Not long ago at an important ITU Development Conference in Buenos Aires, US Vice President Al Gore spoke for the first time of his vision of a ‘global information infrastructure’ made possible by rapidly increasing computer power, ever more sophisticated software, and ever faster telecommunications technologies.

"...We now have at hand," he declared, "the technological breakthroughs and economic means to bring all the communities in the world together. We now can at last create a planetary information network that transmits messages and images with the speed of light from the largest city to the smallest village on every continent. This information network will be a means by which families and friends will transcend the barriers of time and distance...and it will make possible a global information marketplace, where consumers can buy and sell products."

Gore’s arresting concept of a new, global information infrastructure captured the imagination of the world. Ordinary people imagined new worlds of information accessible from their desktops; social theorists saw a way of breaking down barriers between rich and poor; governments in remote and marginalized economies dreamed of a way of overcoming the tyranny of distance and chronic lack of funds for education; IT and telecoms equipment manufacturers envisaged booming new markets; and telecoms carriers anticipated a flood of new traffic across their networks. The GII truly offered something for everyone.

Several years on, national governments have moved beyond mere dreams of a new way of accessing information and doing business. A great many countries now have nationally-defined, tangible GII programmes incorporating implementation dates for new digital services and clearly defined goals and objectives.

While visions of the GII vary enormously from country to country and organization, there are several key elements which most seems to agree on. For a start, the networks and services which will make up the fabric of the GII will be mostly digital.

These new networks will also incorporate some native intelligence – that is, they will depend largely on software for their functionality, and will be able to be reprogrammed to dynamically meet changing demands.

The types of services which run over the GII will also be different. Heavily based on interactive applications, the networks of the future will need to carry information in many different formats – no longer just plain old voice and data, but images, voice and picture e-mail, real-time video and audio clips.

At the centre of global planning for the new information infrastructure is the International Telecommunication Union, the specialized agency of the United Nations concerned with development and harmonization of the world’s telecommunications networks.

Telecommunications network and user equipment is developed and implemented in many different ways around the world, for perfectly legitimate reasons. Different traffic and usage patterns or geographical features mean that particular countries may have very special requirements of their telecommunications networks.

However, national networks rapidly lose their usefulness if they cannot incorporate a range of equipment from different manufacturers, and, in the dawning age of globalization, connect with networks and systems in use in other countries around the world.

The telecommunications industry was quick to realize the crucial importance of interconnectivity – indeed, the need for international interconnection was the driving force prompting the creation of the ITU way back in 1865.

Achieving inter-network connectivity requires coordination at a central level, with cooperation by all players, from equipment makers and network designers to telecommunications operators. For the telecommunications industry, the central coordinating body has always been the ITU. This Geneva based organization, which now boasts a worldwide membership of 188 governments and more than 500 public and private organizations, has steadily fostered the growth and implementation of a huge range of new services all around the world, from standard voice telephony and radiocommunications to the deployment of the world’s first communications satellites.

For the ITU, global telecommunications development means global standardization. Through an ongoing Study Group programme, experts from the private and public sectors meet regularly to forge the specifications for emerging new technologies, ensuring that they can interoperate the same way the world over and are able to integrate seamlessly with the communications networks already in place.

For the GII to be truly revolutionary in its capabilities, it needs to be much more than simply a bigger or faster telecommunications network. It will need to cope with changing patterns of telecommunications use, support new types of signals and protocols, and, most importantly, address issues of basic access for the world’s population.

While the construction of today’s vast telecommunication infrastructure is an enormous human achievement, it remains an unfortunate fact that use of telecommunications has tended to be restricted to the affluent portion of the world’s population. The ITU estimates that something like half the world’s people still do not have regular access to a simple telephone, and that a significant proportion of these have lived all their lives without ever having made a telephone call.

Nick Negroponte, IT guru and director of MIT’s Media Lab, confesses his shock at discovering that more than 100,000 villages in China do not have any telephone, and that in parts of Africa the situation could be considered to be even worse. "I have [recently] been involved with starting a foundation, the purpose of which is to bring computers and net access to kids in the 100 poorest nations of this world. Teledensities [are around] 88, 87 in Sweden. In Africa – if you leave South Africa out of the equation – the number's two. Two isn't bad if you look at rural parts of Africa – suddenly it's .001. The numbers are absolutely startling."

For the GII to live up to its promise, it cannot be allowed to develop as yet another ‘rich man’s system’. The word ‘global’ implies more than the simple spanning of geographic distance, it implies the involvement and interaction of all the world’s people and cultures.

ITU standardization activities are carried out through its three Sectors – Telecommunication Standardization (ITU-T), Radiocommunication (ITU-R) and Development (ITU-D). Recognizing the importance of impartial, globally accepted standards as building blocks of the GII, the ITU has initiated a project-based approach to GII standardization and has agreed on the principles and framework architecture of the GII. In addition, ITU-T Study Group 13 has been appointed Lead Study Group for overall project management, responsible not only for developing its own sets of Recommendations, but for coordinating input from other study groups and a wide range of external organizations.

The ITU has proved itself responsive to industry needs by rapidly developing a number of standards which cover new technologies which are likely to act as fundamental in building up the network fabric of the GII. For example, the emergence of new technologies like Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Internet Protocol (IP), which lie at the heart of many of today’s high-speed computer networks, have already prompted the development of new ITU Recommendations and the modification of some existing ones.

The ITU views its role of promoting greater access to telecommunications systems, and particularly the newly emerging GII, just as important as its technical work in the area of standardization. The organization continues to contribute to the formation of policy and strategic planning initiatives which promote the GII as a global information resource which all the world’s people can, and must share.

