ICTs are now in all walks of life: work; health; entertainment; transportation; education; trade etc. We are living in an increasingly globalised world – a complex, interdependent world. The importance of standards to sustain this world is now very evident, and with this increasing globalisation, international standards are becoming ever more essential.

 

International standards ensure that global networks can interoperate, that products from different manufacturers are compatible, and that vendors, operators, service providers and consumers' benefit from the lower costs resulting from the economies of scale, and competition, that international standards create.

 

ITU’s business has been producing international standards to ensure interconnection and interoperability of international telecommunication ever since its foundation in 1865. At that point in time the major challenge was to overcome the cross border incompatibility of the telegraph service. Indeed, interoperability remains one of ITU’s core functions. However, the ever increasing complexity and convergence of the telecommunications and information technology sector, the changing regulatory environment, and the multitude of other standards bodies that have been created make this far more challenging today. Despite this ITU has continually adapted and reformed itself to cope with the changing environment, and it is now recognised as one of the most resilient organisations that exist.

 

Collaboration and cooperation, rather than competition, between these various stakeholders is the key. This is important to avoid duplication of effort, confusion in the market place, and the chance of becoming locked into proprietary standards.

 

ITU’s standardization sector (ITU-T) has three strategic objectives:

 

ITU’s mission is to produce international standards, not national or regional standards, but standards that can be implemented on a world-wide basis. This means they must satisfy the requirements of the full ITU membership: 193 governments and over 700 private sector entities.

 

It also means that anyone anywhere has the right to build equipment or provide services that meet these standards. It means that any patents in the standards must be made available either free of charge or on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. Indeed this principle is upheld in a common IPR policy that ITU has with the two other international standards organisations, also based in Geneva: ISO and IEC, with whom ITU works very closely with under the umbrella of the World Standards Cooperation (WSC).

 

IPR policy is a very critical and a very topical issue at the moment.

 

The second strategic objective is to bridge the standards gap, what this means is to involve as many of the ITU member countries as possible in the development of standards. I am plesed to say we have been quite successful in this with over 40 new countries participating in our work since 2006, 16 just last year: countries that had never participated in the standards sector before.

 

The third strategic objective is collaboration with other national, and regional standards bodies, forums and consortia. ITU has 5 MoUs and over 60 cooperation agreements with other SDOs and forums, and allows ITU to incorporate others’ standards into its standards rather than to develop competing or duplicate standards.

 

The convergence of the telecommunication and information technology sectors has meant that the traditional demarcation lines between the activities of different standards bodies are becoming increasingly blurred, and this increases the risk of overlap and duplication of activities.

 

In 2009 ITU established a high-level industry advisory group consisting of over twenty Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) from many of the world’s leading ICT companies. The proliferation of standards bodies and the resut confusing standards landscape is one of their major concerns.

 

This time last year the ITU Global Standards Symposium (GSS) in Dubai recognized that the steadily growing role of ICT in other economic sectors, notably the healthcare, transportation, and utility sectors, created a further challenge for global standards makers, namely that each of these sectors has its own ecosystem, with distinct characteristics and requirements, differing product life cycles and standards landscapes, policy and regulatory aspects, issues related to ownership of data, safety, security and privacy requirements.

 

The GSS affirmed the importance of standards organizations collaborating between and among themselves in order to improve efficiency in standards work, reduce the risk of market confusion, and improve interoperability.

 

 As a result the World Telecommunication Standardisation Assembly (WTSA) that followed the GSS established a Review Committee to identify means to enhance cooperation with standards bodies with a view to miniise conflict of standards.

 

This week’s meeting of the Chief Technology Officers’ Group decided to contribute to the work of the Review Committee and also called for the development of bilateral coordination between ITU and SDOs. This is particularly relevant in the case of ICT standardization for the vertical sectors, for example in health and transport.

 

The CTO Group recognised the need for ITU to work closely with ISO, IEC, IEEE and IETF in addition to the traditional SDOs, and welcomed the increasing collaboration with IEEE, especially the joint development of Carrier Ethernet standards, and ITU hosting of IEEE meetings. In particular it called for close collaboration with IEEE on passive optical networks.

 

So this is why cooperation to create global standards is such an important and topical subject for discussion, and why ITU places such importance on building collaborative relationships with all the relevant bodies. I look forward to the discussion and any suggestions on how ITU can do more to achieve this objective, and I invite everyone to contribute to the Review Committee which will meet in Geneva in January next year.