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http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-r/opb/rep/R-REP-M.2134-2008-PDF-E.pdf

The fact is there are only two technologies developed so far that the ITU has acknowledged as meeting the 4G requirements. Those are "LTE-Advanced" and "WirelessMAN-Advanced" (aka WiMAX Advanced); neither one of which is actually what is being deployed and marketed by at&t or verizon:
http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2010/40.aspx

Note that "LTE" is not the same thing as "LTE-Advanced". A key point where "LTE" falls flat on it's face (As does HSPA+ and the Clearwire WiMAX network offered by Sprint.) is the bandwidth requirement:
"enhanced peak data rates to support advanced services and applications (100 Mbit/s for high and 1 Gbit/s for low mobility"

Now, I'm aware that T-Mobile shoveled a bunch of money toward the ITU to get them to issue a press release stating that they did not object to tmo's use on the term 4G in their marketing. But there's a big difference between the lies told by marketing and MBA types and the actual facts.

http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-r/opb/rep/R-REP-M.2134-2008-PDF-E.pdf

The fact is there are only two technologies developed so far that the ITU has acknowledged as meeting the 4G requirements. Those are "LTE-Advanced" and "WirelessMAN-Advanced" (aka WiMAX Advanced); neither one of which is actually what is being deployed and marketed by at&t or verizon:
http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2010/40.aspx

Note that "LTE" is not the same thing as "LTE-Advanced". A key point where "LTE" falls flat on it's face (As does HSPA+ and the Clearwire WiMAX network offered by Sprint.) is the bandwidth requirement:
"enhanced peak data rates to support advanced services and applications (100 Mbit/s for high and 1 Gbit/s for low mobility"

Now, I'm aware that T-Mobile shoveled a bunch of money toward the ITU to get them to issue a press release stating that they did not object to tmo's use on the term 4G in their marketing. But there's a big difference between the lies told by marketing and MBA types and the actual facts.

http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-r/opb/rep/R-REP-M.2134-2008-PDF-E.pdf

The fact is there are only two technologies developed so far that the ITU has acknowledged as meeting the 4G requirements. Those are "LTE-Advanced" and "WirelessMAN-Advanced" (aka WiMAX Advanced); neither one of which is actually what is being deployed and marketed by at&t or verizon:
http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2010/40.aspx

Note that "LTE" is not the same thing as "LTE-Advanced". A key point where "LTE" falls flat on it's face (As does HSPA+ and the Clearwire WiMAX network offered by Sprint.) is the bandwidth requirement:
"enhanced peak data rates to support advanced services and applications (100 Mbit/s for high and 1 Gbit/s for low mobility"

Now, I'm aware that T-Mobile shoveled a bunch of money toward the ITU to get them to issue a press release stating that they did not object to tmo's use on the term 4G in their marketing. But there's a big difference between the lies told by marketing and MBA types and the actual facts.

I'm guessing from your rant that you do not in fact accept the industry accepted definition of 4G

1.0G: AMPS
2.0G: CDMA (IS-95) / TDMA (IS-136) / GSM
2.5G: EDGE / GPRS
3.0G: CDMA2000 (1xRTT/EV-DO) / GPRS/UMTS
3.9G: LTE / WiMax
4.0G: LTE Advanced

I will grant you that the ITU did get tired of US carriers crying and has allowed them to use 4G in their marketing despite their networks inability to actually meet the 4G specification.

There are international treaties concerning radio interference. Among the provisions of these treaties are sections defining amateur radio frequencies which are not to be assigned to other usage or interfered with. If power line communications interferes with amateur radio and emergency radio services, the country in question is in noncompliance with the treaties involved. The governing body of these treaties is the International Telecommunications Union; the United States and the United Kingdom are both signatories. (actually, almost every country on Earth is, with the non-signatories being North Korea and their ilk)

In the United States at least, treaties come immediately after the Constitution in being the highest law of the land (the Supremacy Clause). Depending upon where you are, your kilometerage may vary.

