PTC'19 - Pacific Workshop: From Pipes to Platform; The Pacific Context

PTC'19 - Pacific Workshop: From Pipes to Platform; The Pacific Context

20 January 2019 - Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

Aloha, everyone! It is a great pleasure to be here, and I thank the Pacific Islands Telecommunications Association for the kind invitation to address you today.  ITU has had excellent collaboration with PITA over many years and so I am very happy to have this chance to join you today, as I did the last time I participated in PTC two years ago. My colleague Ioane Koroivuki, ITU Regional Director for Asia Pacific was meant to join me but unfortunately his visa was delayed. He sends you his best wishes.

The beautiful Pacific islands enjoy a diversity of people, cultures and ideas. Yet we are living through a time of accelerating globalization. Technologies are converging. Industries are converging. And our world is becoming increasingly connected. So much so that now more than half of the world’s population is now using the Internet. ICTs permeate all walks of life, economies and industries. With the roll-out of submarine cables in the Pacific, and new satellite networks coming onstream, things will radically change in the Pacific. With connectivity, new platforms will become available to take advantage of technology developments such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Cloud computing, Internet of Things and 5G.

As so often, it is not one technology, but a meeting of technologies, that will create a revolution.

These technologies are now enabling innovations in healthcare, financial services, energy, transport, education and smart cities and communities. They will be essential for the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals - all 17 SDGs - and Artificial Intelligence will influence almost all aspects of societies and economies. 

We are seeing extraordinary advances at the intersection of various fields of innovation. Industries are entering new shared space. They are becoming competitors as well as collaborators. And they need common technical standards more than ever to ensure openness and interoperability, to reduce costs through economies of scale, and to avoid getting locked into propriety standards.

ITU’s membership is growing and becoming much more diverse as a result. And ITU needs to work with many different sectors and organizations with which it has no historical ties. Collaboration, coordination and cooperation are key words. We need to bring our own specific competencies to the table, pool or resources and avoid duplication of effort.

This is why our collaboration with PITA is so important. Last year ITU organized with PITA’s assistance workshops in Fiji on Numbering Misuse and ICT Statistics, and in Solomons a workshop on Spectrum Management. Joint ITU/PITA workshops were held on
Traffic Management & Advanced Wireless Network Planning, Digital Skills and the Asia Pacific Information Superhighway. I thank Fiji for hosting all these events.

I thank PITA for participating in ITU’s events such as the Satellite Symposium in Bangkok and the Regional Development Forums in Manila, Bali and Bangkok.

Key thematic areas are being identified where ITU will work with PITA in 2019 and this year’s Global Symposium for Regulators will be held in Vanuatu 9-12 July.

One of the most important areas of ITU’s work this year will be the international standardization of 5G. The World Radiocommunication Conference in Egypt will decide on the additional spectrum for 5G in the frequency range between 24 GHz and 86 GHz. 5G will change things radically. It will give access to highly reliable, high capacity, low latency communications, where trusted ICTs will be central to innovation in every industry sector. It will turn connectivity into a platform benefiting people, things and industries. And expectations for 5G are high. Research suggests that 5G could unlock worldwide over $12 trillion of new revenue and 22 million jobs.

Software is driving a revolution in networking, enabling the creation of virtual network ‘slices’ able to meet the specific needs of any particular ICT application. With software doing jobs traditionally done by highly specialized hardware, infrastructure is becoming more affordable and networks more flexible, resulting in some very promising ICT applications.

Let us look at a few examples.

Your smartphone camera is now able to capture and transmit images and video of the quality necessary to guide medical interventions. The value of Artificial Intelligence in analyzing this unstructured data contributes to the considerable optimism we see surrounding AI in health.

With the help of Artificial Intelligence, low-tech solutions are achieving better predictions than our best human specialists. We can now imagine this kind of analysis being done at home in the future.

This is why ITU and WHO joined forces last year to launch a new initiative to leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence for health. A new ITU Focus Group called “AI for Health” is open to all stakeholders bringing together researchers, engineers, practitioners, entrepreneurs and policy makers to develop international standards that will save lives.

We have seen similar remarkable breakthroughs in digital financial services.

This week the second symposium of the “Financial Inclusion Global Initiative” will be held in Cairo. This was established by ITU, the World Bank Group, and the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It brings together all stakeholders, including the regulators from the telecom sector and those from the financial sector, to develop policies and interoperable standards to accelerate digital financial inclusion.

The list of new ICT applications built on convergence goes on and on…

The data generated by citizens’ mobile phones and Internet of Things will help governments improve environmental sustainability, increase disaster preparedness and response, and deliver better public services.

ICT platforms provide the basis for these and many more such applications which will create significant improvements in the quality of life enjoyed by millions of people worldwide.

ITU is here to help the Pacific region in any way it can. We know it is not easy participating in ITU work when so many of our meetings are held so far way. However, ITU is in the forefront of using remote participation in meetings, and last year we had over 3000 delegates participating remotely. So, I very much hope we will see greater participation from the Pacific Islands once connectivity is improved. Only by participating can you ensure your own specific requirements are taken into account and that ITU can better address your needs.

The day is near where the Pacific Islands will be truly part of the connected world.

I wish you a very productive discussion, and once gain thank you for the invitation.