cellular subscriptions will top 5 billion this year, Toure said. The forecast was also made by Gabriel Solomon, a senior vice president at GSMA. Seventy-five percent of the world’s population has no Internet service, Toure said.

A broadband commission for digital development was launched by ITU and UNESCO. The plan was discussed at the Mobile World Congress in February (CD Feb 25 p14). The commission will be led by Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Carlos Slim Helu, a Mexican telecom investor ranked by Forbes as the world’s richest person. The U.S. in 2000 brought a World Trade Organization complaint against Mexico claiming in part that its regulator hadn’t prevented Slim’s Telmex from engaging in anti-competitive practices. A dispute panel ruled that Mexico had failed to ensure cost-oriented international interconnection rates, to prevent anti-competitive practices by major telecom firms and to ensure reasonable and non-discriminatory access to and use of telecom networks, the WTO website says. The Mexican Federal Competition Commission has nearly completed the findings of an investigation into market dominance by Telmex and Telcel, said a trade report this year by the U.S. Trade Representative. Telmex has opposed increasing opportunities for foreign providers to compete for part of its 90 percent share of the local telephony market, it said.

Barriers to technology and the Internet should be removed by governments, Slim told reporters in a recorded message. Countries need to have universal broadband service, he said, with access for all families to health, education and government services. All countries should support broadband development, Slim said.

Toure said governments need to view broadband as basic national infrastructure. Universal access to broadband-enabled applications is vital for creating “knowledge societies,” said Abdul Waheed Khan, a UNESCO assistant director-general, by delivering quality education, sharing of scientific knowledge, increasing social cohesion and promoting cultural diversity.

The commission’s key aim is to accelerate progress toward reaching the Millennium Development Goals through the introduction of ubiquitous broadband access, its website said. The commission will define practical ways that countries can achieve it by working with business, the website said.

The chiefs of Ericsson, Telefonica, Bharti Airtel Bharti Enterprises, U.N. agencies and government ministries are among the commission’s 22 members. The group will meet this year and deliver findings in September to the U.N. secretary general for a summit to review progress on reaching the Millennium Development Goals, the ITU said. A separate analysis will look at the challenges and opportunities in deploying broadband nationally and offer up practical recommendations on ways to spur high-speed networks at affordable prices, ITU said.

"We hope that by the end of this process, every single country will have a national broadband initiative and a national broadband policy,” Toure said. “There is a need for a new financing mechanism to be put in place” to pay for broadband networks, he said.