Telecom draws close to 'utopia' of universal access

Geneva - Despite the enduring slump in communications and information technology, the sector is "getting closer to the utopia of universal access," the secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union, Yoshio Utsumi, told the organization's quadrennial Telecom World 2003 show here last week. And the main opportunity for a rebound, he said, is coming from lower-income and developing countries around the world.

"Pent-up demand, simpler equipment and more affordable communication services are dovetailing with a regulatory and economic framework that makes doing business possible where it would not have been imaginable a few years ago," said Utsumi.

The prolonged downturn has prompted soul-searching in the global communications and information technology industries, he said. Indeed, the ITU itself is attempting to come to terms with the hammering the sector has taken since the show last convened in 1999, and "trying to understand what went wrong," Utsumi said.

Sounding an upbeat note, the secretary general said that despite the slump, fixed-line networks grew by 7.5 percent per year worldwide since 1999, or 306 million extra lines, while mobile networks grew by 28.3 percent each year, with an additional 840 million subscribers since the last Telecom World, bringing the total up to nearly 1.1billion subscribers.

Rules for data

Meanwhile, in advanced countries, big issues facing leading telecom operators include how to enable broadband capabilities on mobile networks and how best to structure the new "rules of the data world" vs. rules of the traditional voice world, observed Nikesh Arora, board member of T-Mobile International AG & Co.

Speaking at a keynote session titled "Reconnect," Arora acknowledged the new skepticism about broadband on mobile nets, especially after the industry has spent more than $100 billion on third-generation cellular licenses in Europe alone. However, he assured the industry that broadband on mobile "is a phenomenon [that's] here to stay."

Sean Maloney, executive vice president and general manager of Intel Corp.'s communications group, concurred, suggesting that Wi-Fi communications capabilities and their "grown-up" brother, Wi-Max, which is capable of high data rates at up to 70 km, "will be the means to connect the 500 million people who cannot get broadband access through other means, such as DSL. It is an amazing opportunity and we see many companies and countries already laying the foundations for this," Maloney said.

The Intel executive also called on governments everywhere to free up chunks of the spectrum under 1 GHz so that communities in the developing world can take advantage of the wireless broadband explosion in a cost-effective way.

Meanwhile, facing the saturation of voice traffic, the drive to create new nonvoice services is even more intense and pressing for operators in Japan. Keiji Tachikawa, president and chief executive officer of NTT Docomo, laid out his company's goal to increase its nonvoice traffic, currently 20 percent of its business, to 70 to 80 percent by 2010.

In achieving this goal, Tachikawa said that he sees an opportunity to create a much broader customer base for future mobile services, including "humans, machines, PCs, refrigerators, sensors, automobile and pets, like dogs and cats.

"We want to enable mobile communication services for anything that can move or is portable," Tachikawa said. "New services should include not only person-to-person for cell phone and video phone applications, but also person-to-machine for browsing the Internet, and machine-to-machine for remote-control applications."