Roberto Blois
Deputy Secretary-General
International Telecommunication Union

ITU Opening press conference
at ITU TELECOM AMERICAS 2005

11:00, Monday 3 October 2005
Bahia Convention Centre, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen

It is a great pleasure to welcome you all to ITU TELECOM AMERICAS 2005. Allow me to say how pleased I am that you were able to join us today in this beautiful city of Salvador da Bahia.

ITU TELECOM exhibitions and forums are the world’s pre-eminent international information and communications technology events.

Conceived as a service to ITU’s global membership, we strive to hold these events in each of the world’s five major regions on a regular, rotating basis. Many of you will be aware, however, that is our first event in the Americas region since the year 2000.

This long gap is explained by the economic crisis that befell our proposed host country, Argentina, immediately prior to our planned 2002 event. After five years away from the region, I can only say how delighted we are to be back, and how excited we are to see the many new developments that have transformed the local telecommunications landscape.

The organization of ITU TELECOM events is an important part of ITU’s role. These events bring together the most influential representatives from government and the telecommunications industry, promoting the exchange of ideas, knowledge and new technologies for the benefit of the global community, and in particular the developing world.

The ITU TELECOM event was born in 1971. Exhibitions were combined with a Forum so that the event not only served as a showcase for the latest equipment and services, but as a platform for pinpointing industry trends and sharing information, and for fostering knowledge transfer to less developed countries.

At this year’s exhibition we are delighted to welcome some of the region’s biggest players, including Cisco, Huawei, HP, Nokia, Qualcomm and ZTE, along with a host of smaller, innovative companies who will be showcasing the very latest in new systems and services.

As always, this ITU TELECOM also comprises a Forum, at which more than 120 speakers from over 30 countries will share their views and help us build a vision of the future of telecommunications in this region, and around the world.

As I mentioned just now, AMERICAS 2005 is ITU’s first event in this part of the world for five years. In that short space of time, the Americas region has undergone an extraordinary transformation to become one of the world’s most exciting markets for telecommunications products and services.

At the ITU TELECOM event we’re inaugurating here today, you’ll all have a chance to see first-hand the many advances that have been made in the five years since ITU TELECOM AMERICAS 2000.

Let’s take a brief moment now to look the trends shaping the region overall - and what still needs to be done to help all countries of the Americas reach their full potential.

Put simply, the spread of ICTs in the region since 2000 has been dramatic and impressive, especially in the South, in Central America and in the Caribbean.

The sector itself has also undergone considerable change, with former monopoly markets now largely open to competition. By late last year, almost three quarters of incumbent operators across the region had been fully or partially privatized, while nearly half of all countries had competitive fixed line markets.

Mobile and Internet markets are even more vigorously contested, with 75% of all mobile markets and a full 90% of ISP markets now open to multiple players.

In terms of growth, the real success story is of course mobile. In just five years, the number of cellular subscribers has almost tripled, from 128 million in 1999 to 374 million at the end of 2004. Here in Brazil, the market has grown at an average of 34 percent per year to become the region's second largest — and the world’s 6th largest — cellular market by number of subscribers.

Right across the region, mobile growth has largely been the result of market liberalization, which has helped spur network investment and new service launches while keeping prices down. Prepaid subscriptions and Calling Party Pays pricing models have also been important in helping extend access to less affluent communities.

In the area of mobile data, 3G services and new value-added multimedia services, such as the TV-over-mobile offerings recently launched here in Brazil, are now offering fresh fields for growth for operators in a continent where mobile has long overtaken fixed as the network of choice.

But if the picture is optimistic, much nonetheless remains to be done — particularly in promoting further deployment of new technologies that can help overcome the geographic constraints that have curbed fixed access, and in extending access to disadvantaged populations and under-developed nations.

The Americas is a continent of contrasts, and it can be all too easy to forget, gathered here today in one of Latin America’s most beautiful resorts, that this continent is also home to nations which rank among the world’s least connected countries.

In Bolivia, for example, only seven percent of the population has a fixed telephone subscription. In Nicaragua, less than three percent of people have access to the Internet. In Honduras, only one in 10 people has a cellphone. Contrast that with ICT levels in North America, where average teledensity hovers at around 60 percent, where close to two thirds of all people regularly access online services, and where mobile cellular density is now beginning to approach European levels.

These figures show that much more effort is needed in some parts of the continent if we are to ensure that Latin America achieves the high levels of productivity and sustained economic growth that should be the fruit of the Information Society.

In today’s world, ICTs are a fundamental part of basic infrastructure, and access to the information and communications services they provide is as essential to social and economic development as access to clean water, electricity or transport services.

The need to reach out to the planet’s most under-served communities — to finally connect the one billion people worldwide who remain entirely unconnected from any kind of ICT — was the driving force behind ITU’s launch earlier this year of a new development initiative called Connect the World.

Connect the World aims to bring together leading manufacturers, telcos, governments and inter-governmental agencies, UN organizations and a broad cross-section of civil society. By limiting membership to organizations that have an active involvement in successful ICT development projects, Connect the World strives to create a multistakeholder development community, where partners can draw on one another’s’ strengths, experience and cooperation to strengthen and scale-up existing activities and forge new partnerships and projects.

Connect the World, like ITU TELECOM events themselves, are part of ITU’s ongoing commitment to promoting telecommunication development and helping the world communicate.

Thank you.