HONOLULU - Yoshio Utsumi, Secretary General of the International Telecommunications Union, last week announced the timetable for an international telecommunications summit series to be held in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin American, and Asia. The Geneva telecommunications regulatory agency is a major technology development organization for the United Nations.
Utsumi made his remarks at the opening of the Pacific Telecommunications Council annual meeting, "PTC 2002: Next Generation Communications" held in Waikiki. The PTC is a 22-year-old international association of 730 member companies or professionals that works to bring together telecommunications interests throughout the Pacific hemisphere. The PTC's meetings are often the site of policy-level interactions of technical communities on both sides of the Pacific and internationally.
Responding to concerns by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the United Nations will co-sponsor the summit meetings, which will be hosted by national governments. Annan had previously noted the worldwide digital divide holding back international development. He pointed out there are more computers in the U.S. than all of the rest of the world and that there are as many telephones in Tokyo as in all of Africa. The ITU response is expected to be a catalyst for global information and communications technology development.
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The "World Summit on the Information Society" meetings will begin in Switzerland in 2003, with the next in 2005 in Tunisia. Though not yet officially announced, two years later the next meeting will be in Asia, probably Japan. There is also interest in a Latin America meeting, reportedly in Chile. These telecommunications summit meetings will set policy and serve as an economic stimulus for global markets for the next decade. Planning meetings will begin this summer in Geneva.
China "informatization" proceeds quickly
Another significant presence at the PTC was Wu Jichuan of China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII). The MII is a "super-agency" beyond U.S. models, combining developmental and regulatory authority, overseeing postal, broadcasting, satellite, telecommunication and Internet activities in public and private sectors.
Now that China is joining the World Trade Organization and playing a larger global role - and because Asian political sensibilities concerning Taiwan have been addressed by the sponsoring organization - Wu participated in the PTC for the first time. An engineer and former technology professor, Wu reports that China now has 179 million wireline telephone subscribers in China, second largest in the world after the United States. Internet users are over 30 million.
Wu also reiterated the Chinese view that while global telecommunications technologies, especially the Internet, represent opportunity, they also pose problems for local cultural diversity and traditions. He noted that 90% of Internet content is in English. To enhance and protect its cultural base, China is digitally archiving cultural artifacts and is developing a digital character set for electronic media.
Daniel Brody, of the U.S. Information Technology Office of Beijing, further provided an update on the China market from a U.S. perspective. He reports that last year there was $110.8 billion invested in telecommunications in China. Brody emphasized the dramatic growth of wireless subscribers, now 140 million, with 5 million new subscribers a month.
Telecommunications company consolidation is proceeding in China as well. Privatization of wireless and wireline companies has led to moves to shake out the vendors down to two major regional providers which have not yet been merged together from the current vendors, one each serving the two groupings of northern and southern provinces.
Dr. Jay Gillette is Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at Ball State University and Director of its Human Factors Institute. He has written extensively on information technologies and policy, and previously worked as a program manager at Bellcore (now Telcordia Technologies). He can be reached at jgillett@bsu.edu
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