4G technically refers to networks that have "peak download speed at 100 Mbit/s for high mobility communication (such as from trains and cars) and 1 Gbit/s for low mobility communication (such as pedestrians and stationary users)" http://www.itu.int/ITU-R/index.asp?category=information&rlink=imt-advanced&lang=en Wireless broadband services offering WiMAX (clearewire, DBC) are not technically 4G (unless implementing 802.16m), but are still "mobile broadband" as of 802.16e. Which does he mean?

If you go to the very bottom of the list, yes. If you look at the full executive summary (PDF), the top 115 countries are doing quite ok with fixed broadband being up to 21% of average monthly income. The last of those are countries like Philippines, Vietnam and Morocco. Of the remaining 45, most are dirt poor mostly having a GDP below $1000/person and the bottom 15 countries have an average of $440/person. Also some of those at the bottom are in addition to being poor also island states, the domestic prices are much lower than an Internet connection requiring sea cable or satellite.. And the situation is improving, the title of chart 4 is "Fixed broadband Internet prices are dropping sharply but remain unaffordable in many developing countries".

What I got out of the summary is that you can get broadband at somewhat affordable prices in relatively many countries compared to what I thought. Also that being a poor country in a relatively less poor area helps for broadband prices. Most of the countries that really suck for broadband are those south of Sahara, apparently there's no short way to hook up to a rich country's backbone nearby, while those in Central America and SE Asia mostly manage to hook up to a decent country. You can call it a digital divide here, but it seems to have a physical form very much like a desert...

I have six letters for you:

• ITU
• UPU

Both the Universal Postal Union and the International Telecommunication Union are specialised agencies of the UN. And yet, it appears that the mail still gets through, and I can phone someone virtually anywhere in the world.

I suggest that you need to learn a little bit more about "the UN" before you pass judgment on such a huge organisation and all its parts.Of course it isn't perfect. But the ITU and UPU both do their jobs, and they do them without political interference. I would rather the DNS system be looked after by the ITU than the US government (who does interfere with the working of the relevant organisation).

(Of course, I'm not the first to suggest ITU. I suggest you do a web search for other opinions.)

This is a repeat.

Note that there is an interesting history here concerning the H.264 baseline. According to the JVT that created this baseline there was consensus to have this be "patent free" (or, more exactly, royalty free) :

Regarding Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) for the JVT codec, JVT has agreed to the following basic
principles:

  The JVT codec should have a simple royalty free “baseline” profile (both on the encoder and
decoder) in order to promote the wide implementation and use of the JVT codec. All implementations
should have such a common baseline profile core, in order to allow minimal interoperability among all
JVT codecs. The above requirement means that all technology applied in the baseline profile shall
have no IPR, expired IPR, or valid but royalty-fee-free IPR (according to Box 2.1 or 2.2.1 of the JVT
Patent Disclosure form, as shown below).

  Special, more advanced profiles of the JVT standard may contain patents per Box 2.2 of the JVT
Patent Disclosure form (reasonable terms and conditions).

So, how (besides chutzpah) does MPEG-LA assert licensing rights for the H.264 baseline ? I don't know, but I have heard rumors that the San Diego Qualcomm case had something to do with it :

Qualcomm's Patents Rendered Unenforceable and Qualcomm Ordered to Pay Broadcom's Attorneys Fees, Expenses and Costs

IRVINE, Calif., Aug 07, 2007 -- Broadcom Corporation (Nasdaq: BRCM), a global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, today announced that a San Diego federal court ruled yesterday that Qualcomm Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM) engaged in aggravated litigation misconduct and standards abuse with respect to two Qualcomm patents that relate to digital video technology. The court ruled that Qualcomm has thereby waived its rights to enforce all claims of the two patents and any continuations, continuations-in-part, divisions, reissues, or any other derivatives of those patents. The court also ordered Qualcomm to pay all of Broadcom's reasonable attorneys' fees, court costs, expert witness fees, travel expenses and any other litigation costs reasonably incurred by Broadcom in defending the patent infringement case that led to the rulings.

