ITU Telecom World spotlights Asia

HONG KONG — The first ITU Telecom World to be held outside Geneva had a decidedly Asian feel. In addition to the fact that the vast majority of attendees were from this region, there was a heavy emphasis on wireless, IPTV, technology for developing regions and new applications and services, all of which resonate heavily in Asia-Pacific.

Show attendance was not available at press time, and the event was rumored to have attracted anywhere from 20,000 to the expected 50,000 visitors to Asia World Expo, according to Matt Walker, senior analyst with Ovum. Vendors said they were seeing few visitors from Europe and almost no customers from North America, a fact most attributed to the location and timing of the show.

The nature of the exhibits was toned down only slightly from past events in Geneva's PalExpo — most exhibits were only 2 stories tall, versus the 3- and 4-story displays that often dominate ITU Telecom World.

Alcatel Lucent's two large stands garnered considerable attention, as they were already plastered with the purple ball logo and featured employees nattily attired in purple shirts, ties and scarves. As Walker noted, however, neither booth featured products from the new company, which completed its merger only a few days before ITU Telecom World 2006 opened.

The ITU kicked off the event by announcing a new project to fund telecom in developing nations, called ICT Empowerment Network, and led by Grameen Bank founder and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus. Partners for the micro-funding effort included Cisco Systems, which announced a $1 million donation.

While growth and expansion in the Chinese and Indian markets were a hot topics throughout, one Western carrier that also garnered the spotlight was BT, which came to Hong Kong a week after turning up its first customers on the massive 21st Century Network (21CN) transformation project. BT 21CN is replacing BT's multiple service networks with a single IP backbone between now and 2010.

As Paul Reynolds, CEO of BT Wholesale, told both an ITU Forum audience and a later press briefing, the company is on schedule and on budget with the network transformation and will follow the debut of the service in the small South Wales town of Wick with further build out across South Wales in 2007. It also is rolling out ADSL2+ across the U.K. to deliver 24 Mb/s data service, in advance of 21CN's completion (see story on page 12).

“We will reduce our network complexity with dramatic cost savings of $1 billion annually from 2008 on,” Reynolds said. “We will reduce time to market from over a year to instantly for some services.”

As part of the ITU show, the organization released its eighth report on the state of the Internet and saw both the positive, such as phenomenal wireless growth, and the negative in the growth of “digital dilemmas,” including identity theft, spam and cyber crimes.

It took mobile phones 21 years to reach the 1 billion mark and only three years to hit 2 billion, noted Tim Kelly, ITU Forum chairman. “In December of 2006, the number of mobile phones will be exactly twice the number of fixed-line phones,” Kelly said in an ITU briefing.

Investment in the industry, which grew at 5% to 6% for decades before peaking at 30% in the bubble years of the late '90s, is now on the rise again, Kelly said, and is running about twice the post-World War II average, approaching 15% in 2005.