ITU Telecom World

We are under a growing wave of cybersecurity attacks. This is putting the private sector, public sector and government bodies under increasing pressure to establish solutions for cybersecurity and investigations. In recognition and in response to this, during the 2011 World Summit for Information Society the United Nations put in place a dedicated arm within ITU, ITU IMPACT,  to deal with cybersecurity across all 193 member states.

Most member states face the same problem: the proliferation of Internet access and web-enabled devices is leading to an increase in the volume and sophistication of cybercrime. Yet the reality is that most cybercrime response forces are ill-equipped in terms of forensic staff and investigative technologies to deal with the nature, volume and velocity of these cases, leading to bottlenecks and huge backlogs.

The recent 2013 DBIR Verizon Report, which analysed over 47,000 security incidents globally, further confirmed that geographic borders are no protection against cyber-attacks. Data breaches from 27 countries were analysed as part of the report. The results demonstrated that the majority of financially motivated incidents originated in the US or Eastern Europe and espionage cases predominately originated in East Asia. The message is clear: cyber-attacks cross borders. It follows that a cross-border strategy and approach is essential.  The ITU, with its mandate to build capacity and set the global cybersecurity agenda, is uniquely placed to facilitate a strong, joined-up global response.

As partners of the Cybersecurity Pavilion at ITU Telecom World 2013, our aim is to enable this response and we look forward to seeing you in Bangkok.  Visit Nuix at the Cybersecurity Pavilion (G2) to find out more – or join us for the debate on Building Cybersecurity Capabilities in the Developing World on the showfloor at ITU Telecom World 2013 on Tuesday 19 November.

“Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

–Albert Einstein

Einstein’s often-quoted observation is a good reminder for how the industry should not address “rural broadband.” The last five years have seen a new wave of activities that work to “bridge the digital divide” and enable rural broadband. Yet we see the same mistakes from the past happening in many countries, even countries that should be setting the example for the rest of the world. For example, accusations are reported in the UK media that the UK government favours the “incumbent” as a means to expand broadband coverage, which has not delivered the desired impact.

This policy aspiration vs. policy impact is a recurring theme. How different is our current conversation today about rural broadband to the ones we had about bridging the digital divide? How are the conversations today different from the dialogue before and after the 1982 Maitland Commission Report?

The key difference in today’s conversation is that we have moved from discussing “why” we should bridge the divide to discussing “how” we should bridge the divide. The question however remains about “what” do we use to bridge the divide? What approach is the most appropriate and have the biggest impact? Thesewill be some of the opening questions of the panel debate on “Delivering Broadband to Rural Areas” at ITU Telecom World 2013.

Meanwhile, we need to ask “what is rural broadband”? In many emerging markets 256kbps is already broadband, while in many developed countries, broadband is expected to be anywhere between 10Mbps to 1Gbps. Does rural include sub-urban areas or only remote areas which are usually scarcely populated? The definition does impact the debate about regulations and technologies. Are we talking about bringing fibre or LTE to rural homes, should the government fund this? If so, how should it be funded, and last but not least should it be best addressed in a technology and business model agnostic way?

What is key to keep in mind is that in rural areas, especially in emerging markets, the cost of acquisition and maintenance of a rural customer is very high, leaving very low or little profit margins. Universal service funds therefore have not been able to solve the universal service problem. It is time for a new conversation. It is time for BUSINESS UNUSUAL.

For example, it is often easier and cheaper for grassroots entrepreneurs to bring rural broadband to rural communities and there are many success stories around the world to showcase this. However, regulators may need to intervene to encourage telcos to enter into business arrangements with small rural providers, to provide policy exemptions enabling other smaller players to become “telecom operators” in rural areas and even give preference for any universal service funding to smaller operators, wherever possible. It is actually a win-win for the telecom operator as they can now reach rural customers but deal with the small provider as one customer and hence get a return without the headache of managing each rural customer. This is not unlike a household “offering” bandwidth it buys to the people in the house and buying more bandwidth if there are more people or bandwidth demands to be serviced.

