PRESS RELEASE: [Durban, South Africa, September 10, 2018] International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Telecom World 2018 commences on September 10 in Durban, South Africa. On the theme of “innovation for smarter digital development”, the event focuses on topics including enabling smarter digital development, digital everyone, and beyond connectivity. “As wireless broadband technology develops in leaps and bounds, the connection cost per megabit for 4G has been reduced to about 4% of that for 3G,” Houlin Zhao, Secretary-General of the ITU, mentioned in the keynote speech at the forum summit on digital everyone. “Thanks to the joint efforts of the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, regulators, and network operators, over the past five years 50 million households and many small- to medium-sized enterprises, schools, and hospitals have accessed the Internet through fixed wireless broadband. In the next three to five years, wireless technology is expected to become an important means of raising the broadband penetration rate from 17% to 50% in developing countries. At the same time, we should also study how to maximize the benefits of fixed wireless broadband to social development through policies in spectrum, taxation, land, and subsidy.”

The Broadband Commission has been committed to prioritizing broadband networks on the international policy agenda and pushing governments into formulating national broadband plans or strategies. Currently, more than 150 countries have released national broadband plans. Nevertheless, these plans have not been implemented as fast as expected. The broadband services are costly, lengthening the payback period. Therefore, operators fail to meet the requirements by regulators for ubiquitous connections quickly and at low costs. To drive the growth of digital economy and accelerate the implementation of national broadband plans, wireless broadband is undoubtedly an important choice, encouraging investments from and generating business opportunities for governments, operators, and Internet service providers.

Operators make full use of the features of wireless broadband including wide coverage and low cost in providing universal broadband services. According to the ITU statistics, more than 200 operators across over 90 countries are using wireless broadband technology for access, which greatly speeds up the improvement of ICT indexes. With the advent of 5G, wide spectrums are allocated, removing the bottleneck of limited air interface capacity. Therefore, wireless networks can provide services which used to be only provided by optical fibers. In the next five years, wireless broadband will continuously facilitate the upgrade of national broadband plans. It is estimated that additional 300 million families will access the Internet through wireless broadband.