The International Telecommunications Union has released the 2009 edition of Measuring the Information Society – The ICT Development Index (PDF, 1.53MB) which captures the level of advancement of ICTs in more than 150 countries worldwide and compares progress made between 2002 and 2007.
If you’re looking for measures of the digital divide, here’s hard data for you. One finding jumps to the eye: the rise in mobile cellular telephone subscriptions.
There has been a clear shift from fixed to mobile cellular telephony and by the end of 2008, there were over three times more mobile cellular subscriptions than fixed telephone lines globally. Two thirds of those are now in the developing world compared with less than half in 2002.
(from the ITU press release)
The charts speak louder.
(from Chapter 2 – ICT Market Overview, page 4)
About Internet penetration, ITU estimates that 23 out of 100 inhabitants globally used the Internet at the end of 2008. However, penetration is still low in developing countries (5% in Africa). Broadband penetration is even lower.
How many online? (Source: ITU World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators database.)
(from Chapter 2 – ICT Market Overview, page 5)
Is all lost? No. Read on:
Given the rapid spread of IMT-2000/3G mobile cellular networks in many countries, including in the developing world, there is a clear potential for mobile broadband to connect more and more people — and at higher speed.
Bold by the author of this post, who can’t help but wonder: is this the end of the Web as we know it?
Combine this prediction with the substantial persistence of the digital divide, and here the questions start to flurry:
Maybe nothing new under the sun, but the ITU data put these questions in a different light and give them new meaning.
What do you think?
All content created by ICT-KM is published under a Creative Commons 3.0 license. You are free to share, republish or remix so long as you attribute ICT-KM clearly as the original source.
great summary Antonella
Hi, no doubt mobile technology is dominating in many markets. Mobile dispalys accomplish some tasks but not all related to ICT4D.
Forget 3G mobile telephony wider coverage in Africa. While the technology is still skyrocketing its price, the operators have problems to get a decent coverage even in developed world. The way to Africas broadband is called Wi-Fi…
I wonder if they ever counted (at least 150) Zambian villages that have Radio E-Mail (http://www.remcu.org) to the Africa Internet usage tatistics.
kozuch, the report mentions wifi connections for developing countries (I don’t think they counted that, though, check it out for yourself).
Christian Kreutz (http://www.crisscrossed.net/) has posted “9 Examples of innovative tools for the mobile phone” and shares similarly puzzled questions on what use mobile phones will be gradually put to as they become more widespread.
I might be mistaken, but I have not seen any standards on web design/development for mobile devices nor any for low bandwidth.
The former would greatly increase the speed and usability, and the latter would decrease the connectivity cost in developing countries.
Just imagine that you would be able to go to any website and dependent on connectivity or user options (add a /low behind any URL), any website would show low graphics.
Peter, when we talk about standards, it’s worthwhile turning to the W3C. Here are search results on ‘mobile’ from the W3C site: http://tinyurl.com/b4g9ax
The W3C has a Mobile Web Initiative going on http://www.w3.org/Mobile/ and a workshop coming up in April on “Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social and Economic Development ” http://www.w3.org/2008/10/MW4D_WS/
Your comment raises more issues about the level of adoption, actual application and/or maturity of the existing standards.
Always through the W3C Mobile Web site comes this aggregator http://www.w3.org/Mobile/planet … may be worth keeping an eye on it
@Peter : W3 does indeed give guidelines for mobile based web development – it is the XHTML-MP specification. Mobiforge.com and ready.mobi give more information.
You can also put a URL into a transcoder and get a mobile friendly site out – 2 of the most popular are mowser and google – http://mowser.com/web/ for Mowser or http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u= for google
Opera mini also has a feature where you can set the image quality and it does reduce the size of sites.
Antonella, thanks for summarizing the report. Finding the “way” between mobile and Internet, as we know, is a solution to me. In my opinion, the point is on how to make the large quantity of information available on the Web via cellphones. I consider SMS are not enough as do not allow real many-to-many communication. So something more flexible, more visual but still pretty light has to come. Could be something like a mobile-friendly Web, as @rob allen was indicating, or a layer in between the Web and the SMS communication.