Another aspect of an unusual business model involves tools to bridge the energy divide and the digital divide jointly. In many rural areas, you cannot bridge the digital divide without bridging the energy divide. Approximately 1.4 billion people live without access to electricity and about 1.6 billion without access to telecommunications, and so in many ways the link is very obvious. For telcos, the energy line item for rural telecom cost ranges anywhere from 35% to 75% of OPEX making rural broadband even more unprofitable. The use of energy efficient-technologies and the use of alternative sources of energy such as solar, wind, battery backup and other hybrid solutions are now proving to make better business sense. Yet many telcos and tower companies don’t feel it is their core competency to manage power. In India and Indonesia, there is a rising number of energy services companies offering rural electricity, where the telecom operator, tower company or grassroots telecom entrepreneur is the anchor tenant. More countries should consider policies to encourage this new business model, which will support the spread of broadband as well as renewable energy. In fact, many investors today believe that telecom can be considered to be the “killer app” for renewable energy (telecom needs reliable 24/7 energy and the energy provider gets a consistent anchor tenant).

Ultimately, the key to rural broadband involves innovative technologies, innovative regulations/policies and innovative financing/business models. It is indeed time for BUSINESS UNUSUAL if we are ever to truly bridge the broadband digital divide, let alone just the narrowband digital divide. Policy makers should recognize that they cannot bridge the digital divide without also addressing the energy divide when it comes to rural broadband in emerging markets. Hence policies and funding that favour energy efficient-technologies and/or solutions that run on green energy, and also grassroots entrepreneurs to thrive through win-win relationships with telcos, will help effectively to bring rural broadband for the prosperity of all.

From an innovation perspective, I have always been convinced that “the language we use defines the horizons of our imagination” and so it struck a chord with me when I read in a recent ITU document that “voice calls are no longer the preferred communication mechanism between people”.

This phraseology implies peril for the telecoms industry and a golden opportunity for the internet world. Voice is, however, still the preferred mechanism of human communication but voice calls via a fixed or mobile telephone system are now not the only option available.

This glass half full, myopic misperception leads me to suggest that the business models of telcos are overly focused on the delivery of “coms”. While this has been a highly successful strategy throughout the 20^th century, it is rapidly running out of steam as the internet world and telecoms collide to create the new mobile cloud world of today.

Maybe we should learn from Max Frisch (1911-1991), the Swiss author and critic, who said: “We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes—or rather we have seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are tele-viewers, tele-hearers, tele-knowers”.

So is it time to pivot this focus? Given the colossal change that convergence has forced within a concatenated time frame, the answer should most definitely be “yes”. The challenge for the telecoms industry is to shift its mindset to focus less on the delivery of “coms” and innovatively focus on “tele” – literally meaning “at a distance”.  This demands a focus on innovation that leverages the assets already in place, the layered technology developments of the last 5 years as well as the new ones that are emerging; most importantly, a focus on the evolution of global consumer and business usage needs and patterns. It means combining capabilities and services to “enable engagement over distance”. Now the question to ask is: what is it that tele-consumers and tele-enterprises really need in this 3.0 world?

As an entrepreneur, I have learnt much over the past five years about the concepts and practices of lean startups, and I realize that some of the challenges they face are very often closely aligned to those of the telecoms companies: namely, having to pivot and adopt a change in strategy without changing the vision, as well as creating multiple iterations of minimum viable solutions to solve customers’ real problems; in essence, getting back to what mobile operators were doing naturally in the early days of cellular. This may require smaller out-boarded organizations but, more importantly, a return of the visionary leaders and problem solvers to replace the accountants and managers before they succumb to the same fate that awaits many startups – running out of resources!

So, in conclusion, the ITU World 2013 panel on innovation that I am moderating is about the need for new mindsets and a reevaluation of the telecoms landscape, chiefly because the current map and strategy no longer accurately represent a territory that has been ripped up by the convergence forces of the last five years. I have no doubt that innovation will thrive in the converged industry but the questions still remain: who will the players be and where will this innovation come from?

