The world is connected, economically, socially and technically. Information and communication technologies are being infused into how we and the world around us work. Into systems, processes and infrastructure that enable goods and services to be developed, manufactured, exchanged and delivered.
We've seen over the past few years people using ICT for health, education, for running business. Twenty years after its creation, the World Wide Web offers us unprecedented access to free information. For the 1.7 billion people in the world that now have access to the web, it's broken down so many barriers.
The Internet's potential is open-ended in virtually every dimension I can see, subject only to the willingness of the world community to embrace it. As more and more people get connected, the International Telecommunication Union is center stage. providing the infrastructure and standards at the heart of this technological revolution. It continues to drive innovation in terms of setting standards, in terms of managing spectrum.
We are always connected today, always on the move. From television to Twitter, ICTs have reshaped our world, helping billions of people to live work and communicate. Even the simplest $20 Nokia cell phone in Kenya can, you know, send a message to a Twitter shortcode and broadcast to the entire world. The mobile phone will increasingly take the place of the PC to access the internet, especially in the developing world.
It's here too that we'll see massive strides in development through innovations like mobile banking and telemedicine. Technology really saves lives, telemedicine really saves lives, and it is high time it is expanded to other facilities too. But whilst ICTs have transformed modern lifestyles and brought about untold benefits, they've also led to new privacy and security challenges.
What we're finding is that nations themselves and certainly government agencies are being targeted. It's a matter of when and not if a cyber attack will happen. Committed to connecting the world, ITU remains at the cutting edge of development, creating a safer and better future for everyone. The internet, the defining technological invention of our era.
Already a quarter of the world's population is connected, and almost every aspect of our lives has been touched by this digital revolution. The Internet has changed people's mindset. It's based on innovation. Its resources are unlimited. Today, the real advantage of the Internet is that it makes the world more in touch with itself.
Over the last 40 years, the way we use the internet has changed dramatically. We've seen it transform the way we live our lives and its huge impact on culture, business, and politics. The Internet was originally envisioned as a way for machines to interact with other machines. But I think it's the communications and the social aspects of it that are going to be the dominant features of its evolution in the future. Today, the Internet is about connecting people.
According to Facebook, 350 million people worldwide have Facebook accounts. The messaging service Twitter has morphed from a social networking tool into an instrument of revolution. 50 million tweets are sent using Twitter every day.
Twitter is a new way to communicate. It's completely recipient controlled. So it's very much equivalent to me going to a wall outside in the world and writing on the wall. And a world where even mundane objects like shoes and food can be connected to the internet is fast becoming reality.
The more information we have in the world and the more access everyone has to it, that betters people's lives. Access to the internet wouldn't be possible without ITU. They've unified standards for modems, video compression and Wi-Fi.
The International Telecommunications Union has been in the centre of all of this over the past few years and there is still more to come. We are creating new standards and managing spectrum and also ensuring that satellites are functioning. And as the number of satellites is increasing, of people getting connected to the internet nears 2 billion, ITU is leading the debate on the infrastructure challenges and the future internet. The ITU has been thinking about and is working on the next generation networks, the next generation of internet and next generation of broadband.
Well the original design has been remarkably robust. The internet as it stands today, it's The USA has been able to adapt to increases in bandwidth, has been able to adapt to increases in the population that's using it. Just what problems we will run into in the future, I think, remains to be seen. Built as an open, largely unregulated system, the Internet reflected an assumption that the people using it would be trustworthy.
The Internet's openness is its greatest strength, but it has also become its greatest vulnerability. As long as you are connected to the network, there is a threat. Cybersecurity threatens every strata of society. The total dollar value of the illegal information traded is somewhere north of $600 billion. High-tech criminals are launching more than a hundred attacks a second on the world's computers, setting up botnets, networks of hijacked PCs that can be used to send spam or be plundered for lucrative personal data.
In 2009, Symantec, the world's largest security software company, saw almost 7 million PCs that were members of botnets. A criminal in one part of the world can take control of computers in other parts of the world to launch their attack. And the malicious networks are proliferating rapidly, putting the whole internet at risk. Most individuals and most corporations don't know the extent to which they've been compromised and have bots within their environment.
And in fact they don't find out until after they have been used to mount an attack on somebody else. Most botnets today are used to distribute spam, but botnets can be put to far darker purposes, including cyber espionage and cyber terrorism. We have seen increasing evidence of terrorists trying to equip themselves with IT skills. No longer are they just financially motivated, they are sometimes politically motivated to cause mayhem and chaos. We've seen cases of Estonia.
We've seen numerous botnets over the past few years that lead us to the point to say that there is a potential of a cyber war. One of ITU's fundamental roles is to build confidence and security into information and communication technologies. ITU standards identify cyber threats to mitigate risk, enabling us to talk and trade securely. This is a global problem.
It can only be addressed at a global level. We need to avoid cyber wars. In response to this, ITU came up with a Coordinated Global Action Plan and launched the Global Cyber Security Agenda.
The operating arm of this framework is IMPACT, the foremost cyber threat resource centre in the world. We are a coalition to act as a platform for governments to interact, but in addition to that, to also bring in the different stakeholders that can assist governments of the world to secure this network. We created a collaboration platform.
We encourage most countries to nominate their cybersecurity experts, the law enforcement agencies, the regulatory authorities. And the whole idea was to create an ecosystem of empowered individuals who could actually do something in case of a problem. It allows us to share the intelligence that we are individually gathering and therefore have a more informed point of view around what's happening in the threat landscape.
Ten years ago, the internet revolution was powered by dial-up. Today, it's fueled by an explosive growth in high-speed networks and bandwidth, and a proliferation of new devices that make everything portable. That everything includes your identity, your location, and your ability to transmit and receive information instantaneously, from your friends or the world, to your mobile phone. Well, the interesting thing about the...
