INTERNATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATION UNION
Did you know that...• The global telecommunications network is the world's largest man-made artefact.
• Telecommunications first started in 1839, when two men, Cooke and Wheatstone, carried the first messages on a 21-kilometre telegraph system between London and West Drayton in England. By 1874, the technology had improved to such a degree that signals could be sent through a 5,700-kilometre-long cable between Ireland and Nova Scotia, Canada.
• The first voice telephone was patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, and the first radio-communications system by Guglielmo Marconi in 1896. The radio frequency spectrum is a finite resource, which is becoming increasingly congested as more and more services crowd into the limited space available.
• The international telephone network now comprises a vast web of copper cable, fibre optic lines, high-capacity undersea cables, radio-based links and satellites which between them relay some 165 million minutes worth of calls around the world every day.
• In 1920, the number of voice channels which could be carried over a single piece of copper twisted-pair wire was six. Today, technical advances allow the same piece of wire to carry 34,000 separate channels.
• There are currently more telephones in the city of Tokyo than in all of sub-Saharan Africa. About two thirds of the world's people still do not have easy access to a simple telephone.Never out of touch
Daria Jacobsen is a buyer for a large department store in London. Often on the road, she frequently needs to get in touch with colleagues - some of whom may also be on the move - as well as access corporate data kept on her own PC back at the store, and send cost estimates through to her boss for approval before signing a deal.
"Sometimes I have to cover up to six European cities in the space of two weeks, meeting our suppliers, visiting new manufacturers and wholesalers, or touring factories for quality assurance checks. But at the same time, I need to consult with my boss back in London, to see whether she agrees with my decisions before I going ahead and place a big new order. And when I see something new that appeals to me I often want to get hold of one of my colleagues to check that our buying strategies will be complementary - colours, looks, that kind of thing. Only a couple of years ago trying to keep in touch meant frequent games of 'telephone tag' where we would leave messages for one another at hotel rooms or our expected next port of call - very inefficient, and it really slowed down our work. Now we all have mobile phones, and can get in touch with one another as easily as pushing a button. We don't even need to keep one another informed about where we are, because our phones work right across Europe. Even better, I can now dial-up my computer back home via my laptop, to check previous sales trends or projections, and to send and receive e-mails. Thanks to our new mobile telecommunications systems none of us is ever out of touch, whether we're in a showroom in Florence, or browsing a street market for new ideas in Barcelona."
The ITU has played a key role in the introduction and development of new mobile telephony systems, managing the allocation of radio frequency spectrum and working on standards that enable systems to seamlessly interconnect. Behind-the-scenes work at the ITU today is developing third-generation mobile telephony systems (IMT-2000), as well as paving the way for future developments in satellite-based mobile telephony which will reach all corners of the globe, allowing people to stay in touch literally anytime, anywhere.
A call to the market
Joseph Situma has a successful maize farm in the foothills of Mt Elgon, near Kigale, Kenya. After each harvest, he travels to neighbouring towns to sell his crop, with the aid of the youngest of his six sons.
"A few years ago, managing my farm was much more difficult. Because it was hard to know how much maize we might be able to sell at the market, we were forced to always carry as much with us as possible, which was very expensive and meant I had to have all but one of my sons with me to help manage the loading and unloading of the produce. We never knew what the demand for our maize would be at a particular town, and sometimes we would travel a long way only to find that there were already too many other farmers selling their produce to make it worth our efforts. Sometimes we would even lose valuable harvested crops because we were not able to sell it in time to stop it spoiling. Now, because of the new telephone lines which have been installed in our village, we can contact buyers for our crop in other towns and sell our produce before we even leave the farm. And we only need to carry what we've sold, which saves money on fuel, and enables all but one of my sons to stay and work the farm, which has also made our business more efficient and profitable."
Thanks to ITU development efforts and regional cooperation programmes, telecommunications administrations in the world's developing regions are finding ways to extend and upgrade national telecommunications networks, bringing the convenience and economic power of modern telecommunications within the reach of more and more of the world's people.
phone had a strange accent. Very different from ours. Well, it turned out that he was French. I got worried that the cost of the call would make the dress rather expensive. But then I remembered that these 0800 numbers are charged to the company that you call."
A free call Louisa Lewis lives in Perth, Australia. She loves fashionable clothes.
"The other day, I saw an advertisement in a magazine for a beautiful dress, in silk and wool, at an incredibly cheap price. An offer which I could not refuse. I called, of course. It was one of these 0800 numbers. I was surprised that the guy who answered the
The ITU has recently set up a system of universal numbers starting with 800 where the cost of the communication is charged to the person called. For businesses and consumers, this represents a significant change that allows them to communicate from all parts of the world. Thanks to ITU, the world is thus becoming a truly global market.
The ITU in brief
The ITU is the world's oldest intergovernmental organization, with a history stretching back more than 130 years to 1865 and the develop ment of the first telegraph systems. Created to manage the international interconnection of these early telecommunication systems, the ITU has since facilitated the development of the telephone, radiocom munications, radio and television broadcasting, and lately the popu larization of personal computing and the birth of the Electronic Age. The organization became a specialized agency of the United Nations in 1947. The ITU:
• Develops standards which foster the efficient interconnection of national communications infrastructures into global networks, allow- ing the seamless exchange of information, be it data, faxes or simple voice telephone calls, across all countries of the world;
• Works to integrate new technologies into the existing global telecommunications network, to allow for the development of new kinds of applications such as the Internet, electronic mail and multimedia;
• Manages the sharing of the radio frequency spectrum and satellite orbital positions, finite natural resources which are used by a wide range of equipment including mobile telephones, television and radio broadcasting, satellite based communications systems, aircraft and maritime navigation and safety systems, and wireless computer systems;
• Strives to improve the accessibility of telecommunications in the developing world through policy advice, technical assistance, project management, training programmes and information resources, and by fostering partnerships between telecommunications administrations, funding agencies, and private organizations;
• Comprises 188 Member States and more than 450 Members from the private sector, who work together to develop better, cheaper telecom munication systems and bring them within the reach of as many of the world's people as possible.International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
Place des Nations
CH-1211 Geneva 20
Switzerland
Tel: (41-22) 730 5111
Website: http://www.itu.int/
