Everything about International Telecommunications Union totally explained
The
International Telecommunication Union (
ITU;
French:
Union internationale des télécommunications,
Spanish:
Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones,
simplified Chinese: 国际电信联盟;
Russian:Международный союз электросвязи;
Arabic:الاتحاد الدولي للاتصالات) is an
international organization established to standardize and regulate international radio and
telecommunications. It was founded as the
International Telegraph Union in
Paris on
May 17,
1865. Its main tasks include
standardization, allocation of the
radio spectrum, and organizing interconnection arrangements between different countries to allow international phone calls — in which regard it performs for telecommunications a similar function to what the
UPU performs for postal services. It is one of the
specialized agencies of the
United Nations, and has its headquarters in
Geneva,
Switzerland, next to the main United Nations campus.
Composition
The ITU is made up of three sectors:
A permanent General Secretariat, headed by the Secretary General, manages the day-to-day work of the Union and its sectors.
Leadership
The ITU is headed by a Secretary-General, who is elected to a four-year term by the member states at the plenipotentiary conference.
At the 17th Plenipotentiary Conference (2006) in
Antalya,
Turkey, the ITU's Member States elected Dr.
Hamadoun Touré of
Mali as Secretary-General of the Union.
Directors and Secretaries-general of ITU
Standards
The
international standards that are produced by the ITU are referred to as "
Recommendations" (with the word ordinarily capitalized to distinguish its meaning from the ordinary sense of the word). Due to its longevity as an international organization and its status as a specialized agency of the United Nations, standards promulgated by the ITU carry a higher degree of formal international recognition than those of most other organizations that publish technical specifications of a similar form.
Digital Opportunity Index
The ITU has developed, under the Digital Opportunity Platform, the Digital Opportunity Index (or DOI) as a tool to measure the Information Society. DOI is a composite index based on 11 core ICT indicators. The structure of the index is sequential, which makes it more flexible and allows to use it in combination with other existing indices (such as the UNDP Human Development Index) The DOI was endorsed by the World Summit on the Information Society in the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society (para 117) as a tool for mapping of digital opportunity worldwide.
The DOI, which was compiled for 180 economies for 2005, is at present the most extensive ICT index providing an internationally-agreed benchmark of the status of ICTs around the world at the conclusion of the Tunis Summit, and can be used to track progress made in infrastructure, opportunity and utilization of ICTs by the target year 2015. The measurement of the digital divide and the analysis based on scientifically-significant evidence make it possible to inform policy-making processes and optimize the benefits of ICTs, in particular in the developing countries.
In 2005, the Asian economies of the Republic of Korea and Japan continue to lead in digital opportunity, due to their pioneering take-up of broadband and 3G mobile services. Dramatic progress has been achieved by developing countries, however, which made the greatest progress in digital opportunity - notably India, where digital opportunity nearly doubled between 2001 and 2005, and China, which experienced remarkably strong gains in infrastructure. Different countries are following their own paths in telecommunication development, with some countries leveraging their investments in infrastructure more successfully than others.
A collaborative report, the World Information Society Report, reviews the key trends in ICT development crystallized by the DOI and frame the ICT development debate, providing an annual contribution to the WSIS implementation. Highlights from the report as well as the chapters, different statistics and maps based on the DOI are publicly available.
The policy toolkit being developed under DOP will contribute furthering the knowledge of the digital divide and allow tailoring recommendations to address the specific challenges in digital opportunity faced by individual countries or regions based on facts about what worked and what didn't in a particular context. In that sense, the insights of the different stakeholders involved are valuable in developing adapted and appropriate policy support. A DOI Users’ guide is available for all those willing to calculate the DOI themselves: regulators, development professionals, academics and larger audience.
The DOI isn't at this point an ITU Recommendation (what the ITU calls its standards).
The DOI will continue to be developed as a multi-stakeholder project involving multiple partners as an integrated element of the Digital Opportunity Platform.
Members
The work of the ITU is conducted by its
members. As part of the United Nations structure, a country can be a member, in which case it's referred to as a
Member State. Companies and other such organizations can hold other classes of membership referred to as
Sector Member or
Associate status. As of September 2007 there were 191 Member States and more than 700 Sector Members and Associates.
Sector and Associate memberships enable direct participation by a company in the development of standards (something not allowed in some other standards bodies such as
ISO, where formal ballots are processed by a single entity per country and companies participate only indirectly through national delegations). Various parts of the ITU also maintain
liaison relationships with other organizations.
Members are almost all of the
UN members plus the
Vatican City State. Only
Palau and
East Timor are not participating. Other entities not represented are the
Palestinian Authority and
Taiwan, although the
Palestinian Authority is granted non-voting observer status .
Meetings
The ITU decides matters between states and private organizations through an extensive series of working parties, study groups, regional meetings, and world meetings.
Examples
World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC)
World administrative radio conferences (WARC)
Regional Radiocommunication Conferences (RRC)
World Summit on the Information Society
» Main article: World Summit on the Information Society
The ITU was the lead organizing agency of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), a United Nations summit aiming at bridging the digital divide and turning it into digital opportunity for all. WSIS provided a global forum on the theme of ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) for development, involving for the first time all stakeholders - governments, international organizations, civil society and business. WSIS was a pledge for building a people-centered development-oriented Information Society. Other big themes of the Summit were Internet governance and Financial mechanisms for meeting the challenges of ICTs for development.
The idea of holding WSIS came from the Tunisian President Ben Ali on the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Minneapolis in 1998. The process was launched late in 2002 on the initiative of Kofi Annan. The first phase of the WSIS summit took place in December 2003 in Geneva and the second and final phase took place in Tunis in November 2005.
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