ITU's 160 anniversary

Committed to connecting the world

ITU Regional Standardization Forum for the Arab Region

​Kuwait City, Kuwait, 25 November 2014

Opening Address

Hameed Al-Qattan, Undersecretary, Ministry of Communications, Kuwait
Distinguished guests
Ladies and Gentlemen,

As-salamu alaykum
 
Good morning and welcome to this ITU Regional Standardization Forum for the Arab Region. I am very pleased to be here with you today and I would like to start by thanking our hosts, Kuwait’s Ministry of Communications, for their collaboration in organizing these events here this week in the beautiful city of Kuwait, and for their exceptionally kind hospitality and for providing such excellent conference facilities.

Let me also congratulate Kuwait on its re-election to the ITU Council.

This is my first mission as ITU Deputy Secretary-General elect and I am very pleased that it is to be with my good friends in the Arab region.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Next year ITU will next celebrate its 150th anniversary and pay tribute to the extraordinary engineering feat that is today’s ICT ecosystem, upon which the world’s economy and society now depends so much.

From ITU’s beginnings in 1865 as a body standardizing the international telegraph service, through the development of the telephone, radiocommunications, television, satellite communications, mobile communications and the Internet, ITU has played a key role in brokering consensus on policy and technical considerations crucial to the development of the global ICT ecosystem.

ITU offers the international community a consensus-driven process to coordinate satellite orbits and radiofrequency allocations, to develop technical standards that underpin interconnection and interoperability, and to improve access to ICTs for underserved communities worldwide.

International standards are essential to economic development. They reduce technical barriers to trade. They create a level playing field that enables companies from emerging economies to access regional and global markets. And by increasing competition, and creating a worldwide market, they lead to higher quality and more affordable products.

You cannot make a phone call, watch a video or surf the Web without engaging with a multitude of ITU standards.

The reason every fixed phone and every mobile phone in the world has a unique number is because of ITU standards.

Many estimates suggest that 95 per cent of international traffic runs over fibre-optic cables built in conformance with ITU standards.

In addition, ITU standards are the critical access technologies for the Internet – at first with the V-series modems and now via broadband ADSL and FTTH. Our latest standard – G.fast to be released by the current meeting of ITU-T Study Group 15 – will push aggregate bit rates to an extraordinary 1 Gb/s using traditional copper telephone wires.

Approximately 80% of online video uses the ITU video codec standard H.264. This year ITU produced an improved version - H.265, which is an incredible 50% more efficient.

With convergence, today’s standardization scenario is complex, and ITU is very proactive in building cooperation and collaboration amongst the many bodies active in ICT standardization.

What differentiates ITU from the other standards bodies is its diverse membership – a public-private partnership of 193 governments and over 700 private sector entities that ensure that ITU’s standardization work bears a development dimension unrivaled by other ICT standards bodies.

This is why increasing the participation of developing countries in the work of ITU’s Standardization Sector, is one of the main pillars of ITU’s mission, and why events such as this are so important to encouraging greater participation in ITU’s standards activities.

I started these Regional Standards Forums in October 2007 in Kigali, and we held the first one in the Arab region in Damascus in July 2008 thanks to our good friend Nabil Kisrawi, God rest his soul. Since then the Arab region has become increasingly active in the standards work and very supportive of our initiatives for which we are very grateful.

The participation of developing countries ensures that ITU develops standards to meet their particular requirements. Participation is also a means to understand ITU standards in greater depth, leading to more informed choices of standards and knowledge of how to implement them more effectively.

We have introduced a range of measures to assist the participation of developing countries in the work of ITU-T, which will we hear about later, and I am pleased to report that our efforts have been successful. Since 2006, over 40 developing countries have started participating in ITU-T that had never done so before.

A particularly effective measure has been the creation of the Regional Study Groups.  I am pleased that there are now three Regional Groups in the Arab region and that they are all meeting in collocation with this event.

Also the new category of membership for academic and research institutes has proved very successful in ITU-T with a membership of 63 out of the total of the 84 that have joined ITU, taking advantage of a very modest fee of CHF 2,000 per year for those in developing countries, and CHF 4000 for those in developed countries.

Thanks to the contributions from Korea Communications Commission, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and Nokia Siemens Networks to the Bridging the Standards Gap fund, ITU holds training courses on ITU’s standards and working methods, and capacity-building workshops throughout the year.

A new ITU publication ‘Guidelines on the Establishment of a National Standardization Secretariat for ITU-T’ follows a study supported by the Korean Government which found that a lack of a national body to coordinate ICT standardization strategy at the national level was a major impediment to the development of a country’s standardization capabilities.

As with all our events such as this we encourage participants to suggest new ideas on how we might better ensure that our work and resulting standards continue to address the needs of all the world’s regions.

Thank you and I wish you all a most productive and enjoyable forum.