The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) are jointly holding a meeting of high-level experts to identify key trends and to address the new technological and policy challenges in the digital content delivery environment.

To view the ITU/EBU conference via webcam, click here.

More information about this meeting can be found here.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) will jointly organize a Meeting of High-Level Experts on “Competitive Platforms for the Delivery of Digital Content” to identify global trends and to address the new technological and policy challenges in the digital content delivery environment.

ITU Member States, EBU Membership, meeting participants and other interested parties are encouraged to send in their competitive platforms for digital content related contributions to the meeting at digitalcontent@itu.int

Click here to see the meeting agenda.

Onlline registration is available here.

Information about this meeting can be found here.

 

 

 

 

Under the aegis of the Shaping Tomorrow’s Networks Initiative and in line with the stated objectives of the WSIS Geneva Declaration of Principles (December 2003), which affirms “…the common desire and commitment to build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their quality of life…” the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) will jointly organize a Meeting of High-Level Experts on “Competitive Platforms for the Delivery of Digital Content” to identify global trends and to address the new technological and policy challenges in the digital content delivery environment.

ITU Member States, EBU Membership, meeting participants and other interested parties are encouraged to send in their competitive platforms for digital content related contributions to the meeting at digitalcontent@itu.int 

To register for the upcoming ITU/EBU Meeting of High-Level Experts on Competitive Platforms for the Delivery of Digital Content, please click here or contact Ms. Cristina Bueti at digitalcontent@itu.int

More information about this meeting is available here.

The 2nd WSIS Action Line C5 Facilitation Meeting, dedicated to building confidence and security in the use of ICTs, was held 14-15 May 2007 at ITU Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. The meeting was open to all stakeholders and held in conjunction with a cluster of events 14-25 May surrounding World Telecommunication and Information Society Day (May 17th).

Full documentation for the meeting, including the final agenda, all presentations, meeting contributions, audio archives, is available on the event website.

Enquiries related to the event or generally with regards to ITU cybersecurity activities can be directed to cybersecurity@itu.int.

ITU and UNCTAD are delighted to announce the publication of the World Information Society Report 2007, published on 16 May 2007. The Report seeks to benchmark progress in meeting the WSIS targets, to be achieved by 2015 at the latest, and evaluates the evolution of the digital divide. It presents 200 pages of analysis of the latest trends in ICTs, exploring whether consumers are 'cutting the cord', the death of dial-up and growth in broadband and 3G. It evaluates the digital divide using a variety of techniques and finds that the strong growth of mobile telephony offers the greatest potential to bridge the digital divide.

Using the methodologies endorsed by the World Summit on the Information Society, it finds strong growth in digital opportunity around the world. Asian and European countries continue to lead in digital opportunity, but there are shining examples of strong progress in the take-up of ICTs in Africa - five of the ten top gainers in digital opportunity are African economies. Last year's World Information Society Report benchmarked the gender divide and regional divides. This year's Report uses the Digital Opportunity Index to benchmark gaps in access and use of ICTs by different age groups in the age divide in Singapore.

Growth of the Information Society is not without risks, however, and online security threats remain a cause for concern, however. Building confidence and security in the use of ICTs was a key aim of WSIS, and the report examines the evolution in cyberthreats, including spam, spyware, botnets, identity theft, breaches of privacy and other risks associated with online transactions.

The Report also examines national strategies that various countries have adopted to promote growth in ICT development, illustrating these with reference to a wealth of country case studies. It presents examples of successful projects promoting WSIS implementation around the world. The Report combines theory with authoritative analysis from the ITU and UNCTAD and country examples from around the world. It is due to be presented to the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development, holding its Tenth Panel Meeting in Geneva next week to discuss progress in WSIS implementation.

For more information, please see here. Articles will follow all next week, to highlight different aspects of the Report.

Under the aegis of the Shaping Tomorrow’s Networks Initiative and in line with the stated objectives of the WSIS Geneva Declaration of Principles (December 2003), which affirms “…the common desire and commitment to build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their quality of life…” the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) will jointly organize a High-Level Experts Meeting on “Competitive Platforms for Digital Content” to identify global trends and to address the new technological and policy challenges in the digital content delivery environment.

ITU Member States, EBU Membership, meeting participants and other interested parties are encouraged to send in their competitive platforms for digital content related contributions to the meeting at digitalcontent@itu.int

More information about the Call for Papers is available here.

More information about the Meeting can be found here or by contacting Cristina Bueti at digitalcontent@itu.int  

An International Telecommunication Union (ITU) delegation headed by ITU Secretary General Hamadoun I. Touré visited European Broadcasting Union (EBU) headquarters in Geneva today. The delegation met with EBU Secretary General Jean Réveillon, Phil Laven, Stefan Kürten and Giacomo Mazzone and visited EBU headquarters and Eurovision.

In the afternoon future common activities were discussed and a letter of intent was signed by the EBU and the ITU confirming both Unions' commitment to work collaboratively on a number of inititatives and activities in relation to the implementation of the plan of Action of the WSIS (World Summit for the Information Society.)

                                   

A high-level experts meeting, jointly organised by the ITU and the EBU and entitled “Competitive Platforms for Digital Content”, will take place at EBU headquarters on 21 and 22 June 2007.

The main aim of this meeting is to identify global trends and to address the new technological and policy challenges in the digital content delivery environment.

Click here for more information on this meeting.

EBU press release is availble here.

 

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) are jointly organizing a high-level experts meeting to identify global trends and to address the new technological and policy challenges in the digital content delivery environment.

This meeting is being held under the "Shaping Tomorrow's Networks Initiative" and in line with the stated objectives of the WSIS Tunis Commitment (November 2005), “…[recognizing] in addition to building ICT infrastructure, there should be adequate emphasis on developing human capacity and creating ICT applications and digital content in local language, where appropriate, so as to ensure a comprehensive approach to building a global Information Society ….”

The ITU/EBU High-Level Experts Meeting on "Competitive Platforms for Digital Content" will be held from 21 to 22 June 2007 at EBU Headquarters, Geneva, Switzerland.

Please note that the meeting will be conducted in English only.

More information about the meeting can be found here or by contacting us at digitalcontent@itu.int

More information about Shaping Tomorrow's Networks Initiative can be found here.

The first steps towards a globally harmonized approach to identity management (IdM) have been taken during a meeting of the ITU Focus Group on Identity Management (FG IdM) bringing together, for the first time, the world’s key players in the IdM space.

IdM promises to reduce the need for multiple user names and passwords for each service used, while maintaining privacy of personal information. A global IdM solution will help diminish identity theft and fraud. Further, IdM is one of the key enablers for a simplified and secure interaction between customers and services such as e-commerce. Experts at the meeting concurred that interoperability between existing IdM solutions will provide significant benefits such as increased trust by users of on-line services as well as cybersecurity, reduction of spam and seamless "nomadic” roaming between services worldwide. Abbie Barbir, chairman of the Focus Group on Identity Management: "Our main focus is on how to achieve the common goals of the telecommunication and IdM communities. Nobody can go it alone in this space, an IdM system must have global acceptance. There was a very positive feeling at the meeting that we can achieve this and crucially we saw a great level of participation from all key players."

The meeting of the FG IdM brought together developers, software vendors, standards forums, manufacturers, telcos, solutions providers and academia from around the world to share their knowledge and coordinate their IdM efforts. Interoperability among solutions so far has been minimal. One conclusion of attendees is that cooperation is crucial and that players cannot exist in isolation.

The spirit of the meeting was that everyone will gain by providing an open mechanism that will allow different IdM solutions to communicate even as each IdM solution continues to evolve. Such a "trust metric" does not exist today experts say. Work will continue online and during Focus Group meetings in April, May, and July 2007. An analysis of what IdM is used for will be followed by a gap analysis between existing IdM frameworks now being developed by industry fora and consortiums. These gaps should be addressed before the interworking and interoperability between the various solutions can be achieved. The aim is to provide the basis for a framework which can then be conveyed to the relevant standard bodies including ITU-T Study Groups. The document will include details on the requirements for the additional functionality needed within next generation networks. ITU has a long history of innovation in this field, with key work on trusted, interoperable identity framework standards including Recommendation X.509 that today serves as the primary "public key" technical mechanism for communications security across all telecom and internet infrastructures.

See more information on the Focus Group on Identity Management (FG IdM) website.

The Chairman’s Report (Version for Comments) from the ITU New Initiatives Programme workshop on The Future of Voice, held January 15-16, 2007 in the ITU Headquarter, has been made available for comments on the event's web-page.

To download the document, please click here. 

All comments and remarks, to be reflected in the final version of the Chairman’s Report should be sent via email to SPUmail@itu.int no later than the 19th February 2007.

 

Standards that will ease the wide spread rollout of video over IP networks took a step forward in January. IPTV architecture and requirements, two fundamentally important areas in standards work were progressed at a recent meeting of the ITU-T Focus Group on IPTV (FG IPTV). There was general consensus in the meeting that FG IPTV will successfully develop documents which will accelerate introduction of IPTV to the global market. Setting the architecture and requirements in stone allows the rest of the work to continue with greater ease.

Meeting at the Microsoft conference center, Mountain View California, at the invitation of the Alliance for Telecom Industry Standards (ATIS) the group saw a record number of contributions and experts worked often late to keep up with the workload. Nearly 90 documents were dealt with in the fields of architecture and requirements alone. Malcolm Johnson, newly elected Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau said in a message he sent to the event: "The excellent cooperation between ITU-T and ATIS is an example of the spirit of cooperation that I believe now pervades in the standards world... From what I have seen there is a great deal to be satisfied by in terms of the progress that FG IPTV has achieved so far."

In opening comments, ATIS President & CEO Susan Miller shared with the 200 meeting attendees that IPTV is serving as a ''change agent" for the industry, and "as both the business case and principal driver for accelerating deployment of the next generation network. "Miller noted that for North American service providers in particular, "IPTV is a critical ingredient to bundled service offerings that encompass television services, mobile services, Internet access, and much more. We have seen in the last decade, enormous investments in broadband, and fiber deployments to the home and to the premise," said Miller. Also important a document outlining terms and definitions in the field was created.

While seemingly mundane this work is crucially important in ensuring consistency of comprehension in an area where many standards outlining different aspects of IPTV will co-exist. Further discussion is expected on whether and how to treat the issue of redistribution of content to a point past an IPTV terminal device, and, in particular, how content protection and content management functions can or should apply in a home network environment. Other issues examined and progressed were accessibility issues for people with disabilities, AV codecs and content format requirements. Output and other documents can be found here.
See also the ITU-T newslog for further information. 

The next meeting of FG IPTV will be held from 7 to 11 May 2007 in Bled, Slovenia.

Under the "Shaping Tomorrow's Networks Project" and in line with the stated objectives of the WSIS Tunis Agenda for the Information Society (November 2005), that “… ITU and other regional organisations should take steps to ensure rational, efficient and economic use of, and equitable access to, the radio-frequency spectrum by all countries ….”, ITU and the Ugo Bordoni Foundation (Italy) jointly organized a workshop to identify global trends and good practice in radio spectrum management.

The Workshop on "Market Mechanisms for Spectrum Management" was held from 22 to 23 January 2007 at ITU Headquarters, Geneva, Switzerland.  

In preparation for the workshop a Background Resources Website on Spectrum Management was created. This website aims to provide a number of background resources on regional and national initiatives as well as some background information on spectrum management policy and regulation in general.

Background papers as well as Contributions to the workshop can be found here.

To download the Speaker's Presentations, please click here.

Link to Workshop Webcast Archives is available here.

More information about the Shaping Tomorrow’s Networks Project can be found here.

More information about the workshop can be found here.

See the full ITU Press Release for the event here.

We would like to inform all workshop participants that the Chairman's Report will be made available at the event website in the next few weeks.

The European Parliament held an STOA Workshop on "RFID in the everyday life of Europeans: A citizen's perspective on ambient intelligence" on 24 January 2007. The workshop was organized as part of the project "RFID and identity management: Case Studies from the frontline of the development towards ambient intelligence" commissioned by the Scientific Technology Options Assessment (STOA) Panel of the European Parliament, and carried out by the European Technology Assessment Group.

ITU's Lara Srivastava delivered a presentation on the topic "Is our enviroment getting smarter? Are we". Her presentation is available here. 

The ITU New Initiatives workshop The Future of Voice (15-16 January 2007, Geneva) discussed, inter alia, the regulatory implications of the development of voice communications. A background report Regulatory Trends: New enabling environment framed the debate. Authors of the paper are Andy Banerjee from Analysis Group Inc, Gary Madden and Joachim Tan from CEEM at Curtin University of Technology, Australia.