The development of a GII raises many complex issues in the area of telecommunications regulation. Diana Lady Dougan, a member of the US-sponsored Global Information Infrastructure Commission, speaks of these problems, and the need for the involvement of international organizations to solve them. "Issues of access, basic dial tone in poor and remote areas, incompatible standards, intertwined subsidies, licensing and trade barriers are just a few of the long list of concerns which continue to plague both entrepreneurs and policy makers," she says. "The time has come to forge a new construct for public and private sector cooperation which goes beyond traditional national and bilateral frameworks. Clearly, part of this can be done under the auspices of key multilateral organizations such as the ITU . . . "

Network technologies

The network transmission system known as Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) will be one of the most important elements of the emerging GII. This new-generation technology increases the usable bandwidth in telecommunications networks and allows them to be flexibly reconfigured to adapt to changing traffic loads and user demands. Under SDH, network intelligence will be ‘decentralized’ across the network, which will also be better able to handle different types of traffic travelling at different speeds. As well as supporting network reconfiguration ‘on-the-fly’, SDH can also greatly improve ‘network fill’ by more efficiently packing traffic into the available bandwidth.

The ITU has already developed a wide range of standards for SDH, covering system operation and architectures, the performance and management capabilities of SDH networks and their interfaces, SDH multiplexing equipment and international interconnection between SDH and the older PDH networks.

Improved network management will also be an important future consideration because of the increasing complexity of equipment and the need to integrate an ever-widening range of maintenance routines as new types of equipment is added to the network.

To address this issue, the ITU standardized the Telecommunications Management Network model back in 1988, and continues to upgrade it to meet the needs of the world’s evolving network technologies. The Union is also working on Human Computer Interfaces to deal with the complex task of managing the large global networks which will be intrinsic to proper functioning of the GII. Development of these new interfaces will address the need for large amounts of real-time user interaction with the network, and the possible threats to security and network performance that it could pose.

User interfaces

Speak of user interfaces to the GII, and most people immediately think of the Internet and the World Wide Web. While it’s a little premature to say that the Internet already is the GII, it’s undoubtedly true that for today’s user this vast network of networks is the closest embodiment we yet have of the dream of an easily accessible global system capable of providing a wealth of information at the click of a mouse. Indeed, the phenomenal growth in Internet use over the last five years provides an excellent indication of future demand for GII-based services.

In addition to standard ‘point-and-click’ Internet surfing, Nick Negroponte predicts that the market and applications for systems making use of Internet protocol addresses is set to explode in the next five years. " . . . I'm going to have at least a 100 or couple 100 things that'll have Internet protocol or IP addresses. And the things that will start appearing on the net will at first be things like cameras. There're already over 50,000 cameras connected to the Internet that you can log into and see what that camera sees. Something as simple as that will start to account for a very large number of items on the Internet. [And] if you start putting Internet addresses and Internet circuitry into toys, you're going to have a flow into the home that is much, much more compatible with the rate of change and the speed at which the net is changing."

The ITU is currently involved in a number of projects to reflection and recognition of the importance of IP in today's networks, including telecom networks. Several ITU study groups are now examining aspects of Internet protocol-based networks such as multimedia over IP, interaction between Web-based services and the PSTN and ISDN services, end-to-end interoperability and security, billing systems, IP addressing, naming systems and the use of IP in mobile and satellite networks.

The ITU also has a presence on the administrative committees concerned with Internet governance, and this management role, combined with the technical work currently being undertaken within the Union’s three Sectors, will ensure that the ITU will continue to play a key role in shaping the future of this exciting information resource.

Multimedia

Some of the ITU’s greatest recent milestones involve standards developed to facilitate delivery of multimedia traffic – one of the principal components of tomorrow’s GII.

Under the leadership of ITU-T Study Group 16, the ITU is currently working in the areas of specification of service requirements, infrastructure components, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and tools and operational procedures needed to bring fast multimedia to the average computer desktop. Standardized sound and image formats such as JPEG and ITU H.262/H.222.0 (corresponding to MPEG) will help application developers to ensure consistent performance and interoperability with products from other manufacturers.

In addition, the first version of H.323, the ITU Recommendation covering voice, data and video traffic over IP networks, was approved in 1996, and has already met with enormous enthusiasm from the industry, including leading players such as Microsoft, Intel and Netscape.

This crucial standard, which was reviewed and updated earlier this year, seems certain to become the foundation of Internet telephony as well as of a wide range of other interactive applications which combine audio, video and text.

The ITU has also developed important standards in the areas of signal processing, multimedia terminals, pcm (56k) modems and on-line security, and continues to work on new standards in all these areas to keep pace with the best new developments from within the industry.

Radio and Satellite Systems

The ITU already plays a vital role in management of the world’s radio frequency spectrum, an increasingly scarce resource due to the rapid development and popularity of a wide range of mobile communication systems.

Over the last three years, the Union has also worked to facilitate the development of new kinds of satellite systems which will almost certainly represent an important component of the future global information infrastructure.

Generally known generically (if not always accurately) as LEOs (for Low Earth Obit), these Global Mobile Personal Communications by Satellite (GMPCS) systems are due to come on-line progressively over the five years, offering not only mobile voice and data services from almost anywhere on the surface of the planet, but also multimedia and so-called ‘Internet in the Sky’ capabilities. GMPCS systems may also one day be used to deliver broadcasting applications such as interactive television and point-casting.

Nick Negroponte also sees great potential for these new kinds of satellites in bringing telecommunications-based services such as distance learning to underprivileged children in developing countries. "[Using lower orbiting satellites] means that at any point in time, wherever you are on this Earth, you can see a satellite. And that means that you can basically have a single handset that will be useable all over the world. That gives you a chance to suddenly look at the planet a little more globally and provide to schools the kind of access they don't have today."