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Telecommunication Standardization Advisory Group (TSAG)

8 February 2011, Geneva, Switzerland

Welcome Remarks

Houlin Zhao

Deputy Secretary-General,
International Telecommunication Union

  • Mr. Chairman,
  • Directors of TSB and BR,
  • Friends,
  • Ladies and gentlemen,
  • On behalf of the Secretary General and all elected officials we welcome you to this TSAG meeting which is the first administrative meeting under the new ITU management team.
  • Please let me start by sharing with you the sad news that our dear friend Nabil Kisrawi passed away at the end of January. He was a friend of ITU for many years and he will be greatly missed. A condolence book is available in front of Room Popov and an e-mail address is open to all who wish to send a message to his family.
  • As many of you will know, last October, ITU held its 18th Plenipotentiary Conference in Guadalajara, Mexico. It was the occasion for our membership – now standing at 192 Member States, with the recent addition of Timor Leste – to set out the priorities for the Union for the coming four years, and to ensure that ITU remains relevant, right at the heart of the ICT sector.
  • Sound strategic and financial plans were approved for the period from 2012 to 2015.
  • Our membership also took a number of significant decisions and passed many important resolutions, concerning – among other issues:
  • Accessibility;
  • ICTs and climate change;
  • Strengthening ITU’s regional presence;
  • Measures to help prevent the illicit use and abuse of telecommunication networks;
  • Conformance and interoperability;
  • Emergency communications and humanitarian assistance;
  • The admission of Sector Members from developing countries;
  • Bridging the standardization gap;
  • Special measures to assist SmallIslandDevelopingStates and Landlocked Developing Countries; and
  • Electronic meetings.
  • Opening up the way for the participation of academia in the Union’s work was also the topic of a new Resolution. On that note, I am delighted to be able to let you know that a dozen institutions have been officially accepted as new members already this year... Some applied for membership across all sectors, some for two and some for one. A ceremony was held on 14 January of this year to welcome these new Members and mark this excellent start to a new era of membership for ITU.
  • I think that this will be of great profit to the Union and in particular to the work of ITU-T. New technologies very often find their genesis in academia and strengthening this connection will allow for standardization needs to be identified at an early stage.
  • To facilitate this work the Secretary General hast nominated two Special Envoys; Professor Obi of WasedaUniversity and Professor Mellor of UKTA.
  • Membership also passed a number of key Resolutions on Internet issues, which strengthens and underlines ITU’s commitment to work with the Internet community in extending the benefits of the Internet to all global citizens.
  • All of this means that we will have a very busy four years ahead of us at ITU, and we will be looking to the T Sector, as always to help drive forward the work of the Union in our main objective of connecting the world.
  • It was very interesting to see that the need to prioritize and roll out broadband infrastructure was mentioned in the overwhelming majority of policy statements made by Member States.
  • Broadband has become a major focus in the past year, with the ITU Secretary General’s establishment, in partnership with Mrs Irina Bokova, Director General of UNESCO, of the Broadband Commission for Digital Development.
  • The focus of the Broadband Commission is to explore and encourage ways to rollout broadband to the world, especially developing countries.
  • The Broadband Commission is co-chaired by Mr Carlos Slim of Mexico and President Paul Kagame of Rwanda. The power of broadband to help meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is now widely recognized. The Broadband Commission held a successful meeting in New York on 19 September and submitted a report to Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General of United Nations.
  • It is clear that the work of the standardization sector has been vital to the global rollout of broadband technologies. Without ITU standards for transport, access, quality of service, video and security the development of these technologies would have been severely stunted. This is a message that is heard very strongly in the Broadband Commission.
  • I would also like to share with you some information on the ITU’s work on 4G technologies. In October 2010, ITU’s Radiocommunication Sector completed the assessment of six candidate submissions for the global mobile wireless broadband technology, commonly known as 4G. ITU has qualified two technologies for use in 4G/IMT Advanced mobile wireless broadband technologies. ‘LTE-Advanced’ and ‘WirelessMAN-Advanced’ are now accorded the official designation of IMT-Advanced.
  • In addition I would like to take this opportunity to highlight the Child Online Protection initiative, which was established by ITU and other stakeholders as an international collaborative network for action to promote the online protection of children worldwide. In 2010 activity of this initiative stepped up with new activities spearheaded by patron H.E. Laura Chinchilla, President of Costa Rica.
  • As you know ITU-T’s work in the field of Cybersecurity is world leading. I am proud to see advances in the fields of identity management, information exchange and cloud computing. In the Development sector ITU has also developed toolkits on issues such as Cybercrime and Cybersecurity to assist its Members, especially developing countries.
  • I am pleased to be able to report that there is strong support for ITU’s Global Cybersecurity agenda within the UN Chief Executives Board, which recently asked ITU to lead joint actions to further strengthen cybersecurity within the UN system.
  • In the area of climate change I see ITU-T also playing a strong role. The global attention gained by the Universal Charger for mobile phones will hopefully be matched by the excellent work on a methodology to quantify ICT company’s carbon footprints. This topic is a global concern and cooperation and avoiding duplication of work is key. ITU’s role here has been acknowledged by the UN Secretary General and we can and should take the lead here.
  • I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that we will be celebrating the 40th anniversary of ITU Telecom in Geneva in October.
  • The event – taking place from 24 to 27 October – will bring together world leaders at the highest level along with top executives from many of the world’s most powerful players in the ICT sector. I would like to invite you all to actively participate in the exhibition and the Forum.
  • It will be a great occasion on which to pursue the discussions and debates which are taking place across the ICT world, and I look forward to seeing you there.
  • Ladies and Gentlemen
  • TSAG has an important role to play as the steering committee for the standardization work of ITU.
  • For many years it has provided a strong guiding hand overseeing the work of the Study Groups, coordinating and stimulating interaction between them and the Development and Radiocommunication sectors.
  • I take this opportunity to note and express my great pride and satisfaction with the progress made in ITU-T with regard to the key objectives we have established for the Union, particularly as I have mentioned the critical matters of climate change and cybersecurity.
  • And with that I leave you in the wise and capable hands of the Chairman of TSAG and Mr. Malcolm Johnson, Director, TSB.
  • I wish you a successful meeting. Thank you.