By Prince Osuagwu
As if the Secretary General of International Telecommunications Union, ITU, Dr  Hamadoun Touré, was referring to Nigeria, where the past few weeks recorded massive collapse of almost all telecom networks, governments need to take urgent action now to support mobile broadband growth.

Secretary General ITU, Dr Hamadoun Touré

For the ITU scribe, accelerated fibre roll-out and greater spectrum availability will be imperative if network bottlenecks are to be avoided.

Toure’s advise rose from predictions that network congestions were going to worsen with present statistics of mobile usage around the world.

According to him, Smartphone users already consume on average, five times more data capacity than users of ordinary mobile phones and with the number of smartphones set to rise from today’s global estimate of 500 million handsets in use, to almost two billion by 2015, operators are already having to employ multi-pronged strategies to keep up with demand and not all are succeeding.

“Mobile operators have been investing billions to upgrade and improve the capacity and performance of their networks, but in some high-usage cities, such as San Francisco, New York and London, we are still seeing users frustrated by chronic problems of network unavailability.

“Robust National Broadband Plans that promote extra spectrum and the faster roll-out of the fibre networks which are essential to mobile backhaul are vital to support the growing number of data-intensive applications,” added Touré.

ITU analysis shows 98 countries have National Broadband Plans in place, with this number set to increase over the next year. Mobile broadband is increasingly the technology of choice for hundreds of millions in the developing world, where fixed line infrastructure is often sparse and expensive to deploy.

ITU estimates that the number of mobile broadband subscriptions will reach one billion in the first quarter of 2011. With ninety per cent of the world now covered by a mobile signal, it is clear that mobile is a key tool to bridging the digital divide.

In 2010, 73 per cent of total mobile cellular subscriptions were from the developing world.
It could be recalled that Touré in 2010 led the creation of the Broadband Commission for Digital Development to highlight the need for governments worldwide to promote broadband as a key development tool and push broadband network roll-out more proactively.

The Commission is co-chaired by President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Carlos Slim Helú, Honorary Lifetime Chairman of Grupo Carso.

Dr Touré and Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, are Vice-Chairs. It comprises some of the leading lights of the mobile industry, including Alcatel Lucent’s Ben Verwaayen, Bharti Airtel’s Sunil Bharti Mittal, China Mobile’s Wang Jianzhou, Ericsson’s Hans Vestberg, Denis O’Brien of Digicel, Paul Jacobs of Qualcomm and César Alierta of Telefonica, alongside other prominent business figures, including Sir Richard Branson, John Chambers of Cisco and Paul Otellini of Intel.

Top policy-makers and regulators on the Commission include the European Commission’s Neelie Kroes and the FCC’s Julius Genachowski.

The Commission’s report, delivered to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York last September, recommended that world leaders focus on building a ‘virtuous broadband development dynamic’, and urged governments not to limit market entry, not to tax broadband and related services too heavily, and to ensure ample availability of spectrum to support mobile broadband growth.