Geneva — Forty-four major telecommunication giants from around the world attended a meeting hosted by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva on Monday to discuss the future of telecommunications.

The ITU, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, is an international organisation in the United Nations (UN) system, where governments and the private sector co-ordinate global telecommunication networks and services.

Some of the major corporations that attended the meeting on Monday included Alcatel, Ericsson, China Mobile and IBM. Chief technology officers from these corporations discussed their strategies and visions about the evolution of information communication technologies (ICTs).

A briefing session was organised by ITU on Tuesday December 9, where various innovations in telecommunication technology were discussed.

"We're very excited about some of the technologies that will make it much easier to bridge the digital divide," said Vice-President of Public Policy for the Internet Society, Dr Michael Nelson. The "digital divide" is the technological gulf that exists because the developing world is lagging behind the developed world in terms of technological development.

Most of the companies present at the Tuesday briefing highlighted the fact that their respective organisations were preparing to embrace the next generation of ICTs. The Internet and other tools of communication are expanding at such a rapid rate that corporations have had to upgrade to more efficient systems to manage the advancement in technology.

The developing countries, on the other hand, have only just begun to recognise the impact and importance of ICTs in development and do not have the infrastructure, nor the expertise, to accommodate this technical evolution.

"There are four components to the digital divide: computers, connections, content and competence," explained Nelson, who is also affiliated to IBM.

The convergence of various tools of communication like the Internet and the cellphone was also a major theme in the discussion. The coming together of different technologies has forced major corporations to come up with new products. China Mobile, for instance, has developed a system called Monternet. It has over 30 million subscribers in China and is a result of convergence between the Internet and the mobile phone industry.

One of the major issues surrounding the digital divide is the question of infrastructure. In the rural parts of the Third World, people are only beginning to receive access to electricity and telephone facilities. This means they have to literally skip decades of development in order be on par with the rest of the world.

So what is being done by the big corporations to ensure the divide does not expand? "Computers are easy. Two hundred dollars will buy you a good computer now," said Nelson. "The big challenge is competence. How do we train people to use the technology?" There are now technologies in place in to enable the most remote communities to access the Internet via solar-powered satellites.

There are also developments in voice recognition software that mean the user may not even have to be literate, but merely has to talk to the computer to get it to respond. "At IBM we are working with some schools around the world to introduce IT into the schools, because we believe computers can transform education," added Nelson.

IBM has also invested a billion dollars over a three-year period in autonomic technology, which allows computers to take care of themselves by identifying their internal problems and correcting them by themselves. This would cut out most of the professional people needed to maintain the machines, making the computers relatively cheap to use.

It seems that those countries that welcome international IT companies that want to start up, and who readily allow new technologies to be implemented, will leap-frog the costly process of gradual development.

So it is up to the developing countries to decide whether rapid development is worth opening up their borders to international business influence and scrapping some of the laws governing telecommunications.