WRC Prep Still Lagging; Conference Scheduled for Next Year
Preparations for the World Radiocommunication Conference are lagging because of the COVID-19 pandemic, though in-person meetings are now happening, experts said at the NTIA’s Spectrum Policy Symposium Monday. WRC-23 is only 14 months away, starting at the Dubai World Trade Centre in the United Arab Emirates Nov. 20, 2023.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
“This has been a challenging cycle -- not a surprise to anyone, with COVID and trying to do things remotely,” said Glenn Feldhake, NASA international spectrum program manager. “At this point, we’re not as far as where I would normally think we would be,” he said.
“It has definitely created a new normal for us,” Feldhake said: “We’re doing pretty well, as best as we can, and we are back to in-person meetings with remote participation. But it’s going to be a new normal.” The WRC agenda has been more “science friendly” than in some past conferences, he said: “I’m not panicking yet.”
Jennifer Manner, EchoStar senior vice president-regulatory affairs, noted she just returned from a WRC prep meeting in Geneva: “We’re not as far as we should be, but we don’t have a choice." It’s important that in-person meetings are happening, she said: “If we were still remote … we would have never gotten to the conference preparatory text.”
The pandemic is “a global backdrop” to the WRC and “accelerated the need for telecommunications” and “the need to digitalize a lot of industries,” said Nokia's Grace Koh, U.S. ambassador to the last WRC. “We’re at a point where we’re actually connecting more things than people, and we’re starting to connect more industries,” she said.
The U.S. is “behind the curve” on proposals to the Inter-American Telecommunication Commission (CITEL), which coordinates regional positions, said HWG’s Tricia Paoletta, chair of the FCC’s WRC Advisory Committee. “We only have a handful of proposals where we’ve told our neighbors … this is what we want,” she said. “We don’t know yet where all the difficulties are going to lie,” she said: “We haven’t yet really tested the waters because we are so far behind.” CITEL countries “tend to listen to us,” but “they have their interests too and their own priorities,” she said.
With the ITU secretary-general vote less than two weeks away, at the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Bucharest, which starts Sept. 26, Doreen Bogdan-Martin urged more attention to the unconnected across the world. Bogdan-Martin, from the U.S., is head of the ITU Telecom Development Bureau and a leading candidate for secretary-general.
The past 30 months “have been tough, but if we have struggled, just imagine how much harder it has been for billions of people around the world still totally unconnected,” Bogdan-Martin said in video remarks. “We need to work hard to connect the unconnected, to build partnerships and collaborations to help deploy that connectivity,” she said.
The world needs an ITU “that excels as an institution and is hardwired for the future and responsive to the needs of member states,” Bogdan-Martin said. “The pandemic has left us in no doubt whatsoever about the critical importance of connectivity and communication to the lives and the livelihood of every person on this planet,” she said. By ITU’s latest estimates, one-third of the world is completely offline and hundreds of millions of others “are obliged to settle for digital access that’s far too slow, far too expensive or simply too hard to reach for it to play any meaningful role at all in improving their lives,” she said.