U.K. Spectrum Official Says ITU Must Act Only Where Necessary, Otherwise Provide Flexibility
ANNAPOLIS -- The ITU and its World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC), scheduled to convene next in 2007, should be refocused to better address the needs of industry for direction in some areas, while avoiding other areas where an extended WRC debate would do little good, said Mike Goddard, dir.-spectrum policy & international for the U.K.’s Ofcom and a leading candidate to chair the 2007 meeting. Veena Rawat, chmn. of the 2003 WRC, agreed, telling a Defense Spectrum Summit dinner Thurs. night that WRC must change to take into account industry convergence.
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Goddard told us if he’s elected chmn. he will try to make the process more flexible. “Most countries of the world are happy with the rigid framework the ITU gives them,” he said: “But the world is changing rapidly. The ITU has to concentrate on areas where you do need global agreements and back off from other areas and open up flexibility -- allow people to use spectrum in a more flexible way.
The WRC has had a mixed track record, Goddard said. “There are some areas where the ITU process is very slow and holds things up,” he said. “There are other areas where it’s not a constraint at all. I think we need to find ways of making the framework more flexible.”
Making structural changes at the ITU and WRC would be a “big struggle” for member nations, Goddard said. “Everybody says how relatively slow the ITU is,” he said: “I was at a conference earlier this year where someone talked about innovation and they mentioned the ITU process. I said you can’t talk about them in the same breath.”
Rawat said the ITU must address how to bridge the gap between technology life cycles and policy development, which is a particular challenge when the conference meets only every 3-4 years. The challenge is also made more difficult given the rapid convergence of wireline and wireless technology and the blurring of traditional allocation decisions posed by advanced wireless services such as ultra wideband. Rawat told us the WRC can change before the 2007 meeting if the members want it to. “It’s not the ITU,” she said: “It’s in the hands of the members of the ITU. It’s the members who have to put in an effort. If the members want to do it then they have to change the ITU. “It’s raising constantly the issue and then showing that if they don’t change the technology will move on and the world will move on and the services will be out there. The satellites are being launched,” said Rawat, acting pres. of Canada’s Communications Research Center.
Goddard said the ITU has had a number of success stories, including speeding the deployment of 3G technologies in much of the world. In other areas, like the rollout of Bluetooth technologies, it has been less effective. “The ITU is absolutely essential in many areas if you look at the truly global services -- satellites, maritime, aeronautical -- the ITU is a strength and it has to be there,” he said. “It has less relevance in some of the innovative wireless services, WiMAX and the rest of it. The world is moving faster than the ITU can move.”
Regulators worldwide have changed structurally in recognition of convergence, Goddard said. In 2003 the U.K. govt. changed how communications was regulated, creating in response to the needs of industry a “converged regulator for a converged world,” he said. Creating the agency required major legislation, but getting the bill through the Parliament wasn’t a struggle. “There was a consensus in government that something needed to be done,” he said. “We used to have a separate regulator for telecom, a separate regulator for spectrum, a separate regulator for sound broadcasting.”