GLOBAL SYMPOSIUM FOR REGULATORS 14 - 15 November 2005 Yasmine Hammamet, Tunisia

Press Clippings

1. Regulating in a Broadband World (ITU News No.10)
   
2. Liberalise phones protocol call (Botswana Daily News)
   
3. ITU Global Symposium for Regulators Forges New Broadband Vision (myadsl.co.za)
   
4. ITU Global Symposium for Regulators Forges New Broadband Vision (Pria Chetty)
   
5. Harnessing broadband technologies to achieve the information society (INTUG)
   
6. ITU: New draft "Best Practice Guidelines for Spectrum Management (WISP Centric)
   
7. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to hold its 6^th Global Symposium for Regulators in Hammamet on November 14-15, 2005 (Tunisia Online News)
   
8. ITU: New draft "Best Practice Guidelines for Spectrum Management to Promote Broadband Access" (Open Spectrum)

Regulating in a broadband world

The sixth annual ITU Global Symposium for Regulators (GSR), held in Yasmine Hammamet, Tunisia, on 14-15 November 2005, brought together 390 participants representing regulators, policy-makers and service providers from 110 countries to develop a new vision of a regulatory framework to promote the deployment of broadband communication services, and access to them, in developing countries.

Just a few years ago, ITU's main challenge for the developing world was articulated by the Maitland Commission, which sought to identify the missing link to bring basic voice services to...(English - Spanish - French)

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Liberalise phones protocol call

TUNISIA - The Global Symposium for Regulators (GSR) wrapped up it business in Tunisia on Tuesday with a call to liberalise a protocol that allows telephone calls using a computer network, such as the Internet.

The Voice over the Internet Protocol (VoIP) converts the voice signal from a telephone into a digital signal that travels over the Internet and converts it back to someone with a regular phone number.

VoIP is not liberalised in Botswana for fear that it could financially affect the Botswana Telecommunications Corporation (BTC) in a negative way.

Twoba Koontse, Botswana Telecommunications Authority (BTA) director of communications told BOPA that GSR felt there was need to regulate the protocol.

Koontse, who attended the two-day meeting in Hammamet city, said the regulation was inevitable, particularly that some business people had bypassed the BTC system and sold cards that could make calls.

He said the regulators were, however, against the overburdening of the market with stringent conditions and suggested a light touch regulation.

The 6th annual GSR held under the theme, Effective Regulation in a Broadband World also focused on three other tools to build the information society.

They were spectrum management to promote wireless broadband access and international efforts to combat Spam.

Another GSR participant, Oshinka Tsiang, also of BTA, said the developing world had to get access to broadband - technology that allows quick access to the Internet and could accommodate more services due to the availability of a wide band of frequencies.

If we want to be a global player in the ICT world, we have to communicate at the same speed with the developed nations. We also need broadband to attract investors, he said.

He said Spam, which is a universal threat to the development and security of the Internet, should be dealt with at national, regional and international levels.

Spam is flooding the Internet and cellular phones with the same messages and forcing them on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it.

For instance, Tsiang described some Spam as commercial advertising, malicious and political and explained that laws were being reviewed under Maitlamo, a Botswana national ICT policy, to address the issue.

The BTA board chairperson Dr John Mothibi and chief executive Moshe Lekaukau also participated in the International Telecommunication Union symposium, which attracted 130 participants. BOPA, 18 November 2005 - See article

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ITU Global Symposium for Regulators Forges New Broadband Vision

The International Telecommunication Union’s 6th annual Global Symposium for Regulators (GSR), held in Yasmine Hammamet, Tunisia from 14-15 November 2005, gathered regulators, policy makers and service providers from 110 countries to develop a new regulatory framework to promote broadband deployment and access in developing countries.
Posted by Pria Chetty, Monday, November 21, 2005 - See article

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Harnessing broadband technologies to achieve the information society

Salam Alaikum

Good morning ladies and gentlemen

Welcome to this session on harnessing broadband technologies to achieve the information society.

I would remind you to turn off mobile phones since they can interrupt the proceedings and interfere with the sound system.

