PATTAYA, Thailand – Regulators from around the world agreed on a set of best practices in regulatory measures that are aimed at sharing infrastructure resources to stimulate investment and growth in the ICT sector on Thursday, the last day of the 8th annual Global Symposium for Regulators (GSR-08).
The best practice guidelines aimed at fostering affordable broadband access through sharing and open access deal with pricing, efficient use of resources, spectrum sharing, licensing, neutral, fair and non-discriminating interconnection, transparency in information sharing, and sharing with other infrastructure industries, such as electricity, gas, water, sewage, railways to distribute the cost of civil works
The theme of the symposium was “Six Degrees of Sharing: Innovative Infrastructure Sharing and Open Access Strategies to Promote Affordable Access for All.”
The regulators also recognized the need for regional and international harmonization to ensure widespread use of best practice regulatory policies on sharing, especially in cross-border areas.
Chaired by General Choochart Promphrasid, chair of the National Telecommunication Commission (NTC) in Pattaya, Thailand, the symposium was attended by about 600 participants from 96 countries.
“Innovative business models and services are helping to drive the take-up of mobile communications in emerging markets in the Asia-Pacific region, Africa and the Americas,” said Dr Hamadoun Touré, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). “Pro-competitive and open access strategies are needed to cut the cost of deploying ICT networks – and thus take a big step towards achieving the targets set by the World Summit on the Information Society as well as the United Nations Millennium Development goals.”
At a news conference in Pattaya, Touré said that the connectivity targets must be advanced to 2012 if we are to utilize the catalytic potential of ICT to help meet the Millennium goals by 2015.
The symposium was organized by the ITU in collaboration with the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT) and NTC of Thailand.