In a few short decades, radical changes in technology, market institutions, and regulatory and competition policy have transformed telecommunications markets. Telecommunications service traditionally meant voice communication. However, with the deployment of triple play, the phenomenon of convergence has emerged as both the principal offspring and driver of the technology-market-policy triad. Convergence is bringing together previously disparate communication services, content, and consumer market segments. This phenomenon raises questions about the future of communications and, in particular, about that of voice communication.

The authors maintain the hypotheses that: the future of voice communication will be the future of all forms of electronic communication; and the market will most likely be served by a combination of broadband technologies, prominent among them end-to-end fibre (wireline) and 3G (wireless) technologies (and their successors). In this context, the central question is: how must regulatory policy change to facilitate such a future? Specific regulatory or policy reforms in future communications markets marked by convergence and intermodal competition must be guided by the dynamic efficiency principle.

First, when the last mile access bottleneck disappears, regulatory focus should shift from the terms on which service and content providers can gain access to end users towards ensuring interconnection among IP networks, and between IP networks and access networks. Peering or bill and keep arrangements may suffice, in the absence of significant asymmetry in cross-network traffic patterns, for most forms of interconnection.

Second, any blanket network neutrality rule should be resisted. While undue discrimination may still need to be monitored and rooted out, traditional common carrier regulations accompanied by a blanket network neutrality rule can actually prove to be counter-productive.

Third, regulatory authorities must redesign licensing regimes to adapt to new market realities created by convergence and intermodal competition. Such licensing regimes should not favour the emergence of a particular technology or service but rather allow the market to make those decisions.

Finally, regulation for the future voice environment must mean prudent applications of discretionary policies. Those policies may include: providing incentives to develop and deploy small-scale, modular, and scalable broadband technologies; providing opportunities and systems for aggregating demand for broadband services; constraining international mobile roaming charges to encourage roaming and international voice communication demand; rejecting mandatory MVNO access to the networks of incumbent mobile operators unless specific market failure warrants such access; encouraging pricing models that recognise the multi-sided nature of emerging broadband markets; and renewing global efforts to control spam.

One of the eight background papers of the ITU New Initiatives workshop The Future of Voice (15-16 January 2007, Geneva) look at Communications in New Generation Networks. Authors of the paper are James Alleman from the University of Colorado and Paul Rappoport from Temple University, United States.

Based on demand side and supply side considerations, the authors focus on market dynamics and the drivers of change. While technologists or policymakers may prefer one market structure outcome over another, what the consumer is interested in is communications – simple, easy-to-use, cost effective and available on demand. These needs are not always satisfied in the current market environment. Currently, they must be satisfied with multiple networks and devices. Business and households now have fixed telephones, mobile phone (many times more than one for a household), a broadband connection which could be satellite, cable, DSL, WiFi, or WiMax, and Blackberries. Are consumers indifferent to technology and the protocols to communicate? Does a consumer’s desire to “communicate” transcend any one platform? Voice is not a unique form of communication; e-mail, facsimiles, video phones, and self-generated content are all means to communicate. For the next generation of consumers, simplicity, availability and access are required. To satisfy these consumers, the diversity of communications has significantly expanded. From this perspective, consumer demand is the driver of change.

An example of the change-driving demand is the music download on internet. The figure below clearly underscores the substitution in terms of the preferred or growing importance of the internet as a channel for delivery. The popularity of MP3 files is due in part to the increased level of choice – downloading singles, creation of custom play lists and so forth. However, perhaps the most significant factor is price. The rapid growth in MP3 downloads suggests that demand for MP3 downloads in elastic and that there are large cross price elasticities.

Do people communicate more taking opportunity of all new channels and modalities and are all of these driving telecom revenue bigger while best serving the users? While the popularity of online downloads is constantly growing, real revenue growth is lagging behind, as this is a service substitution phenomenon (MP3 music files for music CDs) rather than new source of revenue. Clearly the magnitude of own and cross-price elasticities need to be considered when assessing the convergence of communication, entertainment and data services as well as the future of ICT as a whole.

The full paper is available at the Future of Voice website.

Within the framework of the ITU New Initiatives Programme event on The Future of Voice held from 15-16 January 2007 in ITU Headquarter, Geneva, Mr Wolfgang Reichl, ÖFEG, Austria, submitted an interesting discussion material on "Balancing Innovation and Preservation in Telephony"

In paper's abstract Mr Reichl writes: Telephony might become just another application on the Internet. To examine if this is a likely or even desireable future, is the topic of this article. Everyone used to know what telephony is but with the appearance of software applications like Skype it isn't that easy anymore. Telephony in the traditional sense is interactive voice conversation between two people connected to a global network. When we talk about connectivity to a global network today, we envisage the Internet and when we talk about telephony, it is mobile telephony. The technological platform for telecommunications seems to evolve towards a common data network for all applications. The service specific silo-like networks convert towards a layered network architecture. When the underlying technology changes it remains critical to entangle the telephony application from technology. This article tries to find a clear seperation between application and technology and explores innovations of the telephony application in the light of convergence of computers, media and telecommunications. Innovations should be balanced against society's needs to preserve a world wide network for voice communications.

To download the paper, please click here.

A public forum on the availability and robustness of electronic communications networks was held in Brussels, Belgium on 18 January, 2007.  It was done as part of a study being conducted for the European Commission by Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs and professional services organizations on this issue.  The study provides insights into the availability and security provisions of electronic communication networks and also makes recommendations to the Commission, Member States, and private sector designed to enhance the security and resilience of these networks.  The findings of the study will be presented at the multi-stakeholder dialogue in Europe, which will be attended by representatives of governments, industry, and users.  Opening the dialogue will be speakers from the financial sector, the electricity sector, and the transport sector who will stress the importance of reliable communications in their operations. 

This study follows a request form the European Council in June 2004 to prepare a critical infrastructure for Europe, the adoption of a Green Paper on critical infrastructure protecion in November 2005 (more information), and a proposal by the Commission for a European Programme on Critical Infrastructure Protection (EPCIP) in December 2006.  In May 2006, the Commission adopted a Communication on a strategy for a secure Information Society - "Dialogue, partership and empowerment" (COM(2006)251).  This action was endorsed the Council Resolution adopted on 11 December 2006.

See more information here.

After the ITU New Initiatives Programme event on the Future of Voice held on 15-16 January 2007 in ITU Headquarter, David Allen provided his direct comment on few issues discussed during the meeting.

To see video material, please click here.

 

ITU is hosting a Workshop on “Market Mechanisms for Spectrum Management” in collaboration with the Ugo Bordoni Foundation (Italy), 22-23 January 2007.

The dramatic increase in demands for radio spectrum from every industry segment – from broadcasters, wireless carriers or satellite providers to emerging unlicensed services or even the public safety and homeland security community – has highlighted the critical importance of spectrum management and related spectrum issues. This timely conference will present an unusually broad and deep look at the full range of issues affecting today’s “spectrum wars”.

Furthermore, in light of the work being carried out under the Shaping Tomorrow’s Networks Programme this workshop will serve as a basis of discussion for possible future approaches, in line with recent technological developments, attempting to provide realistic forecasts in an increasingly ubiquitous, user centric and converged telecommunication environment.

The Advance Programme for the workshop is now on-line, and will be regularly updated.

More information about the Shaping Tomorrow’s Networks Programme can be found here.

All presentations can be found here.

More information about the international workshop on the topic can be found here.

See the full ITU Press Release for the event here.

The ITU workshop The Future of Voice held on the 15^th and 16^th of January 2007 in Geneva, Switzerland looked, inter alia, at the voice traffic and revenue trends in the last fifteen years.

On the global level, local and national long-distance reported telephone minutes per capita were growing in the 1990s and stably falling since the beginning of the new decade. A notable exception of the general rule is the US experiencing continuous growth in the number of local minutes: in 15 years, the number of local minutes per capita has grown four-fold. The international outgoing traffic grew significantly over the last fifteen years: in the Republic of Korea, in 2005 it was 15 times more intensive than in 1990, in the US – five times. Even though, since the beginning of the new century, the international voice traffic tends to slowly decrease.

If we look at the global telecom revenue, we will see the stable global expansion of the sector over the whole period. Voice revenue as a percentage of the total remains stable, while the traffic generated by users has doubled. In 2004, as in 1991, voice constituted more than 80% of telecom revenue surpassing, by far, income from any other source. In the coming years, voice is expected to stay strong driven by falling prices and increasing volumes of traffic.

What are the drivers behind these trends? Enlarged number of users, competition and market liberalization, enhanced innovation and emerging alternative communication platforms, migration to all-IP environment or all of these and more? The dynamics of development of the telecom sector is driven today by multiple factors in an increasingly complex environment both in developed and developing countries. Pressures are forcing change at different levels – market, regulation, type of technology, framed by the shift towards the emerging global economy.

For more insights of the debate on the future of voice, see the complete presentation of Tim Kelly, Head and Jaroslaw Ponder, Policy Analyst of the Strategy & Policy Unit of ITU.

More presentations and background materials on the subject can be found at the Future of Voice website.

For the purposes of the New Initiative Programme event on The Future of Voice, held on 15-16 January 2007 in ITU Headquarters, five background papers as well as four regional studies have been developed and presented for comments. In order to access documents, please click on the links below.

Background Papers

• "Innovation Dynamics in the IP Environment" by Dr. Knud Erik Skouby and Dr. Reza Tadayoni
• "The Future of Communications in Next Generation Networks" by Dr. James Alleman and Dr. Paul Rappoport
• "Regulatory Trends: New Enabling Environment" by Dr. Aniruddha Banerjee, Dr. Gary Madden, and Joachim Tan
• "The Status of Voice over Internet Protocol Worldwide, 2006" by Phillippa Biggs
• "The Future of Voice: Consumer Issues" by Ewan Sutherland

Regional Case Studies

• "Future of Voice in Africa" by Russell Southwood
• "Communications: Government and Business Practices in the Asia Pacific Region" by Khelia Johnson and Oluwaseun Oyeyipo
• "Regulatory Challenges of Voice over IP Telephony: Analysis for Selected South and Eastern European Countries" by Anna Riedel
• "Ruling Voice over IP: Challenges for Regulators in Latin America"

ITU held a workshop entitled The Future of Voice on the 15^th and 16^th of January 2007 at its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. This workshop organized under the ITU New Initiatives Programme focused on the role of voice communications in the future ubiquitous network environment.

For a long time, voice services have been the principal driver of telecommunication revenue and will probably continue to drive demand for some time. Nevertheless, it is becoming harder to sustain traditional models of per-minute pricing for voice as the service is increasingly carried over data channels that are priced on a flat-rate basis. Some of the key issues discussed during the event include:

• How are voice services evolving and what does this mean for users, providers and the telecommunication industry as a whole?
• How will fixed, mobile and internet-based phone services converge?
• How does messaging, gaming, multimedia fit in?
• Are voice services of the future most likely to be billed by the minute, by volume, or on a flat rate basis?
• What regulatory freedom should be given to operators to bundle voice with other services (e.g., multiple play: voice, video, internet and mobility)?
• What form of licensing, if any, will be necessary for voice service providers?
• What will be the new business models and revenue streams?
• What are the residual universal service obligations (e.g. emergency calls) that should be imposed on voice providers?

All presentations and background papers as well as a web archive of the event (video and audio) are available on the workshop website.

The ITU has just published a Survey on Radio Spectrum Management, available for download here (.pdf format).

The survey was prepared by Marco Obiso, Cristina Bueti, Rochi Koirala and Lorenzo Mele of the Strategy and Policy Unit (ITU).

Together with other background papers will form part of the input material for an international ITU/FUB Workshop on Market Mechanisms for Spectrum Management to be held in Geneva (Switzerland) from 22-23 January 2007.

The Advance Programme for the workshop is now on-line, and will be regularly updated.

More information about the Workshop can be found here.

More information about the Shaping Tomorrow’s Networks Programme can be found here.

In conjunction with the Forum at ITU TELECOM WORLD 2006, 4-8 December in Hong Kong, China, ITU is organizing a one day event on 8 December entitled "Countering Spam Cooperation Agenda". Key international and regional organizations involved in the fight against spam will gather to discuss greater collaborative efforts to combat spam and related threats. The event is open to all ITU TELECOM WORLD 2006 participants.

See the full ITU Press Release for the event here.

As part of the Shaping Tomorrow’s Networks Programme and in line with the stated objectives of the WSIS Tunis Agenda for the Information Society (November 2005), that “… ITU and other regional organisations should take steps to ensure rational, efficient and economic use of, and equitable access to, the radio-frequency spectrum by all countries ….”, ITU (Strategy and Policy Unit and Radiocommunication Sector) and and the Ugo Bordoni Foundation will jointly host a workshop to identify global trends and good practice in radio spectrum management.

