Speech by Malcolm Johnson, ITU Deputy Secretary-General

Broadband India Forum - Welcome Address

9 November 2016, Delhi, India

Distinguished guests,
Ladies and gentlemen,

Good morning, it is a great pleasure to be back here in New Delhi. I wish to thank Mr. M F Farooqui for his invitation to speak to you here today.

The ITU Secretary-General, my fellow elected colleagues and ITU staff are very grateful for the very positive role that India plays in ITU, especially as a very active member of the ITU Council.

We have excellent relations with Secretary J.S Deepak, and his colleagues in the Department of Telecommunications, where I enjoyed a very interesting exchanges yesterday with senior officials.

My greetings to Mr Amitabh Kant, CEO - Niti Aayog, and Professor Paulraj and congratulations to Mr. T V Ramachandran, President, BIF for initiating and organizing this Forum on the theme “Accelerating Broadband in India: Complementing OFC with Wireless Fibre”.

The importance of access to the information and knowledge society to facilitate innovation and sustainable socio-economic development cannot be over emphasized.

A world where everyone is connected to the Internet will be a better place. A better place to be informed, to be educated, to receive healthcare, to be productive and enjoy a better standard of living.

However, to benefit from the many innovative products and services on the Internet, or more generally information and communication technologies (ICTs), requires high speed broadband connectivity.

Last year the United Nations adopted ambitious goals for sustainable development to be achieved by the year 2030. These 17 Sustainable Development Goals address a wide range of challenges including ending poverty and hunger, providing quality education for all, and bringing clean water and sanitation to everyone.

If we look at the 169 targets set to achieve these goals it is clear that they can only be achieved by widespread highspeed access to ICTs.
As the lead UN agency for ICTs, ITU has a major role to play in achieving these goals. Most people now connect to the Internet through their smart phones.  There is an increasing demand from more users wanting faster connection to download more and more data. This places great demand on the radio frequency spectrum available to mobile phones. It has to be agreed internationally, otherwise these phones would not work when moving from one country to another, and the cost of phones would be much higher if they did not comply with global standards and benefit from the resulting economies of scale. It is only through the international treaty on the use of the radio frequency spectrum, that ITU has been maintaining for the last 110 years, that this can be achieved. All these devices need to be able to interoperate and this can only be achieved by compliance with international standards, something ITU has been doing for even longer. The networks carrying all this data and communications traffic rely on ITU’s international standards. The development of Internet of Things and 5G will place far great demands on the network. 

Bringing the benefits of this technology to all the world’s citizens is a major goal of the ITU. Encouraging countries to adopt the policies and regulations that will provide the incentives to investment in the provision of broadband services, that stimulate innovation and help develop the necessary skills is the third pillar of ITU’s work.

We are living in turbulent times. Technology is moving at an incredible pace. New innovations arrive almost daily. This places great strain and challenges on the regulatory environment. We are in a global market and to succeed there needs to be some commonality in the regulatory environments around the world.

As for technology, fibre is of course very important to the roll-out of broadband in India and elsewhere, especially for the backhaul networks, but it is of course one of a number of new technologies that must be utilized to the full to bring connectivity to all people everywhere.  

I recognize the importance being placed by BIF on the use of the frequency bands above 40 GHz, because of their unmatched capacities, and especially the V Band for wireless backhaul. The 61-61.5 GHz band has been made available in a number of countries to open the way to early gigabit wireless services, with the advantages identified in the BIF white paper. 

The next World Radio Conference in 2019 will be considering new allocation for use by 5G, including in the V- and W-bands, and as I said earlier, agreement on global allocations will be very important to ensure the major benefits for interoperability, roaming and economies of scale. For this reason, I encourage India to actively contribute to the on-going ITU-R studies to ensure that India’s requirements are fully met.

In urban areas there already exists extensive traditional copper telephone lines, and these too have a role to play thanks to ITU’s new standard G.Fast which opens up the new potential for the traditional copper wire telephone lines to provide speeds of up to 1Gbs within 400m of a fibre node.

Clearly, it is necessary to take advantage of all these options, many of which are complimentary, and need to be interoperable, to realize this vision of an interconnected, and hyperconnected future.

India has an extraordinary potential for growth, and with the adoption of the Digital India Programme, Make in India, and designation of 100 Smart Cities the political will is clearly there. The implementation of these initiatives will transform India.

With its key strategic asset of a large highly educated population of some 250 million people speaking fluent English, and India’s tradition and acceptance of democracy and open debate, and willingness to accept and respect alternative points of view and compromises, I am sure we will see great happenings in India over the next five-ten years.

And you can rest assured of ITU’s support in this endeavour.

So to conclude, I encourage India to actively participate in ITU’s work, take advantage of its membership, encourage more of its industry and academia to contribute to the spectrum and standards development work as well as the recommendations on the best enabling environment, so as to help achieve the goals set by Prime Minister Modi.

I wish you a very enjoyable and productive Forum.

Thank you very much.