The mobile phone is really the transition not to a mobile phone but mobile computer. Consumers want their mobile phones to be their Swiss army knife of information. China is the world's largest mobile communications market.
There are nearly 800 million mobile phone users. And by 2011, 100 million people there will be using mobile phones to access the Internet. They're using mobile phones as a smart terminal, as a computer.
As a combination of gaming device, music, movie players. China Mobile has 25,000 developers designing application software or apps for smartphones. So one of the very successful area that we have done is to use the multimedia messaging or MMS to be a medium with which to deliver a newspaper. Today that newspaper is delivered for more than 50 million a day.
Having the highest number of subscribers of any newspaper in China and perhaps any newspaper in the world. And as the total number of apps downloaded reaches 4 billion, the mobile phone has become more than just a communication device, more like a remote control for your life. There's always been this dream of having the mobile wallet and, you know, everything on this one simple device, and I think it's nearly here. In San Francisco, app developers Square are bringing that dream one step closer to reality.
The idea behind Square is to allow anyone to start accepting. payments and in the U.S. the majority of the citizens have moved to paying with plastic cards, prepaid cards, credit cards. Do you like a cappuccino?
So Square allows someone to very simply take one of those plastic payments. That'll be $3 for you sir. Our business benefits in that we're able to take transactions where people normally wouldn't have cash in their pocket. Alright, looks like you've been here before. All of our transactions.
transactions at this moment are pretty small. It's just a cup of coffee here and there that matches. And so the fees and charges and startup costs of having to get a credit card terminal in here doesn't make sense for what we're doing right now.
Square provides that for us. The important thing to consider in adopting any technology is it has to be tailored to the particular usage of the culture. So for instance, Square would not... work in some place like Kenya, which is doing a lot of mobile payments through SMS. There's not a lot of credit cards.
Kenya, a new frontier in the digital revolution. All across the country, the majority of people live in rural areas, far beyond the reach of even the most modest type of modern technology. The gulf in facilities between research hospitals in central Nairobi and the handful of clinics in the rest of the country is vast.
But according to the ITU, it need not be unbridgeable. We know that we will never have enough health practitioners to access all the people who need it. And therefore, having... access through technology and e-health will enable tremendous opportunities.
In rural Kenya, telemedicine allows less experienced doctors to liaise with specialist consultants many hundreds of miles away. Making a real difference to what these clinics can offer doesn't require large amounts of money. Just one computer, a scanner and a digital camera can transform a hospital.
They are very far from Nairobi and they don't know what type of fracture or what to do with the fracture. So after they actually scan it, they send it to us, we consult, we give them an answer on what they should do. Either to fix it locally, and how to fix it, or to refer.
ITU is keen not to impose technology on a country, but instead listen to individual needs and tailor solutions accordingly. Here, the biggest need is broadband, which would allow doctors to diagnose patients hundreds of miles away using video conferencing. The ITU standard H.265.
X4 allows this to happen and has recently earned the ITU an Emmy Award. The scheme can work more effectively if we have got connectivity in terms of vibroptych cables within the region. And I think we have only one hospital in Kenya, Nairobi Hospital, which has got a vibroptych connection where you can see everything, even in theatre, in laboratory, as you watch them.
screen. ITU believe just like transport, energy and water, broadband is a vital part of national infrastructure and have launched the Build on Broadband initiative to bring benefits right across society to deliver essential services such as e-health, e-education and e-commerce. This is why broadband has become so important. We need to ensure that connectivity is giving people the right opportunity to access information, create information, use information and share information to meet the million-dollar development goals.
And once connected, ITU is ensuring the web is accessible to all through establishing outreach programmes and promoting access for minority users. We need to make sure the web is more accessible to people with low reading skills. We need to make sure the web is more accessible to people who speak languages, who are literate, but speak languages that are not now well represented on the web or can't be represented because of the fonts and...
the other kinds of more technical impediments. We also need to look at making sure the web is accessible for people with disabilities. But as more and more people get connected, the increased use of information and communication technologies can undoubtedly contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. ITU believe that as well as being part of the problem, ICTs can be used to improve the quality of life for people with disabilities. ...be part of the solution, having a critical role to play in combating climate change within the ICT sector and beyond.
The ICT sector is playing a key role in ensuring that we stop the effects of climate change, that we monitor it and we save lives. ITU has a critical role in raising awareness and promoting the development of more environmentally friendly... devices, applications and networks.
The sector can have a very big impact in giving alternatives to some high consuming, high energy consuming industries. Striving to limit their carbon footprint, Indian mobile telecommunications company VNL is connecting remote villages using solar power. We redesigned the entire GSM system specifically for rural areas.
So a VNL base station consumes less than 50 watts, less than a normal electricity bulb, which can operate on two small solar panels and they are connected to a battery also. So for one day sunshine and for three days no sunshine, the system works perfectly alright. For the first time, these rural communities will have network coverage. Unlike traditional GSM base stations, The village site needs no air conditioning or diesel fuel.
I never believed that this could be possible. I feel like I'm human now, not cut off from the world. Bringing the benefits of ICTs to the developing world is a priority for ITU.
ICT gives tremendous opportunity to have access to information and knowledge, which in turn gives people. the opportunity to develop their own goals. What ITU is doing, that is the single most important thing for the global community today, because they are the ones who are pushing for this connecting the unconnected. ITU is the most important standard body internationally for many of the telecommunications standards. It can share best practices between the community and help us jointly come up with what the right standards should be in terms of protecting our infrastructure.
So we can interconnect in smart city, smart power grid, smart transportation and smart environment. The International Telecommunication Union. Empowering people to meet their own aspirations by providing access to information and knowledge.