I cannot be expected to resist the observation that at roaming prices they are also rather expensive.

The speakers in this panel are the result of a public call for participation and a subsequent beauty contest conducted by the staff of the ITU-Development sector.

There was no auction and there will be no trading of minutes between speakers!

I was not on the panel selecting the speakers. My job is merely to keep them to time, not least by confining myself to five minutes, and to ensure that there is a high level of participation in the discussion. So please prepare your questions and comments.

We must not try to compensate limited time by speaking quickly, that just annoys the interpreters and makes their jobs more difficult. It is also frustrating for those who are not native listeners to the languages spoken. Rather we must all concentrate on identifying the key issues for regulatory decision making.

The speakers get a maximum of eight minutes. They are:

Mahmoud Dasser (Cisco Systems)
Jose Toscano (International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, ITSO)
Mahmoud Mahmoud Metwally Nour (TE Data)
Peter Pitsch (INTEL)
Tom Phillips (GSM Association)
Joseph Lawrence (Qualcomm Inc.)
Before them, the GSR Discussion Paper on Broadband Provisioning will be presented by Bjørn Pehrson of the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology and Michael Best of MIT.

Anyone wishing to make comments on the paper, is welcome to do so. They should send their comments by 5th December 2005, to the ITU-D.

The speakers will be followed by Michael and Bjørn who get a chance to comment on the papers and by Knud Erik Skouby of DTU.

I should first note that our friends at UNESCO do not like the term "information society", they prefer "knowledge society". So there is a question about our target and the appropriateness of our focus on technologies. We need to keep in mind that there is more to this than infrastructure, that there are issues about business models, about competitive access across the infrastructure to provide services and about ensuring access to services and, of course, interoperability. We need to have a flourishing content business.

Some countries try to pass off 256 or 512 kbits/s as "broadband", but we could have built that with ISDN in the 1980s and saved ourselves a lot of trouble.

We are not looking at voice or dial-up speeds, but at "warp speed" connections and the services that they enable.

We need to focus on deliverable speeds, not on improbable speeds achieved only under light loading or under test conditions in a laboratory, but in real and especially commercial operations, especially in rural areas of developing countries. That may well mean trade-offs between using the same spectrum for voice or for value-added services and may require significant additional investments.

In Japan we can see very low, certainly very affordable, prices for speeds of 50 and 100 Mbits/s from fixed broadband, of the order of ¥4,000 to ¥6,000 per month. It was competition on ADSL that drove the increase in those speeds during 2004. Japan is adding around 100,000 fibre lines a month and has a total of over 2,000,000; so there is no shortage of investment. A significant part of the success comes from the momentum of very rapid attraction of customers.

The fastest residential service that I know of is in Hong Kong SAR, where HKBN has an offer of 1,000 Megabits/s directly connected into the HK IP exchange. That is on offer today.

So we can see that the target is speeds of the order of one Gigabit per second. That is before we allow for any further technological advances, which we can be quite certain will occur.

In mentioning Hong Kong, there was an ITU workshop near there, in Shenzhen, on Broadband wireless access for rural and remote areas in September. The documents are well worth reading as are those from an earlier event, the OECD workshop in Porto on Developing broadband access for rural and remote areas held last year.

There is a useful paper from the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) on The Economic Advantage of Wireless Infrastructure for Development.

In looking at broadband for rural areas we need to think in terms of Bottom Of the Pyramid (BOP), the term coined by C K Prahalad for the great mass of unserved or potential consumers. By designing services for them and by achieving the economies of scale that permits, we can ensure access for the poorest.

We have to think not only of the BOP as consumers, but also as producers of content. So we need to think of the return path to upload content to servers and for peer-to-peer and of access to appropriate software tools.

Traditionally, even in developed countries, rural areas have been the last place to see competition. Often supply has been made possible only with governmental subsidy. Sometimes, that subsidy is contrived to operate a way that excludes competition.

The European Union rules on state aid for electronic communications seem to have helped municipal and regional authorities to develop schemes that fit within a competitive market. By comparison, the debate in the USA has been much less pleasant, with municipal authorities having been accused of trying to do everything up to undermining capitalism and the American way of life.