The Workshop on "Market Mechanisms for Spectrum Management" will be held from 22 to 23 January 2007 in Room C at ITU Headquarters, Geneva, Switzerland.

It will examine, inter alia, the use of market mechanisms for both primary allocation of spectrum (e.g., auctions) and for secondary trading. It will look at recent trends in ITU Member States, the increasing demand for spectrum and will examine future challenges in developing policies for access to radio spectrum.

ITU Member States, meeting participants and other interested parties are encouraged to send in their spectrum related contributions to the meeting. All contributions will be posted on the meeting website. Please send your contributions to spectrum@itu.int

More information can be found here.

ITU-T will host this year's Broadband Europe Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, 11-14 December 2006. BBEurope is an annual event which was initiated by the European Commission Framework Programme 6 BREAD project which is part of the "BroadBand for All"-strategic objective of the European Commission.

Peter Van Daele, BREAD Project Leader: "The concept of 'Broadband For All' refers to a situation in which broadband is not only available to every citizen, but is actually used by all of them. In that respect it is a more demanding concept than the traditional universal service obligation in telephony, which merely stipulates the availability, at certain conditions, of a given service. The usage of information and communication technologies via broadband infrastructures by all citizens is a policy objective because it is considered to be a key component of transforming Europe into a knowledge-based society, thus enhancing economic growth and increasing employment."

The BREAD project has amongst its objectives to develop a holistic vision encompassing technical, as well as economical and regulatory aspects. Another important aspect is of identifying roadblocks on European, national/regional level and share visions and best practices on national level to EU level.

BBEurope brings together on an international level all the BroadBand players, researchers, service providers, content providers, operators, manufacturers, policy makers, standardisation bodies, professional organisations. The meeting will discuss topics such as NGN, IPTV, wireless access, powerline, security, QoS, and broadband in rural areas. The event will conclude with a panel discussion titled: Future Perspectives in Broadband.

For a draft meeting agenda and more information on the call for papers (deadline: 10 November 2006), see the event website.

The Telecom Evolution Business Forum 2006 was held in Moscow, Russia, from 23-26 October 2006 to evaluate current trends in telecommunication markets and the strategy options open to operators in response to an evolving market. The TeleEvo 2006 conference was hosted by Ernst & Young Russia and included two days' of hands-on training, followed by a further two days of presentations, panel discussions and Question & Answer sessions by experts, consultants, regulators and key stakeholders from the telecom industry, government and civil society. The conference combined a broad overview perspective of the evolution of worldwide telecom markets with more specific presentations by operators focused on markets in the Russian and Commonwealth of Independent States. 

ITU's Phillippa Biggs spoke at the conference on VoIP: Current Trends and Future Evolution.  Her presentation examined the key forces driving the rapid growth in VoIP (such as growth in broadband), VoIP's current and projected market size, as well as regulatory responses to VoIP based on ITU's ongoing work surveying VoIP regulation.

Recent presentations by the ITU's Strategy and Policy Unit can be found here.

The Digital Opportunity Index (DOI) is a composite index that has been developed by the ITU/Digital Opportunity Platform to measure countries' progress in ICTs and digital opportunity, as part of the endorsed methodology for WSIS evaluation and follow-up. It is a flexible methodology that has been used in many different ways. Every day this week, SPU will demonstrate a different application of the DOI, to show its flexible and versatile applications for policy analysis.

The urban/rural digital divide is one of the most obvious divisions in many countries (depending on their geography, degree of urbanisation and industrial development, among other factors). ITU has traditionally sought to monitor the urban/rural divide in telecoms using the indicators of % of main lines in urban areas and mainlines in the largest city. For example, in China, as recently as 2004, just over two-thirds of all mainlines were to be found in urban areas (World Telecommunication Indicators).

However, the urban/rural divide extends far beyond connectivity. Differences in digital opportunity between urban and rural areas are also evident in the price of access to ICTs (often more expensive in rural areas), speed and quality of access (what the Nigerian blogger Oro calls "plug and pray") and technology in e.g., coverage of population with a mobile signal. The Digital Opportunity Index measures all these different aspects to access to ICTs.

For most countries, detailed data on urban/rural differences for all these aspects are difficult to come by. However, at the recent Digital Opportunity Forum held in Korea, the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology presented its expert analysis of the urban/rural divide in Egypt (see figure below). Taking into account differences in price, coverage, Internet availability and usage, the Ministry calculated that the rural population in Egypt has one quarter less opportunity to access and use ICTs as in urban areas. This points to a measurable and significant urban/rural divide in connectivity in a country where the vast majority of the population (95%) live in the fertile Nile valley. The DOI provides a means not only of quantifying the extent of this urban/rural divide, but also of monitoring its future evolution.

The urban/rural divide in Egypt

Source: Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, presented to the Digital Opportunity Forum, 1 September 2006.

For more information about the Digital Opportunity Index, click here.

The ITU and the EU's Daidalos Project plan a workshop on "Digital Identity for NGN" Dec. 5 in Geneva, officials said Mon. The Daidalos Project and VeriSign are advancing global standardization of digital identity management at the ITU, officials said. Proposals have been floated at ITU on handling the issue, but consensus is still forming. The aim of the workshop is to understand better providers' need to offer digital identity across layers of communication systems, administrative domains and other boundaries, documents said. Key challenges for developing a more consistent approach are to tackle the conflicting requirements of privacy, identification and security, documents said. The NGN-GSI Event will focus on identity management as a key theme during its meeting Oct. 23-Nov. 3, said an official involved in the work. The past year or 2, several research institutes in Japan, S. Korea and Switzerland have been interested in sensor network identifiers, he added. There's supposed to be an identity management piece in the October 23-24 Grid Workshop as well, the official said: "There's a whole burgeoning world of communicating sensor devices, and [they] will need some kind of identity to communicate whatever kind of sensing information they have."

Source: Warren's Washington Internet Daily

The International Telecommunication Union along with the Commonwealth Telecommunication Organization (CTO) organized a three-day Forum 26-28 September on Using ICT for Effective Disaster Management. The meeting at Ochos Rios, Jamaica adopted a road map for better coordination in the use of state-of-the-art information and communication technologies (ICT) aimed at improved disaster preparedness and mitigation.

The roadmap includes: formulation of appropriate policies deployment of appropriate technologies ratification and implementation of the Tampere Convention for free movement of technical equipment in case of disaster capacity building for users of ICT services and applications establishment of national platforms that help countries to be ready to use ICT when disasters strike development of common regional strategies on integrating ICT in all phases of disaster mitigation: early warning, preparedness, response and relief

At the Ochos Rios meeting, comments from Jamaican government officials and several regional Caribbean representatives focused on the ability, or lack of ability, of governments, telecom carriers, IT backup service providers, businesses enterprise customers and other private-sector organizations to cope with their most comment peril: tropical hurricanes. The intense 2005 hurricane season brought a record 27 storms (including Emily, Katrina and Wilma) into the region. "Following the 2004 Ivan hurricane disaster and Emily in 2005, it became evident that the lack of communications was one of the significant weaknesses of the regional disaster management framework," says Philip Paulwell, Jamaica's Minister of Industry, Technology, Energy Commerce. "Intra-agency communications as well as public information have been identified as requiring improvement." "There's an urgent need to establish effective and comprehensive communication links between the affected areas, national disaster response facilities and with the larger international community.

For further details, see the ITU press release on this topic.

ITU-T is hosting a workshop NGN and Grids in collaboration with the Open Grid Forum (OGF) in Geneva , 23-24 October 2006. Grid computing enables organizations to pool IT resources across departmental and organizational boundaries in a secure, highly efficient manner in order to solve massive computational problems.

Next generation networks (NGN) offer increased quality and service features for users, independent of the underlying transport technology. ITU-T’s Global Standards Initiative on Next Generation Network (NGN-GSI) is well under way and is responding to urgent market needs for global NGN standards.

The workshop will explore how Grids will work in an NGN environment by bringing together experts from both communities.
The telco community is eyeing Grid development with interest. Telcos could use grids internally, for billing and simulations for example but new revenue streams can be foreseen in areas such as managed grid services.

One panel discussion and Q&A will pose the question: "What can Grids do for Telcos and what can Telcos do for Grids?" Other panel discussions will examine NGN management and security. From a telecoms perspective there are some challenges such as QoS, how to control the network, how to manage dynamic provisioning and how to provide collision-free addresses (IPv4 <-> NAT). It is expected that all of these topics and more will be addressed. A key result of the event will be a gap analysis of standards in the field and a better understanding of how grids can be catered for in ITU-T’s NGN Release 2. An action plan outlining what work needs to be done, and where can then be developed.

See the ITU-T Newslog for more details on the workshop.

Dear Subscribers,

We regret to inform you that as a result of scheduling complications it has been necessary to postpone the Market Mechanisms for Spectrum Management Workshop from the 2nd and 3rd of November 2006 to the 22nd and 23rd of January 2007.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Those directly affected will be contacted by us individually.

More information about the workshop and related activities can be found here.

A forthcoming ITU-T IPTV Global Technical Workshop will review and examine IPTV standardization, political and regulatory aspects, business models and various case studies as well as technical developments and service provider’s operational aspects.

IPTV represents a convergence between the traditional telecommunication and broadcast industries. And, as with any convergence a lot of work is needed to ensure interoperability. Globally accepted standards are clearly a key enabler for this. With many of the conditions necessary for IPTV rollout in place - global IP connectivity over managed broadband infrastructure with such guarantees as QoS and security, and broadband connectivity with enhanced network capabilities - there is a strong demand for standards to ensure smooth service rollout and interoperability.

The workshop will provide a review of the current status of IPTV work as well as an examination of where to go next.

See the meeting website for further information.

[ITU-T Newslog]

Implementation of the outcomes of the recently concluded World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) gathered momentum with the launch of the United Nations Group on the Information Society (UNGIS). High level representatives of twenty-two UN agencies met on Friday, 14 July 2006 at ITU Headquarters in Geneva under the chairmanship of ITU Secretary-General Yoshio Utsumi to facilitate the process.

UNGIS will serve as an interagency coordinating mechanism within the UN system to implement the outcomes of WSIS. The Group will enable synergies aimed at resolving substantive and policy issues, avoiding redundancies and enhancing effectiveness of the system while raising public awareness about the goals and objectives of the global Information Society. UNGIS will also work to highlight the importance of ICTs in meeting the Millennium Development Goals.

See ITU Press Release for full text. 

The ITU held an international workshop under its New Initiatives Programme on the topic "The Regulatory Environment for Future Mobile Multimedia Services" in Mainz (Germany) from 21-23 June 2006. The final report [PDF]  of the chairman has now been published.

Workshop presentations can be found here. Background documents, including country case studies and thematic papers are also available on the workshop homepage.

 

The ITU has just published an Issues Paper on the Regulatory Environment for Future Mobile Multimedia Services, available for download here (.pdf format).

The paper was prepared by Lara Srivastava, of the Strategy and Policy Unit (ITU), and Ingrid Silver & Rod Kirwan of the law practice of Denton Wilde Sapte.

Together with case studies (on Germany, China, Hong Kong SAR) and a thematic paper on spectrum flexibility, these background papers will form part of the input material for an international ITU New Initiatives Workshop on The Regulatory Environment for Future Mobile Multimedia Services, to be held in Mainz (Germany) from 21-23 June 2006, and jointly hosted by Germany's Federal Network Agency.

The Advance Programme for the workshop is now on-line, and will be regularly updated.

More information about the ITU New Initiatives Programme can be found here.
More information about the international workshop on the topic can be found here.  

 

In 2006, ITU-T will celebrate 50 years of making the standards that have played a massive part in shaping the information and communications technologies (ICT) and services of today. In order to mark this momentous milestone, ITU-T will stage a unique one-day event on 20 July 2006 bringing together some of the most important players in ICT.

As part of celebrations for the anniversary, you are invited to vote for the most influential standards work from ITU-T. ITU work is behind many of the worlds most prevalent information and communications technologies. Select one of the standards on this shortlist which you think has best shaped the ICT world of today, or feel free to suggest additional standards for consideration.

More information about activities related to ITU-T's 50 Year Anniversary Celebrations can be found here.

The winners of the third annual Mobile Entertainment Awards (the "Meffys") were announced by the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) this week in London.

The mobile games award went to Digital Chocolate, the mobile music award to Warner Music's WAMO Packs, the mobile content award to Chooz Active Content's Foreplay, and the mobile entertainment handset award to Nokia's N70. Wiinners in other categories included Bango, France Telecom, 3 UK and Yospace.  The special recognition award was given to Jim Brailean, CEO/President and Founder of PacketVideo. The top entries for each category were selected by panels of independent industry media and analyst experts.

