PARIS – Governments around the world must create and execute national multi-sectoral broadband plans, or risk being seriously disadvantaged in today’s increasingly high-speed digital environment. That is the gist of a new report released Monday by the Broadband Commission for Digital Development.
The report Broadband: A Platform for Progress examines what broadband is, why it is so valuable in driving economies and societies forward, and how these networks can be created. It also breaks out the expanding range of services that are boosted by broadband (m-banking, healthcare, and e-government, to name a few), and includes an overview of the status of broadband around the world.
With technology advancing so quickly, the Commission declined to define broadband as a specific speed; rather, the report defines it as “always-on” (i.e. not needing the user to make a new connection to a server each time), and “high-capacity”, and therefore able to carry a great deal of data per second.
“History has witnessed many ‘declarations of independence’. But in today’s interconnected world we might propose a new ‘Declaration of Inter-dependence’ – a recognition that the economic welfare of each individual country increasingly depends on access to the rest of the world through broadband Internet,” said ITU secretary-general Dr Hamadoun Touré, in a statement. “This new Broadband Commission report indicates that improvements in broadband penetration directly correlate to improvements in GDP. Basically, the more available and cheaper broadband access is, the better for a country’s economy and growth prospects.”
This is the second major publication from The Broadband Commission for Digital Development, which was launched in May 2010 by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
