The final year of the last millennium
was a very important one for ITU.
As the industry we have helped build and nurture over more than 135 years continues to evolve at a dizzying pace, so too our own organization is rapidly reinventing itself
to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

New reform programmes, now well underway, are transforming ITU into a highly responsive international forum capable of delivering its products with the timeliness expected in today’s dynamic environment. We’ve already come a long way in terms of reforming traditional functions like technical standardization or management of the world’s increasingly scarce radio frequency resources, dramatically improving delivery times for core products and implementing more equitable costrecovery systems. While we can applaud these efforts, a good deal more work is needed to ensure ITU keeps pace with the changes which continue to reshape the world around it.

At the same time, ITU is taking important new policy initiatives in fields ranging from e-commerce and IP networking to fixed-mobile interconnect. In the realm of the Internet, the interdependence between IP and public switched networks has prompted the development of a wide range of standards aimed at facilitating end-to-end delivery of multimedia services in a converged environment. The Union also concluded an agreement with the Internet Engineering Task Force to cooperatively develop technical specifications with a view to meeting market demand within the shortest possible timescales.

In the field of telecommunications development, 1999 was a year of remarkable achievement. We played a key role in new initiatives to bring vital services such as telemedicine, tele-education and e-commerce to people throughout the developing world. At the same time, we worked closely with governments and industry to extend access to telecommunications through new community telecentres. We also helped many countries fulfill their commitments under the World Trade Organization agreement on basic telecommunications, and we continue to work with others now preparing to make future commitments. In Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Sri Lanka and in eight countries in southern Africa, we worked closely with government to help set up independent regulatory authorities. At the same time, we helped another 14 countries reform their telecommunication sectors. And in Africa, the Americas and Asia Pacific we continue to work with partners to develop four new Centres of Excellence, which will help national policy makers and regulators develop regulatory frameworks conducive to private investment.

Meanwhile, ITU’s active contribution to the development of mobile technologies has become the cornerstone of an industry which now boasts annual revenues exceeding US$230 billion. The agreement on ITU’s IMT-2000 standard in Helsinki in November was the culmination of years of development work, and is already paving the way towards exciting new third-generation cellular systems that will marry the convenience of mobile to the power of the Internet.

At the beginning of what can truly be called the Information Age, telecommunications systems are rapidly redefining the way we live and work. For ITU, the world’s increasing reliance on electronic communications, along with the rapid convergence of once-disparate networks, equipment and services, all translate into enormous challenges in the fields of both standardization and policy development. The need to meet the expectations of a new digital generation will continue to drive efforts to reform and refine ITU throughout the years ahead.

Yoshio Utsumi