The Awards took place alongside Mobile Entertainment Market (MEM) 2006 at Islington's Business Design Centre in London (UK), at which the MEF also revealed its new Board of Directors. Ingrid Silver (Partner, Denton Wilde Sapte) was newly elected to the MEF Board and attended the Meffys reception with ITU's Lara Srivastava. Ingrid Silver and Lara Srivastava (with Rod Kirwan of Denton's) are presently co-authoring a paper on "The Regulatory Environment for Future Mobile Multimedia Services" as part of the ITU's New Initiatives Programme. The paper will be presented at an international workshop on the topic to be held in Mainz, Germany from 21-23 June 2006.

 

On 1-2 June 2006 the ITU Strategy and Policy Unit (SPU) in collaboration with London Business School (LBS) will hold a joint conference on the measurement of ICTs and the macro-, micro- and meso-impact of ICTs in the Information Society.

The conference will explore the impact of ICTs in industry, firms, growth and productivity. What is the real meaning of the digital divide? Can investment in ICTs help to reduce the productivity gap? Are countries really at a disadvantage through falling behind in take-up of ICTs?

For more details on this event please click here.

This brochure summarizes the results of a workshop on Tomorrow’s Networks Today, held in Saint Vincent (Aosta), Italy from 7 to 8 October 2005. It was prepared by Cristina Bueti and Marco Obiso on the basis of specially prepared case studies, input documents and contributions to the workshop. The enclosed CD-Rom contains the background materials and documents of the workshop as well as a wide range of background resources related to tomorrow’s networks.

More information can be found here.

Click here to buy the brochure.

Workshop: Optimization Technologies for Low-Bandwidth Networks, ICTP Workshop, Trieste, Italy, 9 - 20 October 2006:

Bandwidth in developing countries can be so expensive that some universities cannot afford speeds equivalent to the average Western household with ADSL connection. The reasons for this situation include: Internet access available only via satellite connections and lack of communications infrastructure in many remote areas. Bandwidth and computing equipment are expensive as a result of weak currencies, high transport costs, small budgets and high tariffs. Universities cannot afford a decent link, or in some cases still do not see its value or are unaware of existing alternatives. By applying optimization techniques based on Open Source technologies, effectiveness of available connections can be highly improved.

The Workshop will provide information and practical training on how to gain the maximum benefit from existing connections to the Internet, exposing participants to the latest techniques to optimise the use of low-bandwidth network connections.

The Workshop will consist of theoretical lectures, laboratory hands-on sessions and demos. Linux will be used as primary O.S. Case Studies by Participants are also welcome, describing their computing and networking environment and connectivity related problems, issues on content delivery, etc.

Now underway is the ITU/UNESCO Global Symposium on Promoting the Multilingual Internet which is a follow-up to Phase 2 of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). The Tunis Agenda for the Information Society, adopted at the Tunis Phase of WSIS, highlights the importance of multilingualism for bridging the digital divide. It identifies ITU as taking the lead role in the implementation of information and communication infrastructure (WSIS Tunis Agenda Action Line C2), ITU/UNESCO for access to information and knowledge (WSIS Tunis Agenda Action Line C3), and UNESCO for cultural diversity and identity, linguistic diversity and local content (WSIS Tunis Agenda Action Line C8).

The event is being audiocast live in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. The programme is available here and contains links to all the presentations and speaker biographies.

At a recent Study Group 17 (SG17) meeting in Korea, SG17 gave final approval to a Question on Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) that provides direction and focus to ongoing work.

The news comes as ITU makes final preparations for the Global Symposium on Promoting the Multilingual Internet, it is convening together with UNESCO, 9-11 May 2006.

ITU-T was mandated to work on IDN at the 2004 World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly in Brazil. IDN will contribute to easier and greater use of the Internet in those countries where the native or official languages are not represented in ASCII characters.

Andrzej Bartosiewicz, representing Poland and acting as Rapporteur for IDNs said: “We have received a number of contributions in this area and have been impressed with the level of interest and the productive nature of discussions. There are a number of organizations working in the field and I believe coordination will be an important focus of any work. The upcoming workshop will be a particularly useful tool for facilitating networking between experts in the field and furthering the study in general.”

Bartosiewicz said that a webpage will be published shortly with news on ITU-T study in the area, as well as related events and technical documents. An official 'circular letter' will be sent sent to Member States he said, requesting information about their experiences on the use of IDN. Given the response to this communication SG 17 will be able to better assess the current situation and needs.

[via the ITU-T Newslog]

On 6 April 2006 Quallo Center held 2006 Quello Communication Law and Policy Symposium.

For programme of the event and presentations please click here.

ITU's Strategy and Policy Unit has just released a new issue of SPU Flash.

The electronic version of the flash is available here. 

The ITU has released the Results of its 2006-2007 Questionnaire on Future Topics  for workshops under the ITU New Initiatives Programme.

The top three winners are as follows:

1. Pushing the Boundaries - Wireless Networking

2. The Future of Voice

3. Privacy and Data Protection in Telecommunications

More information about the ITU New Initiatives Programme can be found here.

ITU will take the lead in international standardization for IPTV with the announcement that it is to form a Focus Group on IPTV (IPTV FG).

The announcement, while acknowledging that standards work is ongoing in many different places, including ITU, is a reaction to an industry call for ITU to push forward and coordinate global standardization effort in the field.

IPTV is a system where a digital television service is delivered to consumers using the Internet protocol over a broadband connection. It will help pave the way for players, many of whom are already moving to IP-based NGN infrastructure, to offer a triple-play of video, voice and data.

Standards are necessary in order to give service providers, whether traditional broadcasters, ISPs or telecoms service providers, control over their platforms and their offerings. Standards here will encourage innovation, help mask the complexity of services, guarantee QoS, ensure interoperability and ultimately help players remain competitive.

The mission of IPTV FG is to coordinate and promote the development of global IPTV standards taking into account the existing work of the ITU study groups as well as SDOs, fora and consortia. The group was launched following a decision taken at a public consultation meeting attended by around 120 experts from the world’s ICT companies. Attendees agreed that all players in the IPTV value chain will benefit from worldwide standards, that there is a lot of work to be done and that rapid progress is necessary in order to avoid market fragmentation. The Focus Group mechanism was seen as the most effective way of addressing this. Inputs to the meeting as well as a webcast can be found here.

Houlin Zhao, Director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau of ITU: "We have seen a desire to expedite and accelerate a global focus on standards for IPTV. There has been extraordinary consensus that ITU must lead this work and I am pleased that – again - ITU is seen as the right place to develop and harmonize this international standardization work, as well as identify and help fill gaps where there is still a standardization need." The FG will build upon existing work. Its scope will include architecture and requirements, QoS, security, network and control aspects, end system aspects – terminals etc., interoperability, middleware and application platforms.

Please see the ITU-T IPTV website for more information on the focus group.

Activités de l’UIT dans la Lutte contre le SPAM, PDF, Cristina Bueti, ITU Strategy and Policy Unit,21 March 2006, presented at the workshop on "Lutte contre le SPAM"(Rabat, Morocco).

The fight against spam, phishing and e-mail fraud should focus on economic incentives and aiding law enforcement, according to attendees at a conference examining the problem this week. Speakers at MIT's 2006 Spam Conference were notably cognizant of the recent proposals of white lists and AOL's Goodmail, a pay per e-mail service offering preferential treatment in e-mail delivery for marketers.

More information can be found here.

 

From today's Wall Street Journal Europe: How France Became A Leader in Offering Faster Broadband

"For years, France's telecommunications industry was a state-owned monopoly with one of the world's most backward broadband markets. But thanks to deregulation six years ago, French consumers have access to high-speed Internet service that is much faster and cheaper than in the U.S.

One telecom company in particular has exploited the changes and created competition in France -- a start-up called Iliad. Over 1.1 million French subscribers pay as low as €29.99 ($36) monthly for a "triple play" package called Free that includes 81 TV channels, unlimited phone calls within France and to 14 countries, and high-speed Internet. The least expensive comparable package from most cable and phone operators in the U.S. is more than $90, although more TV channels are generally included.

"We are coming into people's living rooms and changing the way they consume telecom services," says Michael Boukobza, Iliad's 28-year-old chief executive."

Key to France's success has been the active intervention of ARCEP, the French communications regulator. At last week's ITU workshop What Rules for IP-enabled NGNs?, François Varloot of ARCEP presented an overview of the French marketplace and their views on emerging symmetric and asymmetric IP regulatory issues.

On 23-24 March 2006 at ITU headquarters, the ITU Strategy and Policy Unit hosted a high-level experts workshop entitled What Rules for IP-enabled NGNs? focused on the policy and regulatory challenges related to the deployment of IP-enabled NGNs. The following materials are now available:

• The original workshop concept document providing details on the objectives of the workshop
• Final Agenda
• Background papers:
  • Ruling the New and Emerging Markets in the Telecommunication Sector by Christian Wey, Pio Baake and Sven Heitzler 
  • Interconnection in an IP-enabled NGN Environment by Scott Marcus
  • Universal Service in an IP-enabled NGN Environment by Patrick Xavier
• All presentations and contributions
• Webcast archives

John McDonald, a member of the ITU team that created the new VDSL 2 standard, will participate in an upcoming Webinar on this topic, Monday 3 April 2006.

The Webinar hosted by Light Reading will look at this development and explore the significance and implications of the new standard for both operators and the enormous installed base of DSL subscribers. ITU’s new VDSL 2 standard (Very High-Speed DSL 2)(ITU-T Recommendation G.993.2) delivers up to 100 Mbit/s both up and downstream, a tenfold increase over ADSL (Asymmetric DSL). By doing so, it provides for so-called fiber-extension, bringing fiber-like bandwidth to premises not directly connected to the fiber optic segment of a telecom company’s network.

VDSL 2 will allow operators to compete with cable and satellite providers by offering services such as high-definition TV (HDTV), video-on-demand, videoconferencing, high-speed internet access, and advanced voice services, over a standard copper telephone cable. As well as addressing fast-growing consumer demand for high-speed multimedia services, VDSL 2 offers carriers a solution that is interoperable with the DSL equipment many already have in place, expediting migration of customers to new VDSL 2-based products. VDSL 2 works with both legacy ATM networks and next generation IP-based networks.

Register for the online event to learn more about VDSL 2.

As part of its work on preparing an ICT Regulatory Toolkit, the Regulatory Reform Unit of ITU hosted, on 15 March 2006, a virtual conference on the impact of new technologies on TELECOM/ICT Regulation.

The conference recording, together with presentations from Tim Kelly (ITU), Anthony Rutkowski (Verisign), Sharil Tarmizi (Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission), Michael Best (Georgia Tech), Michail Bletsas (One Laptop Per Child) and Russell Southwood (Balancing Act) are available here. 

The draft agenda (PDF) for the 23-24 March 2006 ITU Workshop What Rules for IP-enabled NGNs is now available.

A related page of NGN Policy and Regulatory Initiatives around the globe is also available.

The OECD hosted a workshop entitled The Future of the Internet in Paris on 8 March 2006. Presentations given at the event will serve at "food for thought" for future OECD work.

The Economist has a related article entitled Reinventing the Internet.

"The case for promoting a global culture for cybersecurity was strongly emphasized at the World Telecommunication Development Conference (WTDC) during an information session for participants conducted by ITU on Friday.

ITU pointed out that in an increasingly interconnected and networked world our societies are vulnerable to a wide variety of threats, including deliberate attacks on critical information infrastructures with debilitating effects on our economies and on our societies. In order to safeguard our systems and infrastructure, we need to strengthen our collective cybersecurity.

As this depends on the security practices of each and every networked country, business, and citizen, we need to develop a global culture of cybersecurity. According to ITU, cybersecurity is critical in the use and development of ICT. The lack of adequate security is an obstacle for using ICTs that rely on the protection and confidentiality of sensitive data. Unless these security and trust issues are addressed, the benefits of the Information Society to governments, businesses and citizens cannot be fully realized.

The information session was aimed at raising awareness on this very important subject and to contribute to bridging the information and knowledge divide between and within countries.

At that session, ITU launched a new reference guide on Cybersecurity for Developing Countries and informed delegates of ITU’s initiative in Promoting Global Cybersecurity as the theme for World Telecommunication Day on 17 May this year. ITU will also assist developing and least developed countries in increasing cybersecurity and will conduct workshops and seminars to enable countries to exchange ideas and discuss common issues." [Via WTDC 2006 Highlights]

For more information about the World Telecommunication Development Conference (WTDC), please click here. 