See Steve’s video on this session  and catch up on the perspectives of many other panel moderators!

My panel session at ITU Telecom World 2013 is about privacy and security.

I would define privacy as the right to keep information about yourself from others. It is often thought to include anonymity and confidentiality of your information. There are many other variations of this basic thought. You may wish, for example, to keep your identity private, or you may wish information to only be available to your close friends and not to anybody else. You may also wish to move or remove information, or be able to change inaccurate information about yourself.

Let us think about the mobile phone. Your operator clearly knows where you are and who you calling, but depending on the services you may be using, other people or applications may also know information about you. This information could be your location, the contents of messages you are sending or numbers you have dialled. It is truly revealing to look at privacy messages that you may agree to when you download and use a particular App on your mobile phone platform. I know of one very common game, for example, where everyone has agreed for it to look at your last number dialled. I am still not clear as to why this would be required!

Another example is a large email provider, who inspects all the words in your emails both sent and received, and targets advertisements at you. Would you say that this is a breach of your freedom, or is it a legitimate use?

It is often argued that information can be anonymised, but this has been proved many times to be ineffectual –  and one can find many examples of inferring an individual’s behaviour from anonymised data. So equally, there must be guidelines for data aggregation as well as data collection.

Naturally, there is a balance between the individual and their right to privacy. If you are a criminal or terrorist, for example, would you have equal rights? Of course all of this becomes more difficult because one person’s terrorist may be another person’s friend. This becomes even more interesting when we look at countries, where what from one viewpoint might be terrorism is from another viewpoint freedom fighters in action.

People also have rights to have their information forgotten. We do not want our fun or holiday pictures to be taken into account when future employers look at our prospects for a job. So should you have separation between your identity as a person with your own legitimate personal activities, compared to somebody in a role or position of power? We all have something that we wish to keep private from others!

The interesting question is: how do we ensure privacy and security in the various services and communications that we might be using? I believe that there should be clear guidelines and easy-to-understand, clear language to offer guidance to the individual. There are many examples of services that keep on changing security settings where it is extremely difficult to secure communications and ensure privacy. Services and products should also have adequate controls with regards privacy and security to protect the individual. For the present, this is not universally true. We need to think carefully to develop clear guidelines and protocols for doing this.

And so the panel should have a very interesting debate on the individual’s rights to privacy and security, and how to balance this against the detection of any illegal activities. We only have to think of recent events to realise what a delicate balance this can be.

Zimbabwe is a land rich in diversity ranging from low-lying semi-desert regions to lush highlands strewn with forests and lakes. It is a country situated on a high plateau in Southern Africa and covering 390 245 km. Zimbabwe’s ICT sector has over the past years entered a new age of opportunity and growth which four years ago would have seemed most unthinkable. This sector has proved to be a key infrastructural enabler for economic growth and has acted as a catalyst for propelling the country into a knowledge society with ubiquitous connectivity.

Just a few years ago, thousands would gather outside our stores, waiting in endless queues for the chance to purchase a simple SIM card. This was the most visible result of years of low investment in telecommunications. Zimbabwe was among the lowest in terms of internet penetration those years and yet, today, a revolution is sweeping across Zimbabwe’s telecommunications industry and the internet penetration rate has risen to just over 35%. While less than 14% of Zimbabweans had access to mobile phones in 2009, today, close to 90% of our people are connected to cellular technology and a significant number has adopted mobile money technology. Zimbabwe today stands as one of the top five nations with the fastest internet speeds on the continent, with the latest 4G LTE now available to ordinary customers. High speed broadband has become the backbone of the knowledge economy as well as a significant contributor to economic growth. The World Bank estimates that a 10% increase in broadband penetration could raise GDP by 1-2%, so Zimbabwe’s ICT industry is on the right track.

