The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has just published “Measuring the Information Society” (2009) an ICT Development Index covering the period from 2002 to 2007.   At first sight the top level figures appear encouaging: over 4 billion cell phone subscibers, 1.3 billion land lines, and almost 1.5 billion using the Internet.   But what progress has been made over the past 5 years?   Do more people in the developing world need to use the Internet?   The conclusion of the report is that “the magnitude of the digital divide is almost the same as five years before”.

The concept of the “digital divide” has acheived widespread currency over many years and is commonly interpreted as including both access to ICTs and use of the Internet.   The ITU has then taken this broad definition and built a composite index to measure the divide.   The index includes measures relating to mobile phone, fixed lines, and broadband Internet.   For the first time the report now includes measures relating to an “ICT Price Basket” which relates tariffs for different services into one measure and then compares prices to relative income levels.   For example this shows that in the UK broadband costs 0.8% of GNI whilst in Nepal this is 80% of GNI.

It is clear that those countries with relatively low costs of mobile phones have a high use level.   With the direction of the technology heading towards the mobile Internet could it be that voice communications will be the major way in which developing countries increase access to and use of the Internet?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 6:52 am and is filed under ICTs, New Technologies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.