At a workshop on ICT Indicators for performance benchmarking, held in Delhi 1-3 March, under the auspices of LIRNEasia and TRAI, representatives from the region's national statistical offices and regulatory agencies committed themselves to developing a set of ICT Indicators for the region based around "core set of ICT Indicators" defined by the Partnership for Measuring ICT for Development. This methodology means that they will be able to apply the composite "Digital Oppoportunity Index", which has been developed by a multi-stakeholder partnership, including ITU, KADO and UNCTAD, for the measurement of the digital divide within the region and within individual countries.

The proceedings of the conference, which included presentations from TRAI, LIRNEasia, ITU, OECD and NRRI, are avaialble on the LIRNEasia website at: http://www.lirneasia.net/2006/03/workshop-on-ict-indicators-for-benchmarking-performance-in-network-and-services-development/.

ITU and UNESCO are organizing a Global Symposium on Promoting the Multilingual Internet in Geneva from 9 - 11 May 2006.

Participation in the meeting is open to any organization or individual from ITU or UNESCO member countries. Written contributions are invited on the themes of the event and should be sent to multilingual (at) itu.int before Tuesday 25 April 2006.

The Tunis Agenda for the Information Society, adopted at the Tunis Phase of WSIS, highlights the importance of multilingualism for bridging the digital divide. It identifies ITU as taking the lead role in the implementation of information and communication infrastructure (WSIS Tunis Agenda Action Line C2), ITU/UNESCO for access to information and knowledge (WSIS Tunis Agenda Action Line C3), and UNESCO for cultural diversity and identity, linguistic diversity and local content (WSIS Tunis Agenda Action Line C8).

The symposium will examine issues highlighted in paragraph 53 of the WSIS Tunis Agenda, including:

1. Options for advancing the process for the introduction of multilingualism in a number of areas including domain names, email addresses and keyword look-up; 
   
2. Options for implementing programmes, also in cooperation with other appropriate organizations, that allow for the presence of multilingual domain names and content on the internet and the use of various software models in order to fight against the linguistic digital divide and ensure the participation of all in the emerging new society;
   
3. Options for strengthening cooperation between relevant bodies for the further development of technical standards and to foster their global deployment; In addition, the event will review technical solutions and current experiences, identify open issues and discuss a roadmap for further steps in the direction of promoting internet multilingualism.

The draft agenda of the symposium, background information and other information are available on the event website.

ITU-T together with the US Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) is holding a free workshop Next Generation Network Technology and Standardization at the Mandalay Bay Convention Centre in Las Vegas , USA , 19-20 March 2006 during the TelecomNEXT event.

This workshop will: 

• Examine the status of NGN standards 
• Identify standards work needed to support ongoing viable businesses for all parties as NGN becomes reality, and 
• Enhance and extend standardization community cooperation to further coordinate NGN work

A particular emphasis of the event will be next generation network (NGN) requirements and standards objectives from a North American perspective and how these can be best taken into account in global NGN standardization by the ITU-T.

More information on the event and the draft meeting programme can be accessed through the ITU-T website. 

IPDR.org hosted an event last week to take a focused look at IPTV accounting and settlement. The event objectives included:

• Understanding the requirements for IPTV accounting
• Summarizing challenges associated with all network data related aspects of IPTV such as advertising, content settlement, user behavior, capacity management, multimedia events, and other IPTV service components
• Developing technical specifications to address the needs of IPTV overall accounting and settlement
• Creating an industry wide task force comprised of leaders and contributors

IPDR plans to submit protocols to international groups such as the ITU and 3GPP for adoption as industry standards, according to Kelly Anderson, President of IPDR.org. Her group is working especially closely with the IPTV Interoperability Forum of the Alliance for Telecom Industry Solutions (ATIS), represented at the meeting. ATIS and IPDR said last week that the American National Standards Group had approved as an American national standard for trial use a generic IPDR specification for billing applications for packet-based services on which ATIS had collaborated.

The presentations made at the event are available.

The Director of the TSB is holding a consultation meeting on IPTV standardization on April 4-5 2006.

The ITU-T Newslog has news of a joint ITU-T Workshop and IMTC Forum 2006 on "H.323, SIP: is H.325 next?" to be held 9-11 May 2006 in San Diego, California. 

The rollout of NGN will bring with it in a new era of multimedia communications and with that a need to consider updating or replacing the currently used H.323 and SIP multimedia protocols. The question is whether to pursue development of a new protocol and a new generation of multimedia communication systems, or define new multimedia capabilities and functionality for existing protocols. Perhaps some consideration needs to be given to service control interface specifications. With work already underway in ITU on a new protocol dubbed H.325, the industry must decide whether to invest more time and resource into this pursuit. The answer to this question will be one of the more fundamental issues addressed at this IMTC Forum and ITU-T Workshop, which will have to consider: market acceptance/need and benefit to end users, service providers and to enterprise information technology (IT) staff.

More details on the workshop are available here. For a primer on H.325, see here.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has published comments received on its recent consultation paper on Issues pertaining to Next Generation Networks (NGN) released in January 2006. Also see accompanying Press Release.

The ITU Strategy and Policy Unit is hosting a workshop entitled What Rules for IP-enabled NGNs? in March 2006. The ITU also has a website on related national, regional and international policy and regulatory initiatives.

In line with paragraph 108 and the Annex of the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society, a consultation is being held on 15-16 May 2006, at ITU Headquarters in Geneva, on WSIS Action Line C5: Building Confidence and Security in the use of ICTs. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss the WSIS multi-stakeholder implementation process for Action Line C5.

The meeting is open to all WSIS stakeholders that are interested and involved in the implementation process in the field of building confidence and security in the use of ICTs.

A draft agenda for the consultation on WSIS Action Line C5 Facilitation and the invitation letter to the meeting from ITU Secretary-General Yoshio Utsumi can be viewed on the WSIS C5 Implementation website.

More information on the activities related to WSIS implementation and follow-up can be viewed here.

The ITU hosted a workshop on “Networked RFID: Systems and Services” in Geneva, 14-15 February 2006.

The event focused on the use of RFID technology in networked environments, and review international standardization. Particular emphasis was given to the impact that networked RFID applications will have on telecommunication networks, especially on network and service capability requirements and interworking aspects.

Links to the meeting presentations and the audio webcast archive from the event are now available on the website.

Please see “Networked RFID: Systems and Services”, for further information.

In line with para 108 and Annex of the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society, a consultation on WSIS Action Line Facilitation for WSIS action line C2, i.e. information and communication infrastructure will take place in conjunction with WTDC-06 in Doha, Qatar, on 9 March 2006, in the Convention Center, Room Al Majlis, to benefit from the presence of many WSIS stakeholders present at WTDC-06. The meeting will run from 14.00 – 17.00 hours. The meeting is open to all WSIS stakeholders that are interested and involved in implementation process in the field of information and communication infrastructure. The meeting will be held in English.

The purpose of the meeting is for information exchange and to discuss the WSIS multi-stakeholder implementation process in field of information and communication infrastructure.  ITU, UNESCO and UNDP are holding a consultation meeting to establish the nature of the coordination process, its outputs, modalities and logistics, of the work to be undertaken on WSIS implementation on 24 February 2006, in Geneva, and the outcome of this meeting will be reported. A draft annotated agenda is attached, together with a registration/badge request form for those not registered for WTDC-06. Further information is available from the implementation website.

The ITU is hosting a workshop on Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) from 14-15 February 2006, bringing the spotlight on the emergence of a so-called "Internet of Things", enabling ubiquitous network connectivity, anytime and anywhere. The agenda and an accompanying press release are available.

Update: The workshop is being audiocast live and archived.

ITU's Market and Finance Unit has just released publication ICT Market Liberalisation Reports for CEE Countries and Baltic States.

The publication includes seven following contributions:

• Significant market power in telecommunications: theoretical and practical aspects
• Increasing the competition in the Polish mobile telecommunication market
• Lithuanian telecommunication market
• Liberalization of the ICT Market in Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Economic and institutional implications of network convergence in Hungary
• Implementation of the new act on electronic communications in Slovenia
• Implementation of the New Regulatory Framework in Lithuania

To download publication, please click here.

The official website of the 1st Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), to be convened later this year in Greece has been launched.

In preparation for an upcoming ITU workshop entitled What Rules for IP-enabled NGNs?, to be held 23-24 March 2006 at ITU (see workshop concept document), an ITU NGN Policy and Regulatory site is now available and under development.

The new site contains links to the workshop and other resources as well as the most recent NGN-related news from the ITU Strategy and Policy Unit and the ITU-T.

An entry on Richard Stastny's blog (VoIP and ENUM) points to a number of interesting presentations made at an ERO hosted event on scenarios for NGN naming, numbering and addressing, interconnection and QoS.

The European Regional Seminar on Regulatory and Economic Aspects of VoIP and Broadband Promotion for Central Eastern European countries (CEE), Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Baltic States took place from the 29 to 30 November 2005, in Istanbul, Turkey. The agenda and presentations made at the meeting are available.

Call for input on the forthcoming review of the EU regulatory framework for electronic communications and services, including review of the Recommendation on relevant markets! Deadline 31 January 2006

The Commission Services invite interested parties to give their views on possible changes to the five EP and Council directives that constitute the current EU framework for electronic communications, and to the Recommendation on relevant markets.

The consultation document can be found here.

A public workshop is provisionally planned for Tuesday 24 January 2006 in Brussels. The workshop will be open to all interested parties, but prior registration is required. A registration form can be found here.

For more information, please click here.

LightReading has an article on the recent NGN Industry Event in London on 18 November 2005, where ITU unveiled Release 1 standards for NGN by ITU-T's Focus Group on Next-Generation Networks (FGNGN). The event also outlined the next phase of NGN work to be progressed under the banner of the NGN Global Standards Initiative (NGN-GSI). In the presentation (Zipped PowerPoint) by BT Group Technology Officer Mick Reeve:

"...the world's telecom standards groups are, at last, all singing from the same song sheet with their work on next-generation network (NGN) standards.

"Addressing an International Telecommunication Union meeting in London today, Reeve, a key figure in the development of BT's 21st Century Network (21CN), praised the ITU for its role in bringing together the work of many different groups around the world and delivering a unified vision of what an NGN should look like and deliver. (See BT Unveils 21CN Suppliers, Bross: More to Come on 21CN, and Wales to Get 21CN First.)

"The ITU has done a great job in finding a global agreement on NGNs. There's a high level of agreement globally about NGN principles" that has helped deliver an "overall architecture for next generation networks and systems, something that has been unheard of before now," says the BT man. He cited the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), TeleManagement Forum, and Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) as organizations that have helped in the ITU's work."  

Other presentations made at the event can be found here.

The WSIS Stocktaking Report has been officially launched during the World Summit on the Infrmation Society in Tunis. The report has been prepared on the basis of activities entered to the WSIS Stocktaking Database that by November 2005 contained more then 2500 entries. 

For the launch presentation see Stocktaking.pdf (1.47 MB).

For the WSIS Stocktaking Database see here. 

For the upcoming Global Symposium for Regulators (GSR) to be held in Hammamet, Tunisia, 14-15 November 2005, just before the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the ITU has released a paper by Tracy Cohen, Olli Mattila and Russel Southwood, entitled VoIP and Regulation, which will be presented at the GSR:

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is generally viewed as a “disruptive technology”. All the current market indications show that IP networks and services like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) will replace traditional PSTN networks and services. ITU estimates that by 2008, at least 50 percent of international minutes will be carried on IP networks and that many carriers will have all-IP networks. Recent trends are certainly headed in this direction. For example, in the United States, residential VoIP subscriber numbers have increased from 150,000 at the end of 2003 to over 2 million in March 2005. It is predicted that subscribers in the US will exceed 4.1 million by 2006, generating over USD 1 billion in gross revenues for the year. In March 2005, the Chilean broadband operator VTR launched the first telecommunication network for residential services based on IP technology. The operator expects to expand its platform and reach 2 million customers in five years. There are approximately 35,000 residential telephones that use IP technology in Chile, either through Chilean operators or through Vonage...

This paper examines how VoIP services will affect future regulation. Due to the starkly contrasting global perceptions of VoIP however, it is difficult to present a unified approach to regulatory treatment of VoIP and this paper aims to reflect regulatory experiences from a wide range of countries that are grappling with the transition to VoIP. The three sections of this paper are structured to answer both the broad and specific questions raised by VoIP services, including the overall approach to regulating VoIP as a mainstream service; how VoIP has changed voice business models and the various ways of classifying the services it has created; and finally, other related issues frequently raised in connection with VoIP, such as quality of service; network integrity; emergency calling, numbering, communication security and lawful interception.