According to a report by Opera Mobile, Zimbabwe has been consistently ranked in the top 10 mobile internet users and the biggest African market in terms of page views per user. According to the Zimbabwe Investment Authority, there are a number of investment opportunities in the Zimbabwe ICT sector which range from e-business to business process outsourcing and many others. Beyond telecommunication services, Zimbabwe is a hive of mineral wealth, arable agricultural land, and manufacturing, with great investment opportunities in these sectors. With the ever changing technology, Zimbabwe stands ready to adapt and develop to the future of technology.

This year 8 companies are taking part in ITU Telecom World 2013 in Bangkok Thailand and these are Africom, Econet Wireless Zimbabwe, Liquid Telecom, Telecel Zimbabwe, Netone Cellular, TelOne, Zimbabwe Investment Authority and Potraz the regulator. Zimbabwe is also sponsoring a networking cocktail this year for exhibitors on the 18th of November 2013 in the Gandhi Palace.

Tsunami is a nasty word in Asia; a word that carries the idea of impending disaster. However, it is accurate to say that this is exactly what is facing telco networks in APAC as they struggle to cope with a tidal wave of data generated by their customers.

According to Cisco, global mobile data traffic grew by 70 per cent in 2012, to a level that corresponds to almost 12 times the entire Internet traffic in 2000! The word zettabyte, or one trillion gigabytes, has been coined to describe the new scales that apply in the fixed market. Cisco have stated that they expect that by 2016 global IP traffic will reach 1.3 zettabytes per year. This is ten times more than all IP traffic generated in 2008.

The issue for the operators is how to scale their legacy networks to be able to meet this customer demand. In APAC, fibre and LTE are possible technology solutions – however, this comes at a cost that commercial operators find hard to bear. In Australia, the previous government made a national broadband network a cornerstone of its election policy, claiming that only government had the long-term vision and access to capital required. The NBN Co plan involved the expenditure of US$36 billion over a fifteen-year period to June 21 to bring high-speed broadband to all Australian households, businesses and enterprises, through a combination of Fibre-To-The-Premise (FTTP), Fixed Wireless and Satellite technologies. Promising speeds of up to 100 Mbps, the project was to enable a variety of innovative industries and facilitate the delivery of essential government services.

However, the project is now under threat with the recently elected Australian government claiming that it is too expensive and that by utilizing the legacy copper network for the last tens of metres it can be done cheaper and faster. Whether this is possible is still the subject of vigorous debate with the final outcome not known until after independent reviews.

In many APAC countries, though, due to either geography or economics, wireless will be the only answer to burgeoning data demand. Key to this solution is access to adequate spectrum resources. In Thailand, access to critical 3G spectrum was held up for years due to complex regulatory issues. Now the Thai operators are rushing to implement 3G and 4G technologies simultaneously. In Taiwan operators are battling each other to secure vital 3G/4G frequencies with bids in round 340 currently more than three times reserve prices; while in India, the GSMA has urged for more efficient allocation of scarce spectrum resources.

The evolution of wireless technologies over the past decade has been extraordinary considering that the original standard for 3G specified speeds of 384 kbps for mobile devices, whereas now evolved 3G (3GPP Rel-11) is promising peak data speeds of up to 336 Mbps! In parallel with this development we have the newer LTE standard promising even faster speeds due to its more efficient protocols and all-IP architecture.

Of course, customers couldn’t care less about such details: they simply want to upload and download information and entertainment where and when they want and at an affordable price. With mobile data traffic in APAC forecast to grow 17-fold from 2012 to 2017, a compound annual growth rate of 76%, this represents a formidable challenge to operators and regulators alike. Will they be riding the wave… or underneath it? This is what we’ll be discussing at the panel session Riding the Data Wave at ITU Telecom World 2013 in Bangkok, Thailand.

Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting the Rural Networks Award in the UK’s 2014 Next Generation Digital Challenge  at NexGen 13 held in London.