Citing the misconduct of Qualcomm's employees, witnesses, and counsel before, during and after trial, the court found that "Broadcom proved this to be an exceptional case by clear and convincing evidence based on (1) Qualcomm's bad faith participation in the H.264 standard-setting body, the Joint Video Team (JVT); and (2) the litigation misconduct of Qualcomm through its employees, hired outside witnesses, and trial counsel during discovery, motions practice, trial and post-trial proceedings." According to the court, "Qualcomm closely monitored and participated in the development of the H.264 standard, all the while concealing the existence of at least two patents it believed were likely to be essential to the practice of the standard, until after the development was completed and the standard was published internationally. Then, without any prior letter, email, telephone call, or even a smoke signal, let alone attempt to license Broadcom, Qualcomm filed the instant lawsuit against Broadcom for infringement of the '104 and '767 patents."

This experience seems to have left a bad taste in the mouth of the video standards industry concerning royalty free patents. This is shear speculation, but I also have to wonder if this has something to do with MPEG-LA's reluctance to date to charge royalties for the H.264 baseline.

You're guessing at numbers, whereas Wikipedia cites several studies, and IEEE and ITU publications.

In much of the underdeveloped world, there's a lack of hard telephone lines, so mobile phones are preferred. For instance, in sub-Saharan Africa, as of 2006, only 2.6% of rural villages had land lines, but 45% had mobile signals.

I haven't been able to track down the source, but I recall reading that in the poorest country in Asia, 50% of the population owned mobile phones. That's consistent with what I cited above.

I literally do not know anyone above the age of ten who does not have at least one mobile phone.

Finally, on the broadcast TV issue: if 15% of the population has access to TV only by broadcast, then that's an argument for extending fiber networks so that everyone has access, not an argument against extending networks.

4G is officially referring to IMT Advanced as defined by ITU-R. The LTE and WiMax (802.16e) we have now have not yet reached the requirements in IMT Advanced to be called 4G, and LTE is definitely not "the dominant 4G standard" as quoted in the article. Although IMT Advanced is not yet finalized and has to wait until October this year, the candidates include LTE-Advanced (3GPP LTE R10 and beyond) and WiMax Evolution (IEEE 802.16m).

4G as defined to IMT Advanced would give a 100Mbps peak data rate during high mobility and 1Gbps during stationary/low mobility.

LTE that AT&T and the rests would deliver 100Mbps downlink data rate but only about 50Mbps uplink, and only up to about 300Mbps when in low mobility. For the real 4G, one will have to wait until October this year to have the IMT-Advanced to become finalized, and that LTE-Advanced would hopefully be available in 2012.

4G is officially referring to IMT Advanced as defined by ITU-R. The LTE and WiMax (802.16e) we have now have not yet reached the requirements in IMT Advanced to be called 4G, and LTE is definitely not "the dominant 4G standard" as quoted in the article. Although IMT Advanced is not yet finalized and has to wait until October this year, the candidates include LTE-Advanced (3GPP LTE R10 and beyond) and WiMax Evolution (IEEE 802.16m).

4G as defined to IMT Advanced would give a 100Mbps peak data rate during high mobility and 1Gbps during stationary/low mobility.

LTE that AT&T and the rests would deliver 100Mbps downlink data rate but only about 50Mbps uplink, and only up to about 300Mbps when in low mobility. For the real 4G, one will have to wait until October this year to have the IMT-Advanced to become finalized, and that LTE-Advanced would hopefully be available in 2012.

h.264 is an open standard, the spec is available online, for free, right here: http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.264-200305-S

Of course you need to pay to implement it, but lets not pretend it's a black box or 'closed' just because it isn't literally free to pass around like friendship bread.

x264 (which is the h264-compatible codec used in VLC)

x264 is only an encoder for the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard. It does not handle decoding.

is a cleanroom reverse-engineering job. So, it's technically not h264. Just very compatible

Citation definitely needed. The project calls itself a H.264/AVC encoder.