For the upcoming Global Symposium for Regulators (GSR) to be held in Hammamet, Tunisia, 14-15 November 2005, just before the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the ITU has released a paper by John Palfrey entitled Stemming the International Tide of Spam: a Draft Model Law, which will be presented at the GSR:

This discussion paper primarily takes up the question of what – beyond coordinating with technologists and other countries’ enforcement teams and educating consumers – legislators and regulators might consider by way of legal mechanisms. First, the paper takes up the elements that might be included in an anti-spam law. Second, the paper explores one alternative legal mechanism which might be built into an anti-spam strategy, the establishment of enforceable codes of conduct for Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Third, this paper also examines a variant of the legal approach where ISPs are formally encouraged by regulators to develop their own code of conduct. ISPs should be encouraged to establish and enforce narrowly-drawn codes of conduct that prohibit their users from using that ISP as a source for spamming and related bad acts, such as spoofing and phishing, and not to enter into peering arrangements with ISPs that do not uphold similar codes of conduct. Rather than continue to rely upon chasing individual spammers, regulators in the most resource-constrained countries in particular would be more likely to succeed by working with and through the ISPs that are closer to the source of the problem, to their customers, and to the technology in question. The regulator’s job would be to ensure that ISPs within their jurisdiction adopt adequate codes of conduct as a condition of their operating license and then to enforce adherence to those codes of conduct. The regulator can also play a role in sharing best practices among ISPs and making consumers aware of the good works of the best ISPs. While effectively just shifting the burden of some of the anti-spam enforcement to ISPs is not without clear drawbacks, and cannot alone succeed in stemming the tide of spam, such a policy has a far higher likelihood of success in the developing countries context than the anti-spam enforcement tactics employed to date.

The ITU-T Newslog has a detailed post on the recent home networking workshop and related ITU-T home networking standards. The event, held at ITU 13-14 October 2005 met concurrently was the Home Networking-Joint Coordination Activity (HN-JCA), a group of ITU-T experts aiming to coordinate standardization effort on home networking across ITU-T Study Groups.

The high quality and breadth of the contributions resulted in a wealth of material much of which is not available anywhere else in the world, according to the event’s steering committee chair Charlie Sandbank. Because of time constraints not all this material could be presented at the workshop but it is now available, including the key conclusions, at the workshop website.

Anti-Spam: les actions menées au plan international (PDF), Robert Shaw, ITU Strategy and Policy Unit, 18 October 2005, presented to Coalition Anti-Spam Nord–Sud: Atelier de travail (Rabat, Morocco).

Home Networking is the linking of all types of electronic devices for applications such as entertainment, telecommunication, home automation systems and telemetry (remote control and monitoring systems). And given the wide range of previously unrelated technologies involved, standards that allow for interoperability are seen as key to the successful marketing of the concept.

Now taking place at the ITU is a workshop on Opportunities and Challenges in Home Networking. The event is organized by ITU-T Study Group 9, in cooperation with several other ITU-T study groups and various organizations outside of ITU. It follows the Workshop on Home Networking and Home Services held 17-18 June 2004, Tokyo.

Study Group 9 has been working on standardization in home networking systems for more than four years. It has already approved three ITU-T Recommendations in the field, particularly dealing with IP-based multimedia services over cable networks. A current focus is a new Recommendation that will specify ways to bridge conditional access systems (that ensure payment in pay TV for example) to digital rights management (DRM) systems, an important step toward smooth operation of fully integrated home networking.

This workshop will bring together experts from all over the world who are pushing forward the frontiers of this fast-moving field. It will provide an overview of the technology as well as an examination of standards that address access, services, performance, Quality of Service, electromagnetic interference and security issues. The workshop will deal with current technology and future trends to provide a framework for moving forward standardization work. Attention will be given to both the technology and service aspects of this new technology.

The programme can be found here with links to the presentations. Highlights include:

• Worldwide Status of Home Networking
• Home Network Architecture and Technologies (including an update on UPnP and DLNA)
• Home Networking Services and Business Models
• Security and Digital Rights Management
• Quality of Service in the Home Network
• Electromagnetic Interference in the Home Environment
• The Home Networking Future: Efforts and Challenges

The ITU Strategy and Policy Unit, in collaboration with the Italian Ministry of Communications, the Ugo Bordoni Foundation and the Aosta Valley regional authority, organized a Workshop on “Tomorrow’s Network Today” on 7-8 October 2005.

The workshop considered five broad themes:

• International Visions of Ubiquitous Networks and Next Generation Networks
• National Visions of Ubiquitous Networks and Next Generation Networks
• Creating an Enabling Environment
• The Italian Path Towards Ubiquitous Networks
• An example of Italian best practice: "Being Digital in the Aosta Valley"

Now available on the workshop website  are the agenda, with links to presentations as they were delivered and the two Case Studies on Italy – “Bridging the Gap: Taking Tomorrow’s Network Today” presented by Marco Obiso and “Ubiquitous Networks Societies: The Case of Italy” presented by Cristina Bueti - as well as background papers and voluntary contributions produced for the workshop.

During the event, Tim Kelly, Head of the Strategy and Policy Unit (ITU) presented “Tomorrow’s Network and the Internet of Things”, showing some of the outcomes of the forthcoming ITU Internet Reports publication that this year will be dedicated to the theme of the “Internet of Things “.

A final report of the workshop will be available in the next few weeks at the workshop website.

ITU, together with sponsors BT, Cisco, Motorola, Nortel and Siemens, is holding a one day event to mark a new milestone in ITU’s work on next-generation networks (NGN). The event will present an overview of NGN work so far, details on future directions, and some of the key business drivers for NGN. In addition to announcing completion of work on the Release 1 standards for NGN by ITU-T’s Focus Group on Next-Generation Networks (FGNGN), the event will communicate the next phase of NGN work, dubbed the NGN Global Standards Initiative (NGN-GSI).

Press are invited to attend for the whole day, specific sessions or just for lunch, which will be preceded by a panel session. There will also be opportunities for one-on-one interviews with key NGN players from the world’s leading telcos and systems vendors.

For more details click here.

Operators from around the globe are implementing NGN strategies and plan to invest billions of dollars in the rollout of new packet-based networks. Their involvement in global standards-making stimulates innovation and more robust technology, fosters interoperability and multi-vendor product offerings, and protects current and future investment.

The operators, systems vendors and governments driving this standardization work believe NGN will deliver substantial cost savings through the economies of scale inherent in a single converged network. They believe international standards will facilitate an open market for systems, lowering costs and providing for mix-and-match implementation and global interoperability. NGN will benefit consumers through innovative new services, greater control and personalization, ease of migration between services, and continuity for existing services.

The event is aimed at professionals involved in product planning and service creation for systems vendors and service providers.

A limited number of places will be made available for journalists. Journalists interested in attending should contact ITU’s Toby Johnson.

The latest meeting of ITU Study Group 3 saw an agreement that may lead to lower international mobile telephony charges. The move follows a successful initiative in the 1990’s to lower the – then – high cost of international fixed line telephone calls.

Study Group 3 research has found that in some cases mobile termination charges can be five to ten times more than fixed termination charge. Termination charges happen when calls are terminated in a network other than that from which they have originated. And since as many as 75 per cent of all calls now involve the mobile network in some way Study Group 3 has decided to investigate how to lower these costs and make mobile telephony more affordable.

The Study Group will send a questionnaire to members and following analysis of the responses it will develop targets aimed at bringing down the cost of mobile call termination. The same initiative for fixed-line telephony is thought to have significantly reduced costs to consumers. Although some lowering of call costs can be shown to have been due to competition and market conditions, call costs were also seen to drop in areas where there was no competition, indicating that the ITU initiative had worked.

In other news from Study Group 3's last meeting it was announced that an alternative has been agreed to the 140 year old practice of allowing the calling party’s service provider to invoice the call terminator for call termination services. The practice has led to many disputes and there have been calls to review the situation. Study Group 3's meeting agreed to a new model that – it is felt – will be less problematic. Now the call terminator can bill directly for the minutes used by the service provider sending the calls.

For further information on these and other Study Group 3 activites, please click here.

To further encourage the development of a ubiquitous network society, the ITU Strategy and Policy Unit, the Italian Ministry of Communications, the Ugo Bordoni Foundation and the Aosta Valley are hosting a Workshop on "Tomorrow's Network Today" that will be held in Saint-Vincent (Aosta), Italy on 7-8 October 2005.

This Workshop will discuss specific measures to help overcome potential challenges and determine possible future actions.

One session will be dedicated to Next Generation Networks (NGN) as a framework to harmonize the worldwide technical and functional basis needed to extend the use of integrated ICTs to as many users as possible.

During the workshop there will be an Exhibition which will bring together a wide range of leading industry participants as well as high-level representatives from government and regulators.

Click here for more information about the event.

ITU-T, in collaboration with the European Union’s IPv6 Task Force Steering Committee (EU IPv6 TF-SC) and the IPv6 Forum, organized an IPv6 workshop at ITU Headquarters in Geneva, June 22-23, 2005.

A final report of the workshop is now available on the workshop website.

The ITU Standardization Bureau, ITU-T, hosted the 36th Joint Picture Experts Group (JPEG) Meeting, held in Geneva between July 18-22.

The JPEG, formed many years ago jointly by ITU-T Study Group 16 and ISO/IEC JTC1 Study Group 29, is renowned for its JPEG and JPEG-2000 image compression standards.

In ITU-T, Study Group 16 is home to all media coding work, such as the H-Series of Recommendations, and includes work done together with ISO/IEC's JPEG, and JPEG-2000 groups in image compression, as well as work done with MPEG in developing video compression standards such as H.264. ISO/IEC JTC1 SG 29 is the focal point in ISO/IEC JTC1 for image, video and audio compression standards. The meeting surveyed the progress of technologies broached in the previous JPEG meeting, held in Lisbon in March 2005, including image security in JPEG-2000 which is being addressed by JPEG’s JPSEC ad hoc group. The group is developing a standard that will enable protected images to retain JPEG-2000 system features, such as scalability. This new feature within JPEG images will allow international distribution of digital images containing encrypted content, while still retaining the ability to adaptively deliver content for a wide variety of devices with varying display capabilities. The meeting also followed up on JPEG’s Digital Cinema ad hoc group and its advances in developing profiles for JPEG-2000 digital cinema applications. The Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) organization has adopted JPEG-2000 for future distribution of digital movies to theatres. JPEG is working closely with the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) to standardize aspects of this future architecture.

The Video and Image Coding and Applications (VICA) workshop, 22-23 July 2005, which followed the ITU-T-hosted JPEG meeting, aimed to build upon the presence of JPEG and ITU-T SG 16 experts (who met July 26 - August 5 this year). The workshop reviewed existing video and image compression standards, their current applications, and future directions in the field.

More information on the workshop can be found here.

The Chairman's report (PDF) from the ITU WSIS Thematic Meeting on Cybersecurity held June 28 - July 1 2005 has been released.

The event was organized in the framework of the implementation of the Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action adopted on 12 December 2003, at the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and in preparation for the Tunis phase of WSIS, to be held from 16 to 18 November, 2005. The event website provides links to the final agenda, all background papers, presentations, electronic contributions, the Chairman’s Report and audio archives.

The four-day meeting was structured to consider and debate six broad themes in promoting international dialogue and cooperative measures among governments, the private sector and other stakeholders as well as promotion of a global culture of cybersecurity. These include information sharing of national and regional approaches, good practices and guidelines; developing watch, warning and incident response capabilities; technical standards and industry solutions; harmonizing national legal approaches and international legal coordination; privacy, data and consumer protection; and developing countries and cybersecurity.

The first day of the meeting focused on countering spam as follow-up to the ITU WSIS Thematic Meeting on Countering Spam, held in July 2004.

At a recent ITU cybersecurity event, Bruce Schneier, Founder and CTO, Counterpane Internet Security, Inc. gave a keynote speech entitled Negotiating for Security.

A Real Audio archive is available of Mr. Schneier's talk (speech starts 4 minutes from start of archive).

Mr. Schneier states that security is one of the fundamental building blocks of the information society as everything we now do with information requires some kind of security—sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, may it be personal, corporate or government related. He said that to a very real extent the limits of the information society can be seen as the limits of security. In other words, if we cannot do it securely, we will not do it with computers and on the internet. Therefore, this means that security is a fundamental enabling technology of the global information society. Moreover, he noted that society as a whole is increasingly moving onto computers and networks and therefore things that had previously nothing to do with computers suddenly do: whether airplanes or the national power grid, these now have an important information security component to their secure functioning. This means that information security therefore has become our general security, which is almost everything. This fact explains our need for an increased focus on security and why the things we are trying to achieve here at this meeting are so important.

