Last December, our national leaders adopted the Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action at the
World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva. This set out
challenges for future work on Internet governance, concerned with
networks and services using the Internet Protocol. Achiving
an information society requires a great deal of work on national ICT
strategies with a difficult mixture of technical and policy, present
and near future issues.
At the heart of this is the need to ensure that competition is allowed
to
deliver the benefits to users that should flow from innovation.
Internet
traffic
One task that the WSIS established was for further work on Internet
eXchange Centres (IXCs).
There was a very useful debate
on this at ITU Telecom Africa in May. This made clear that there
remained significant lessons to be learned and changes to be made. In
some cases incumbent telecommunications operators were operating a
bottleneck, by limiting and overcharging access to the international
undersea cables.
Underlying this is the issue of domestic and international leased
lines, to which we will return this afternoon. One example is that
for international circuits from Africa to the USA, the charges to ISP
are paid 80 per cent to the African telecommunications operators and 20
per cent to the operators in the USA.
A separate debate has been underway for half a decade on International
Internet Connectivity (IIC). This resulted in the adoption, only the
week before last, of an annex to ITU-T Recommendation D.50. However, it
is a very weak sort of guidance that seems very unlikely to provide
much progress for least developed countries.
By comparison, work on IXCs seems much more fruitful and
an ITU workshop on this topic would be very welcome.
The exchange of Internet traffic will remain a significant issue up to
the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)
in Tunisia in November 2005.
Voice
over Internet Protocol
VoIP has been the subject of discussion at the OECD and the ITU in the
last few days. AT&T was clear in emphasising Service over IP
(SoIP), rather than just VoIP.
It has also been the subject of consultation by any number of national
regulators, for example, Germany
and Spain,
plus the European
Commisison and the CEPT.
The issues raised in these discussions include:
the financial effect on operators
the consequent effect on government revenues.from taxation and
especially contributions to the Universal Service Fund (USF)
access to emergency services, including the provision of location
information
access for the disabled to telephony services
provision for wire tapping and data retention for law enforcement
assignment of telephone numbers
quality of service
VoIP is being deployed very quickly and often invisibly to users. It is
a speed that is significantly faster than policy makers usually have to
keep pace with. For example, some policy
makers still consider callback to be illegal yet VoIP is considerably
more disruptive.
There is also the issue of the regulation of the interconnection of
VPNs, an issue with INTUG has raised at APECTEL.
Mobile
networks
As VoIP prices tumble, the question arises of the high cost of calls to
mobile networks. It is making them look more conspicuous and appears
likely to reduce the ability of MNOs to continue to increase the number
of minutes of calls originating on their networks. VoIP should allow
fixed operators to recover some lost ground.
There is an unpleasant catch for mobile network operators with the
introduction of IP capabilities. They claim they can deliver video to a
handset, but if it is to be affordable then the cost per bit must fall
to a level where voice is effectively free. Yet, they do not know what
is the level of demand or the willingness to pay for video and other
new services. To complicate matters, there are alternative networks to
deliver
entertainment to mobile phones. These include Digiral Audio
Broadcasting (DAB) and Digiral Video Broadcasting (DVB) plus satellite
broadcasting. All three have a data-casting capability, even to
individual devices, so that they can compete with data transmission
services. There are a range of different models in Wi-Fi and WiMax that
are still the subject of experiment..
The roll-out of 3G has been very slow, except in Korea and Japan. Even
2G or 2.5G services such as GPRS are too expensive to use extensively.
This is an issue that Rosemary Sinclair will return to tomorrow at
CommunicAsia..
Ubiquitous
networks
In Japan the preferred term is ubiquitius network, rather than Next
Generation Networks (NGN). Massive bandwidth will be available wherever
we are.
Both for operators and users, it can be attractive to bundle the costs
into a single monthly bill for services over IP. However, this may be
anti-competitive, as players leverage power from one sector where they
are dominant into another. Exclusive deals on content may disadvantage
other broadband players. .