The problem with subsidies is that often there is no sunset clause, they go on forever. That sort of model is a problem in a developed country, it is utterly impossible in a developing country.

We need to consider the forms of interconnection between networks. Are these, for example, peering? Is there to be non-discriminatory access?

We have already seen some operators try to block access to certain services, based on terms and conditions of their contract. Some countries are familiar with the problems of "walled gardens".

The CEO of SBC, soon to be renamed AT&T, recently railed against providers of search engines and VoIP who were not paying to use "his" pipes, even if his customers have already paid. [see Business Week]

I think we can best steer clear of the point scoring of the various lobbies for CDMA, GSM, WiMAX, 4G, 5G and beyond. The concept that "my network is bigger than your's" or "we have more customers than you" is not especially helpful at the policy level.

Size matters because it should make the technology cheap and because it allows you to communicate with more people. However, you can interconnect heterogenous networks. Rapidity of uptake is also important to help reduce the unit costs in manufacturing.

One very real question concerns uncertainty about the scale. ADSL seems to need many millions of lines and so tends to be national in coverage. However, WISPs seem to be able to survive on much smaller numbers of customers. The policy implication is that we need to allow for variations in size. We might want to opt for smaller networks first, with the fallback that we can allow consolidation later if and only if it does not harm competition.

The pre-paid model for cellular telephony has worked well to help expand 2G voice and SMS.

However, it is far from clear what will be the equivalent for broadband Internet access. We do not seem to have the new business model yet. That has implications for regulation, again in encouraging experimentation. Since we do not know what the business model will be, we are obliged to encourage experimentation.

The questions for the GSR are what really works and where, what are we uncertain about and what issues do we need to see tested either technically or commercially and how can we keep each other informed about successes and failures.

We can also refer matters to the World Telecommunications Development Conference to be held in Doha in March and also to the World Radiocommunications Conference in Geneva in October 2007.

That is enough from me, the first speaker please.

by Ewan Sutherland (INTUG), 14 November 2005, Hammamet - see article

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ITU: New draft "Best Practice Guidelines for Spectrum Management

The Guidelines reiterate the principles unanimously endorsed at the 2004 GSR, adding refinements gleaned in a more recent consultation with regulators. Some 32 national agencies participated in the consultation, along with the ASEAN group representing 10 countries. We quoted excerpts from the responses in a 6 September news item http://www.volweb.cz/horvitz/os-info/news-sep05-004.html. The new draft is likely to be revised in small ways during GSR 2005, which ends today.

The Guidelines are an ambitous attempt to define a new global consensus on "best practices" in radio spectrum management. The language is non-coercive but pulls no punches: "...the onus is on regulators to adjust, alter or reform their regulatory codes, wherever possible, to dismantle unnecessary rules which today may adversely affect the operation of wireless technologies and systems. A new set of spectrum management principles and practices will enable countries to harness the full potential of wireless broadband technologies..."

The Guidelines promote flexibility, efficiency, transparency and minimization. "Flexible use measures" include:

* "Recognizing that wireless broadband services may be used for both commercial and non-commercial uses (e.g., for community initiatives or public and social purposes) and that broadband wireless spectrum can be allocated for non-commercial uses with lower regulatory burdens, such as reduced, minimal or no spectrum fees; regulators can also allocate and assign spectrum for community or non-commercial use of broadband wireless services...

* "Adopting lighter regulatory approaches in rural and less congested areas, such as flexible regulation of power levels, the use of specialized antennas, the use of simple authorizations, the use of geographic licensing areas, lower spectrum fees and secondary markets in rural areas...

* "Recognizing the role that both non-licensed (or licence-exempt) and licensed spectrum can play in the promotion of broadband services, balancing the desire to foster innovation with the need to control congestion and interference. One measure is to allow small operators to start operations using licence-exempt spectrum, and then moved to licensed spectrum when the business case is proved..."

As for managing spectrum efficiently, the Guidelines note that "Regulators can promote advanced spectrum efficient technologies that allow co-existence with other radio communications services, using interference mitigation techniques like dynamic frequency selection and spread spectrum technology..."