At the recent ITU WSIS Thematic Meeting on Cybersecurity, Maria Cristina Bueti, Policy Analyst, Strategy and Policy Unit, ITU, presented a background paper entitled ITU Survey of Anti-Spam Laws and Authorities Worldwide. The survey was conducted in April 2005 and sent to ITU’s 189 Member States. The survey results, based on 58 responses received, showed that there are a number of countries that have already implemented anti-spam legislation. In some cases, countries use data protection laws or consumer protection laws to cope with spam issues. A number of countries do not have anti-spam legislation or any laws applicable to spam. A slide from her presentation is shown below.

The final version of a paper commissioned by the ITU entitled A Comparative Analysis of Spam Laws: The Quest for a Model Law (PDF) has been released. The paper was authored by Derek E. Bambauer, John G. Palfrey, Jr., and David E. Abrams, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School, for the ITU WSIS Thematic Meeting on Cybersecurity held in Geneva, 28 June - 1 July 2005.

Executive Summary

Spam presents a significant challenge to users, Internet service providers, states, and legal systems worldwide. The costs of spam are significant and growing, and the increasing volume of spam threatens to destroy the utility of electronic mail communications.

The Chairman’s Report from the ITU WSIS Thematic Meeting on Countering Spam in July 2004 emphasized the importance of a multi-faceted approach to solving the problem of spam and named legal governance as one of the necessary means. Our paper focuses on the potential nature of the legal regulation of spam, specifically the importance of harmonizing regulations in the form of a model spam law. We agree with the Chairman that the law is only one means towards this end and we urge regulators to incorporate other modes of control into their efforts, including technical methods, market-based means, and norm-based modalities.

Spam uniquely challenges regulation because it easily transverses borders. The sender of a message, the server that transmits it, and the recipient who reads it may be located in three different states, all of which are under unique legal governance. If spam laws are not aligned in these states, enforcement will suffer because the very differences between spam laws may mean that a violation in one state is a permissible action in another. Moreover, spammers have an incentive to locate operations in places with less regulation, and the opportunity to states to create a domestic spam hosting market may engage them in a race to the bottom.

Harmonizing laws that regulate spam offers considerable benefits, insofar as a model law could assist in establishing a framework for cross-border enforcement collaboration. To those enforcing the regulation of spam, harmonization as a model law effort offers: clear guidelines, easy adoption, enhanced enforcement, stronger norms, fewer havens for spammers, and the increased sharing of best practices. If such regulators then agree that harmonization can aid legal regimes intent on curbing spam, they must initially address four critical tasks: defining prohibited content, setting default rules for contacting recipients, harmonizing existing laws, and enforcing such rules effectively. This legal approach must be concurrently matched by efforts that employ other modes of regulation, such as technical measures, user education, and market-based approaches.

Our analysis of existing spam legislation gathered by the ITU Strategy and Policy Unit evaluated these laws’ elements to determine whether they were commonly included or not, and whether provisions were uniformly implemented or varying when present. Our research documents seven instances in which extant laws strongly converge: a focus on commercial content, the mandatory disclosure of sender/advertiser/routing, bans on fraudulent or misleading content, bans on automated collection or generation of recipient addresses, the permission to contact recipients where there is an existing relationship, the requirement to allow recipients to refuse future messages, and a mix of graduated civil and criminal liability. Also documented are five key areas of disagreement which are vital to a harmonized spam law but which have evaded consensus thus far: a prior consent requirement for contacting recipients, a designated enforcer, label requirements for spam messages, the definition of spam (whether it is limited to e-mail communication, or includes other applications, such as SMS), and the jurisdictional reach of the system’s spam laws. Naturally, a harmonization effort must tackle and narrow these zones of divergence in order to succeed.

Spam laws, whether harmonized or not, are at best only part of the solution to the spam problem and must be developed in concert with technical, market, and norms-based tools if the scourge of spam is to be substantially reduced. Efforts to harmonize the legal regulation of spam can serve as one effective means to solving the unique challenges spam presents. A model spam law is possible to develop, despite the many differences among the world’s spam laws.

In between the meetings of two lead technical groups working on image and video compression, ISO/IEC's JPEG and ITU-T's Study Group 16, ITU will host a Workshop on Video and Image Coding and Applications (VICA) at the ITU headquarters, Geneva, Switzerland, 22 to 23 July 2005. Key experts will join users to review the development, assessment and application of video and image coding and to discuss and start work on an action plan and a roadmap for VICA standardization.

Presentations will instigate discussion on how standards work in the field, including how next generation networks (NGN) can support the development of so-called ubiquitous services - any device, anytime, anywhere. Current work on home network environments will also be taken into account. For more information, see the ITU meeting website.

One of the presentations includes an overview of the ITU-T H.264 standard (also known as MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) made by Gary Sullivan, Microsoft, Rapporteur for ITU-T Q.6/16.

ITU-T has recently hosted a workshop on IPv6 organized in cooperation with the European Union’s IPv6 Task Force Steering Committee (IPv6 EU TF-SC) and the IPv6 Forum. The event, held in Geneva, between 22 to 23 June 2005, examined the current status of IPv6, with regards to rollout, policy, technology and applications. An additional aim was to promote awareness of IPv6 to countries where Internet use is relatively low. The agenda and presentations have been made available on the event web site.

The final presentation at yesterday's session on spam at the ITU WSIS Thematic Meeting on Cybersecurity, John LEVINE, Chair, IETF Antispam Research Group (ASRG) made a presentation entitled the Limits of Security Technology: Lessons from the Spam Wars.

Yesterday, at the ITU WSIS Thematic Meeting on Cybersecurity, during the day focused on spam, a session was dedicated to discussing national policies and legislative approaches to spam. As part of this session, a Background Paper commissioned by ITU, entitled A Comparative Analysis of Spam Laws: the Quest for Model Law, was presented (presentation) by Derek BAMBAUER, Research Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The authors of hte paper are Derek BAMBAUER, John PALFREY, Executive Director, and David ABRAMS, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School, United States. From the introduction to the report: 

The goal of this paper is to help policymakers understand the potential benefits and challenges of model spam legislation as a tool to improve the security of and user confidence in information and communications technology (ICT), as well as the potential that model spam legislation holds for Internet users worldwide. First, it sets forth a framework for understanding spam and identifies key issues confronting regulators. Next, the paper examines the set of options for spam laws based on existing and proposed legislation gathered by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Strategy and Policy Unit (SPU). It analyzes the level of consensus among these extant laws and the degree to which a particular component is included in most legislation and in the degree to which provisions addressing this component are similar or harmonized. The paper points towards zones where there is considerable consensus while simultaneously illuminating the most fundamental differences, so that policymakers can tackle the hard issues and choices involved in spam laws. Finally, the paper makes preliminary recommendations for spam law efforts and considers both the potential for and the likely efficacy of a model spam law.

During the same sessions, there were presentations from:

• Panellist: Jonathan KRADEN (biography), Staff Attorney, Federal Trade Commission (FTC), United States
    o  Presentation
• Panellist: Miguel MONTERO (biography), Spam Ruling Administrator, Radiografica Costarricense (RACSA), Costa Rica
    o  Presentation
• Panellist: Liang LIU (biography), Assistant Director, Anti-Spam Coordination Team, Internet Society of China, People’s Republic of China
    o  Presentation
• Presentation: Maria Cristina BUETI (biography), Policy Analyst, Strategy and Policy Unit, ITU
  ”ITU Survey of Anti-Spam Laws and Authorities Worldwide”
    o  Presentation

Luc Mathan from the relatively new Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) is giving a presentation on MAAWG's efforts to align the messaging industry stakeholders along three directives: Collaboration, Technology and Policy. The working group will address collaborating on cross-operator communications, best practices and technology to combat messaging abuse, as well as developing a cohesive point of view on public policy.  More information about MAAWG.

MAAWG members are developing a feedback loop mechanisms to deal with spam complaints between ISPs. They are also creating a contact database for service providers to be able to contact the appropriate person to deal with a messaging abuse situation.

Steve Linford of the Spamhaus Project is speaking at the ITU WSIS Thematic Meeting on Cybersecurity on the first day which is concentrating on countering spam. Some of his remarks:

• Spamhaus blocks approximatley 8 billion spam messages per day
• They estimate there are 4 million infected zombie machines which have been compromised with 60-100,000 newly infected per week
• These are used to launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Attacks
• This is increasingly a criminal activity with "spam supermarkets"
• Mostly American and Russian spammers using Chinese hosting. These are technically smart users who firewall their sites from their hosting companies.
• Spammers in Russia are more criminal than US counterparts. They are involved in
• The largest Russian ISP, Rostelecom says they cannot terminate accounts as Russian law does not permit it.
• Australian spam laws are best in the world, penalties are high enough to make a dent in spam
• Consumer confidence in the Internet is dropping every day
• Spam is a cancer and it is fast killing the Internet

Some of Steve's conclusions include:

• You must ban and not regulate spam
• Governments must give resources to law enforcement agencies
• Make it criminal for ISPs to host spammers
• Require a 24 hour point of contact for all ISPs to terminate problems
• Educate users to not reply to spam

The meeting is also being audiocast live over the Internet. Mr. Linford's talk is the beginning of Session 2.

At the start of the 21st century, our societies are increasingly dependent on information and communications technologies (ICTs) that span the globe. The ITU WSIS Thematic Meeting on Cybersecurity opens today and takes place from 28 June – 1 July 2005 at ITU headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. This conference will examine the recommendations in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) first phase's Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action that relate to building confidence and security in the use of ICTs and the promotion of a global culture of cybersecurity. Now available on the meeting web site is the agenda (with links to presentations as they are given) and meeting background papers and contributions. The meeting is also being audiocast live over the Internet.

The meeting will specifically consider six broad themes in promoting international cooperative measures among governments, the private sector and other stakeholders, including:

• information sharing of national approaches, good practices and guidelines; 
• developing watch, warning and incident response capabilities;
• harmonizing national legal approaches and international legal coordination;
• technical standards;
• privacy, data and consumer protection;
• developing economies and cybersecurity.

The first day of the meeting will focus on countering spam as follow-up to the ITU WSIS Thematic Meeting on Countering Spam held in July 2004.

There are lots different indices which rank the world's countries according to their level of penetration of ICTs, or their e-readiness. But until now there has been no agreement on what indicators to include, or what methodology to use. Now, in the framework of the implementation of the WSIS Plan of Action, a new methodology, prepared by Michael Minges of TMG Inc on behalf of ITU, has been released for developing a composite "Digital Opportunity Index". This new methodology is based on the core list of indicators agreed by the "Partnership for Measuring ICT for Development" of UN agencies at their meeting on 7-9 February 2005.

The draft methodology is structured around eleven indicators in four clusters:

• Affordability and coverage: Mobile phone coverage and tariff baskets for mobiles and Internet access.
• Access path and device: Penetration of fixed-lines, mobile phones and PCs.
• Infrastructure: Fixed and mobile Internet subscribers and international Internet bandwidth per inhabitant.
• Quality: Penetration of fixed and mobile broadband subscribers.

The index has been developed according to a modular methodology, so that it can be easily extended, adpated for national use, or used alongside other indices, such as the UNDP's Human Development Index. As a proof-of-concept, the methodology has been applied to 40 leading economies, with Sweden, Denmark, Republic of Korea, Switzerland and Hong Kong-China appearing in the top five. The index will be further discussed at the WSIS Thematic Meeting on "Multi-stakeholder partnerships for bridging the digital divide", to be held on 23-24 June 2005, in Seoul, Republic of Korea.

More

Communications has a post on the recent IMTC Forum 2005: The Future of Next Generation Networks: Convergence of VoIP, Videoconferencing and Mobile, May 10-12, 2005.

The IMTC is an industry association best known for championing video telephony.  Many of the attendees have devoted 10, 15, even 20 years of effort to making video telephony work. 

All of the presentations made at the Forum are linked to in this document (Word) on the IMTC web site. Some presentations worth highlighting include:

• Videotelephony and IMS, Alex Afshar, Dilithium Networks
• Video Compression After H.264, Gisle Bjøntegaard, TANDBERG
• IMS in Future Networks, Dr. Subrata De, Vodafone
• NAT/FW traversal standardization work in ITU, Dave Lindbergh, Polycom

The 2005 ASEM Cyber Security Workshop, Seoul will be held in Republic of Korea, hosted by the Ministry of Information and Communication of Korea. The ITU WSIS Thematic Meeting on Cybersecurity will follow shortly afterwards, June 29-July 1 2005 in Geneva, Switzerland.

