It is a great pleasure to be with you here in Dubai today. Let me offer my sincere thanks andappreciation to the United Arab Emirates for all its efforts in the excellent organization andfacilities for this conference. I would like to express my thanks to the local authorities of Dubaifor their very kind hospitality.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I think we are all well aware of the importance of this sixth WTDC, and I am encouraged to seesuch a high level of participation.
What we decide and define here over the next two weeks will shape not just the future of ICTdevelopment over the next four years, but the future shape of the very world we live in.
In today’s fast-moving ICT sector, four years is a very long time. To see how long that really is,let’s look back to 2010, when we last held the WTDC, in Hyderabad, India.
Since then the ICT landscape has changed in extraordinary and unexpected ways.
We have seen the number of fixed-line subscriptions continue to fall, and there are now around82 million fewer fixed-line subscriptions than there were at the beginning of 2010.
This fall in fixed lines has been massively more than compensated for by mobile growth over thesame period – with net additions of almost 2.2 billion mobile cellular subscriptions since thebeginning of 2010.
And the great news for this Conference is that almost all of this growth has been in thedeveloping world, which accounted for 90% of the net additions – very close to two billion newmobile cellular subscriptions have been added in the past four years.
The same pattern is true of the growth in internet users, where 817 million of the one billionnew internet users over the past four years have come from the developing world.
We have also seen social media continue to skyrocket. When we met in Hyderabad, four yearsago, there were around 30 million users of Twitter, and 400 million users of Facebook. Todayhundreds of millions of tweets are sent every day, and Facebook has over 1.2 billion users.
Does that mean our job is finished?
Of course not!
And that’s why we’re all here.
While over three quarters of people in the developed world now have access to the internet,more than two thirds of people in the developing world still do not.
In the developed world, fixed and mobile broadband penetration rates at the beginning of 2014stood at 27.2% and 74.8% respectively. In the developing world, they stood at 6.1% and19.8%.
Distinguished delegates,
These are powerful numbers, but they also demonstrate the extraordinary opportunities thatlie ahead.
ICTs – and in particular broadband networks – offer perhaps the greatest opportunity wehave ever had to make rapid and profound advances in global social and economicdevelopment.
This is of tremendous and timely importance, as we approach the cusp between the MDGsnext year, and the beginning of the post-2015 development process.
And this of course is why ‘Broadband for Sustainable Development’ has been chosen as thetheme for WTDC this year.