These awards illustrate the ability of communities and innovators to crack on with finding connectivity solutions regardless of the incumbent’s strategy and solve a multitude of community issues like poor radio and TV reception.  They demonstrate how the utility of local access networks is very different from the openly competitive services that run over them, and remind us that regulation for connectivity and services should also be approached with differing aims and objectives.

It will be interesting in November, when I moderate the ITU Telecom World 2013 debate on Regulatory Convergence (Tuesday, 19 November at 16:15) in Bangkok, Thailand, to see if anyone questions the merits of converged regulation, when these trends towards separation of connectivity and services must be  accommodated in markets where the pressure to enable new access network entrants is growing  apace.

This may of course be peculiar to Europe, although there are many pioneering examples of open network design in the Nordic Countries.

The panel for the debate brings together informed views from Asia, Europe and the USA – We live in interesting times!

Join the conversation. Watch the live webcast of this session (available on this site in November) and share your views through Twitter #ITUWORLD.

Investing in the burgeoning ICT sector in Uganda is vital to drive the growth of the industry, and of the country as a whole.  And making sure the message on Uganda’s digital and broadband initiatives, projects and opportunities gets out to a world of potential investors is a big part of ensuring this happens.

This is why Uganda will be present on the showfloor at ITU Telecom World 2013 with a National Pavilion, showcasing ICT technologies, advancements, innovations and investment opportunities to the event’s uniquely influential global audience. Under the theme of “Uganda – Unleashing the opportunity for ICT”, the Uganda pavilion will be accompanied by a delegation headed by the Minister for Information and Communications Technology, H.E. John Nasasira, and including officials from UCC, the Ministry of ICT and NITA-U, Ministry of Tourism, and other key ICT sector players.

Priority ICT projects open to possible partnerships focus on the need to promote universal access to both voice telephony and data networks throughout the country, including the Rural Communications Development Fund and the National Backbone Infrastructure, which aims to connect all major towns in Uganda on an optical fibre network.

Growing business and economic activity is increasingly dependent on ICT, both as the essential supporting infrastructure and as a source of new initiatives and entrepreneurial start ups. Uganda has focused in particular on business process outsourcing in areas such as customer support services, policy management (including human resources) and data process services such as payroll outsourcing and technical support services.  Also in development are a series of ICT Technology Parks to boost the development of this business process outsourcing and encourage innovation incubation.

The multimedia business in Uganda is still in its infancy, and whatever production made in Uganda is faced with stiff global and regional competition.  This is a particularly exciting area looking to attract  investment to exploit local talent and innovation. Developing local digital content has consistently proved key to driving Internet take up and associated economic growth, in addition to paving the way for the inclusion of all citizens in the digital economy.

Uganda’s ICT sector has much to showcase, talent and technology to demonstrate to the world – and a wealth of potential partnerships and opportunities. There’s no better place to highlight this than the global stage of ITU Telecom World 2013.

Many aspects of life as we know it are being revolutionized by new technologies – and new ways of using new technologies. This is a change that goes far beyond gadgets and geeks, a change with the potential to uproot business models, daily life and society itself.

As curators of interactive exhibition space The Lab at ITU Telecom World 2013, our aim is to illustrate the impact of this technology-based revolution through practical or artistic cutting-edge applications – and to better understand the nature of the future.

No single factor or development is behind this change: it is the conjunction of several elements that makes it so exciting and far-reaching. For example, proprietary systems are now a thing of the past. The magic word of the future is “open.” In tomorrow’s digital marketplace, there’ll be no place for hermetically sealed-off claims of individual providers. Everything is growing together into a vast ecosystem where developers, providers and end users roam and romp worldwide.

Here, “plug and serve” solutions are fed in and offered up, demanded and purchased. Everything and anything can be quickly and conveniently loaded to all sorts of mobile devices, whenever and wherever they’re needed.

Additional impetus is provided by a current development that is nothing less than revolutionary: the so-called internet of things. Nearly all the technical devices and accompanying paraphernalia we use on a daily basis will soon come equipped with sensors, cameras, chips and microprocessors, and be able to be started, operated and updated via the Internet. The quantity of data that will then constantly careen around the Web will be truly gigantic.