Spectrum policy in transition by Philippa MARKS and Kiyotaka YUGUCHI, Keio Communication Review No. 26 (2004). A comparison of spectrum policy in the UK, France and Japan. Also see ITU's related work in the Strategy and Policy Unit's Radio Spectrum Management for a Converging World.

[Keio University - Mediacom via my weblog]

The European Commission will hold an Open Workshop on Identifying Policy and Regulatory Issues of Next Generation Networks (PDF) on 22 June 2005. The workshop is directed towards policy makers and regulators, but is open to anyone who may have an interest. A provisional programme can be found here (PDF). Attendance is free of charge but registration is required.

The ITU is also hosting a workshop on NGN policy and regulatory issues in February 2006. More details will be announced later here.

The Tokyo Ubiquitous Network Conference (WSIS thematic meeting): Toward the realization of a Ubiquitous Network Society, organized by Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and United Nations University (UNU), has opened. The programme and related presentations/documents are available on the meeting website.

The high reliance on ICTs as an enabler for social and economic development and the speed with which critical information systems and data can be accessed, manipulated and destroyed has put cyber security on the top of the agenda as one of the main challenges to the emerging Information Society and the knowledge-based economy.

Within the framework of its mandate in the Istanbul Action Plan Programme 3, ITU and the Government of Latvia are organizing a regional seminar on Cyber Security for CIS, CEE and Baltic States. The seminar will provide a forum for Member States and Sector members from the region to discuss and exchange views on the main cyber security threats and challenges faced by countries in the region. Countries will have the opportunity to present national initiatives related to cybersecurity policies, strategies and legislation.

More information on the event can be found here.

The UK communications regulator OFCOM has done one of the first public consultations on the regulatory implications of Next Generation Networks (NGN), particularly with regard to BT's 21CN NGN initiative. The consultation document, entitled Next Generation Networks - Future arrangements for access and interconnection (overview,complete) explores the implications of Next Generation Networks (NGNs) for access and interconnection arrangements in the UK. The responses to the consultation are available here.

In BT's response to the consultation, it indicates some of its views on 21CN regulation:

Finally BT observes that some key aspects of the strategic positioning, NGN access and interconnect, are not addressed in Ofcom's questions. We wish to point to the following specific points.

1. We would expect that NGNs will blur many of the boundaries all of us in the industry currently take for granted. For example, the distinction between "operators" and "service providers" will diminish; and one could foresee an increase in pan-European alternative providers leveraging their IP infrastructure using next-generation interconnection more effectively. Further, as the barriers to market entry are lowered through technology advances and open standards, we would expect many new entrants to change the landscape - some with innovative value propositions and others by identifying and exploiting new arbitrage angles.

2. We believe end user customers will soon demand seamless, ‘any to any’ interworking between mobile and fixed networks. Operators will require the ability to roam on, and interconnect to, other national and international fixed and mobile networks in order to facilitate the provision of next generation services. The regulatory regime needs to become more technologically neutral and focus on economic bottlenecks, irrespective of the underlying network technology.

3. We believe that innovative services will be heavily reliant on intelligent interworking to provide coherent services. Therefore, cross platform access (including roaming and interconnect) to intelligence capabilities will be essential in ensuring further development of services and competition in the convergent marketplace.

4. BT is disappointed to see the level of potential regulatory intervention and micromanagement, both in commercial and technical terms, demonstrated in this Consultation. This is particularly inappropriate as it followed so soon after the second phase of the Telecoms Strategic Review, which promulgated a deregulatory agenda and a focus on regulating only bottlenecks. This Consultation also includes some substantive inconsistencies of approach which will need to be addressed.

5. It is critical that the outcome of this - and any later - consultation processes should be a regulatory regime which rewards investment and does not leave BT with a significant proportion of the 21CN investment risk, whilst distributing the investment returns across the industry. Ofcom will wish to consider this issue as they contemplate the responses to the Consultation.

The ITU Strategy and Policy Unit, in cooperation with the ITU-T and ITU-D, is organizing a workshop on NGN Policy and Regulation in February 2006.

The ITU-D e-flash is a regular update on some of the activities of the ITU's Telecommunication Development Sector. It provides information on the sector's activities and links to upcoming events, workshops and useful background information. The latest edition includes:

• The Regional Preparatory Meeting for Europe for the World Telecommunication Development Conference (WTDC-06) Shapes the Future of the ITU Development Action Plan
• A Further Step Towards the Sustainability of The Centers of Excellence Network (CoE)
• Guidelines on the Transition of Existing Mobile Networks to IMT-2000 for Developing Countries is Available
• ITU and China Team Up for Cooperation in Radio Monitoring Training
• Building the Global Knowledge-Based Information Society on Scientific Institutions
• ITU-D Sector Membership Surpasses 300!
• Upcoming Events and Workshops
• Information Links

Richard Stastny has a post on his take on the 1-2 May 2005 ITU-T workshop on NGN in collaboration with the IETF in Geneva at ITU headquarters.

• The workshop was very well attended (270 participants), both from IESG and IAB, and also from ITU-T SG groups and other standardization bodies (e.g. ETSI TISPAN). An indication of the high-level attendance can also be derived from the speakers list in the program.

Update: he has some further thoughts in a later post on the different visions of NGN.

[via VoIP and ENUM]

The presentations from last month's ITU-T Cybersecurity II Symposium, hosted by RANS in Moscow, are now available, including presentations from:

• Mr Herbert Bertine, Chairman of ITU-T Study Group 17, presentation
• Mr Igor Faynberg, Technical Manager, NGN Standards, and Technologies and ITU-T FGNGN WG 5 Leader, presentation
• Mr Magnus Nyström, RSA Security, presentation
• Mr Charles Brookson, Head of Technology and Standards, Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), UK, presentation
• Mr Igor Furgel, Common Criteria, T-Systems GEI GmbH, presentation
• Mr Bill McCrum, Deputy Director General, Telecom Engineering, Industry Canada, presentation
• Mr Hyun-Cheol Jeong, Senior Research Staff, Korea Information Security Center of KISA, presentation
• Mr Gary Kondakov, Managing Director, Kaspersky Labs in Russia, CIS and Baltic countries, presentation
• Mr Eliot Lear, Consulting Engineer, Network Security, CISCO, pesentation
• Mr Alexander Pogudin, CEO of Center of Financial Technologies, presentation
• Ms Amal Abdallah, Federal Communications Commission, USA, presentation
• Mr Andrey Chapchaev, Director General, Infotecs, presentation
  
  
  

ZDNET Australia is reporting that Australian regulators have signed an agreement with Asia-Pacific nations to step up the war against spam.

Twelve Asia-Pacific communications and Internet agencies have joined the Australian Communications Authority in signing a memorandum of understanding -- the Seoul-Melbourne Anti-Spam Agreement --on cooperation in countering spam.

ACA acting chairman Bob Horton said the memorandum was "focused on sharing knowledge, information and intelligence about known sources of spam, network vulnerabilities, methods of spam propagation, and technical, educational and policy solutions to the spam problem".

Other agencies involved include:

• the Internet Society of China;
• Commerce, Industry and Technology Bureau, Hong Kong (CITB);
• Philippines Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT);
• Philippines Computer Emergency Response Team (PH-CERT);
• the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC);
• the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Japan (METI);
• Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Japan (MIC);
• New Zealand Ministry of Economic Development (MED);
• Taiwan Computer Emergency Response Team / Coordination Centre (TWCERT/CC) and;
• the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, Kingdom of Thailand (MICT).

The new document is based on an agreement signed in late 2003 between the ACA, the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) -- since renamed the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) -- and the Korea Information Security Agency.

Furthering cooperation among international initiatives in countering spam will also be discussed at the ITU's upcoming WSIS Thematic Meeting on Cybersecurity which will begin with a countering spam day as a following up to ITU's meeting in July 2004 on countering spam.

ITU-T is hosting a workshop on IPv6 organized in cooperation with the European Union’s IPv6 Task Force Steering Committee (IPv6 EU TF-SC) and the IPv6 Forum. Here is the advanced programme.

Taking place in Geneva, between 22 to 23 June 2005, the event will examine the current status of IPv6, with regards to rollout, policy, technology and applications. An additional aim will be to promote awareness of IPv6 to countries where Internet use is relatively low. The workshop will also follow-up on recent comments sent to the Director of ITU-T’s secretariat, the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB) on the management and distribution of IP addresses. .

ITU-T Workshop on NGN in collaboration with IETF will be held in Geneva at ITU Headquarters on 1 - 2 May 2005. The workshop will also serve as an important meeting point for ITU-T and IETF management.

The overall objectives of the workshop are to explore specific NGN issues that impact both the ITU-T and the IETF to better understand the work underway in the two organizations and to identify areas where actions could be taken between the ITU-T and IETF to further coordinate their work. Six sessions will each be co-chaired by an ITU representative and a representative from IETF. Topics will include requirements and functional architecture; nomadicity and mobility; QoS, control and signalling capabilities; network management; security capabilities and evolution.

The workshop, the second on NGN in 2005, is an example of the way in which ITU-T is seeking to engage all interested parties in work towards the development of worldwide standards for NGN. Objectives of the workshop include:

• To explore specific NGN issues that impact both the ITU-T and the IETF to better understand the work underway in the two organizations; and
• To identify those areas where actions could be taken between the ITU-T and the IETF to further should coordinate their NGN-related work., and to seek to reach agreement on any actions to be taken to coordinate the work of the two organizations and perhaps establish joint activities.

Also see the ITU press release:

The objectives of the workshop are to report the progress of ITU’s work on NGN and explore specific issues that impact both the ITU and the IETF in order to better understand the work underway in the two organizations and to identify areas where action can be taken to make further progress.

Houlin Zhao, Director of the ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau notes that, "We have made tremendous progress, thanks to the support of ITU members and members of other standards developing organizations such as IETF, ETSI and ATIS. The momentum that this work has achieved will allow the ICT industry to develop a raft of new products and services on a much more powerful and dynamic infrastructure based on globally accepted standards."

An experts workshop on Ubiquitous Network Societies was held from 6 to 8 April 2005 in Geneva, Switzerland at ITU Headquarters. The Chair's Report from the meeting is available here. Workshop presentations can be downloaded here. The background and thematic papers presented at the workshop include:

Thematic/Background Papers

• Background paper: Ubiquitous Network Societies: The Case of Radio Frequency Identification (PDF)  
• Background paper: Privacy and Ubiquitous Network Societies (PDF)
• Background paper: Ubiquitous Network Societies: Their impact on the telecommunication industry (PDF)

Country Case Studies

• Ubiquitous Network Societies: The Case of Japan  (PDF)
• Ubiquitous Network Societies: The Case of the Republic of Singapore (PDF)
• Ubiquitous Network Societies: The Case of Korea (PDF)
• Ubiquitous Network Societies: The Case of Italy (PDF).  See also Ubiquitous Network Societies - Survey on the Case of Italy (PDF)

Our workshop in Seoul, Korea has finished today and it was a nice success. Lots of thought provoking ideas on how to globally improve information systems security and network infrastructure protection. Korea has been an excellent place to hold the workshop as they have made tremendous progress here on the technical, policy, legislative and enforcement fronts. There was a much consensus that there was a need for better international standards and implementation, information sharing, halting cyber-attacks in progress, coordinating legal systems, and providing assistance to developing countries. The workshop site is being updated with the papers and presentations made during the last two and a half days. The Chairman's report should also be available there shortly.

Dr. Steven Bryen  of Aurora Defense presented at our workshop that closed today a paper entitled A Collective Security Approach To Protecting The Global Critical Infrastructure. The paper makes a brief mention of Echelon and it was interesting to run across this article published on Cyrptome that recently appeared in the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet. It reports to be an interview with one of the architects of Echelon II.

Korea has (by far) the highest broadband penetration in the world with about 7.8 million households with broadband connectivity, representing 30% of Korea's 25 million Internet users (2001). Here in Seoul at our workshop, we've just had a very interesting presentation on the present status of Cyber-Crime and Cyber-terrorism in Korea and the counter measures that the Korean Cyber-Terror Response Center of the Korean National Policy Agency are taking. In 2001, they made 7,595 arrests for hacking, virus attacks, etc. Of those, 1,473 they classified as cyber-terrorism. In Korea, they have 651 members of the police force dedicated to cyber-crime activites. 232 police stations have 495 police officers tasked to deal with cyber-crime. Absolutely amazing numbers indicating that the government has no tolerance for this activity. Is this the price that will be paid when broadband is deployed? I guess all those "always-on" broadband connections are tempting targets for launching zombie attacks...

The ITU Strategy and Policy Unit, with the support of the Korean Administration is running a workshop on Creating Trust in Critical Network Infrastructures. Lots of thought-provoking papers and presentations are being given.