But we noticed a few minor lapses: in the Introduction, the draft speaks of "consumers" rather than "users," and their list of good spectrum sharing practices omits coding. However, the Guidelines are bound to be influential and encourage liberalization.

Written by Site Admin - WISP Centric
Tuesday, 15 November 2005
http://www.volweb.cz/horvitz/os-info/news-nov05-019.html - see article

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The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to hold its 6 th Global Symposium for Regulators in Hammamet on November 14-15, 2005

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), under whose authority the Tunis WSIS will be held, is also holding its 6th Global Symposium for Regulators on November 13-14 at the Conference center of the “medina” in Yasmine Hammamet. The theme for this year’s symposium is “Regulation in the broad-band world: key instruments to build an information society”.

The Symposium, which will be held in collaboration with the Tunisian National Telecommunications Authority and with the support of the Ministry of communication technologies, will gather about 400 participants from 100 countries. It is significant that the GSR is holding its 6th meeting almost back to back with the Tunis WSIS which is due to take place on November 16-18, 2005.

Several important and timely issues in the world of telecommunications will be debated, these include the benefits of broad –band technologies, the fight against spam, and IP voice regulation among others. Recent research has shown the superiority of broad–band technology compared with the more ‘traditional’ Wi-Fi.
Tunis, 31 October 2005 (Tunisia Online) - see article

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ITU: New draft "Best Practice Guidelines for Spectrum Management to Promote Broadband Access"

New draft guidelines for promoting wireless broadband access were released yesterday at the ITU's 2005 Global Symposium for Regulators (GSR) in Geneva. The draft is now online in English and in Russian.

The Guidelines reiterate the principles unanimously endorsed at the 2004 GSR, adding refinements gleaned in a more recent consultation with regulators. Some 32 national agencies participated in the consultation, along with the ASEAN group representing 10 countries. We quoted excerpts from the responses in a 6 September news item. The new draft is likely to be revised in small ways during GSR 2005, which ends today.

The Guidelines are an ambitous attempt to define a new global consensus on "best practices" in radio spectrum management. The language is non-coercive but pulls no punches: "...the onus is on regulators to adjust, alter or reform their regulatory codes, wherever possible, to dismantle unnecessary rules which today may adversely affect the operation of wireless technologies and systems. A new set of spectrum management principles and practices will enable countries to harness the full potential of wireless broadband technologies..."

The Guidelines promote flexibility, efficiency, transparency and minimization. "Flexible use measures" include:

"Recognizing that wireless broadband services may be used for both commercial and non-commercial uses (e.g., for community initiatives or public and social purposes) and that broadband wireless spectrum can be allocated for non-commercial uses with lower regulatory burdens, such as reduced, minimal or no spectrum fees; regulators can also allocate and assign spectrum for community or non-commercial use of broadband wireless services...
"Adopting lighter regulatory approaches in rural and less congested areas, such as flexible regulation of power levels, the use of specialized antennas, the use of simple authorizations, the use of geographic licensing areas, lower spectrum fees and secondary markets in rural areas...
"Recognizing the role that both non-licensed (or licence-exempt) and licensed spectrum can play in the promotion of broadband services, balancing the desire to foster innovation with the need to control congestion and interference. One measure is to allow small operators to start operations using licence-exempt spectrum, and then moved to licensed spectrum when the business case is proved..."
As for managing spectrum efficiently, the Guidelines note that "Regulators can promote advanced spectrum efficient technologies that allow co-existence with other radio communications services, using interference mitigation techniques like dynamic frequency selection and spread spectrum technology..."

But we noticed a few minor lapses: in the Introduction, the draft speaks of "consumers" rather than "users," and their list of good spectrum sharing practices omits coding. However, the Guidelines are bound to be influential and encourage liberalization.

UPDATE: The final version of the 2005 Guidelines is online here. The passages quoted above survived more or less intact, but a few phrases were added to recognize that regulators are not free to change policies abruptly.

Spectrum Policy: 15 November 2005 - See article