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.