The foundation of this digital ecosystem is extremely high-performance, totally pervasive infrastructure that offers everybody optimal network access. But it is equally indispensible that the right balance is achieved between, on the one hand, saving and evaluating user data and behavior, and on the other hand, protecting people’s right to privacy and data security. This is something that won’t just be in the interest of the end user but also of the economy itself, since a lack of trust in the Internet will have a growing—and increasingly negative—influence on potential turnover on the online marketplace.

In the context of an open lab situation, Ars Electronica has assembled artistic commentary on this radical transformation process. We present best-practice examples at the nexus of art, technology and society that show the opportunities and risks that the economy, science, politics, art and whole societies could soon be facing.

This is a matter of new forms of communication and participation, new types of artists and scientific disciplines, unconventional alliances, and business models with great future promise. We throw a spotlight onto the enormous potential of technological innovations and, thus, the changed relationships of power in political and economic life that will inevitably accompany them.

Experience it for yourself at the InnovationSpace Lab on the showfloor at ITU Telecom World 2013 – interact with the future.

Ahead of my Futurist Keynote speech at ITU Telecom World 2013 in November, I’d like to share a few thoughts on the disruptive trends poised to utterly transform the way we live, communicate and do business.

We are entering an era of information tsunamis: mind-boggling global data torrents , all-pervasive social-local-mobile (SoLoMo) connectivity, widespread ‘wikilikean’ transparency expectations (both B2C as well as B2B), rapid changes in interface technologies (AR, gestures, voice-control, nanotechnologies,bionics, AI etc), the hyper-realtime speed of information and media, and of abundant consumer choice in pretty much every sector of commerce and business.

Almost all business – including those in the hereto lesser-impacted B2B sectors such as banking, energy and raw materials – will become socially-driven (especially those based on digital products). Peer to peer recommendations, ratings, endorsements and all kinds of are already widespread but will essentially replace customer relationship management in the near future; the same goes for hiring and general HR needs (witness the rise of LinkedIn as a global HR resource pretty much eliminating the need for traditional headhunters). Since most social business is essentially data-sharing- and permission-driven, data is indeed becoming the new oil. The global and radical empowerment of ‘the people formerly known as consumers’ via cheap, powerful and ubiquitous SoLoMo technologies will be a huge game changer (yes, both an opportunity and threat) – and this will really get cooking when another 3 billion in the BRICS and other emerging markets come online. You thought it was confusing now – just give it another 2 years.

There will be data, data, enormous big data, everywhere. Data levels, depth and sheer frequency will reach previously unimaginable pace and proportions, and anyone / anything having to do with data-mining and management will be in very high demand. The consequence: curation, context, relevance, timeliness and overall sense and meaning-making as well as totally intuitive pattern recognition (i.e. the human part of the data deluge) will become infinitely more important than mere access to lots of information, content or data. Meaning will actually trump noise.

In the dawning knowledge- and experience society, we are quickly shifting from downloads to flows, and from stuff to bits, both in terms of technology as well as in terms of our user behaviour and actual consumption habits. Information is no longer (just) stored and kept for later, rather, it’s accessed and filtered and sifted, when and where and how it’s needed, in realtime, realplace, real-life. Technology will also move from relying on search, files and pages to reading, understanding and enabling flows and streams (cloud, social, local, mobile).

And then there’s the Internet of Things, of course, and pervasive machine-to-machine connectivity is becoming very real, very fast. Wireless networks, RFIDs and NFC technologies will seamlessly and ubiquitously connect people (if not their actual brains then their devices) to things to machines, and vice versa, and artificial intelligence and ultra-smart electronic agents will glue all this together.

The Internet is gradually becoming an extension of our brains; and mobile devices are already our external brains. Is the next stop the actual integration of the Internet in our bodies (iris implants etc), cyborgs after that… singularity, transhumanism? Not sure what to think of that, really -are you?