I'm guessing because there are possible legal patent-related issues surrounding a reverse-engineered codec like x264.

Being implemented through reverse-engineering doesn't matter. Anyway, it seems the specification is freely downloadable.

40 sat terminals are being established, along with 60 broadband terminals, from the ITU. A lot of stuff has to be moved in, because so much was destroyed

http://www.itu.int/newsroom/press_releases/2010/02.html

I was looking at various pics of the destruction, and it is trite and often used, but it looks like a major giant airforce just carpet bombed the place.

I have never been there, but based on other articles I have read about real poor areas with cellphones, a lot of the people depend on charging kiosks / local services to recharge their phones, because domestic electricity is so rare. I would imagine most of those facilities are now smashed as well.

Probably. It's a stretch, but since most of cellphones nowadays come with some sort of a little camera built-in and Latvia's mobile penetration rate is around 99%, I wouldn't be surprised by some random guy putting up a video of such a sight on youtube a few hours later.

Though the timing is a little suspicious, and the quality of the video is better than something I'd expect from a cellphone.

The UN already has the Universal Postal Union and the International Telecommunications Union, which do for post offices, telephony, and radio roughly what ICANN does for the Internet. The ITU does a decent job, assigning country codes, negotiating the rules which interconnect phone systems across borders, and keeping radio broadcasters from conflicting. Nobody thinks about the Universal Postal Union much, but the fact that you can mail a letter to almost any country on earth didn't happen by accident.

Much of what the UN really does is to act as an umbrella organization for the dull and boring mechanics of infrastructure coordination. The diplomatic level gets all the attention, but there's necessary grunt work going on in the background.

I see nothing odd in that. I got my first Nokia cellphone when I was on 5th grade, I think. I'm not sure how long elementary school takes in USA but here in Finland it is 9 years and you finish it when you are 15 or 16 years old (assuming you don't have to redo any year or anything like that). Most Finns have already also given up land lines as everyone in the family has cellphone. (Official cell phone penetration rate is apparently at 128% as there are more phones than people. For comparison, the rate for USA is 86% linky)

So a lot of kids at elementary school have cellphones. At that point question is "Should they be allowed in school or not" and thus "Is there any benefit from that?". The answer is, yes there is. At least I remember numerous times that I didn't come home directly from school but instead went to a friend for a while. It was good for me to have my phone with me and I think that my mother was happy knowing that she could contact me if necessary. Of course I used the phone myself, too. Texted friends if they have gotten off the school yet, etc. etc... Once called an ambulance after school when I saw an accident. So the next question is "Is there any harm from allowing them in schools" and I don't believe there is. There was a rule "Don't let it ring during a lesson or a teacher will take it and your parents will have to come and ask it back.". Some teachers were very strict about that, others were not. But practically everyone had a phone and I don't think I heard a phone ring during a lesson more than ten times or so in total. It was never a problem of any sort, not for teachers and not for students.

A lot of posters have implied that not only would cell phones be allowed in schools but it would be a very odd idea to allow them. Is there any logical reasoning behind this?

The empire strikes back. In other news: The ITU recommends that network filters should be installed which prevent access to websites with child abuse material. It should not surprise anyone that such filters would be technically content neutral.

ask the itu

Is the ITU considered to be part of the UN by you?

I personally think they would do a good job...

What about the UPU (formally IPU)?

Both are older than the UN (being established in the 18th Century), but, both are part of the UN system now. Oh, and what about the IAEA? FAO? ILO? WMO? All these are part of the UN as well. I think they seemed to have worked out reasonably well, though, of course, not perfect.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that the UN is only the politicised bits.

While school contacts with the space station are routinely made through the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station program, many of those contacts are made using a traditional ham radio.

They made their own radio that used Amateur Radio frequencies (nitpick: Amateur Satellite Service freqs) as opposed to using a Yaesu or Kenwood radio on Amateur freqs. To hams like me, this isn't a big deal. Designing software-defined radios and protocols that can span Virginia->New Zealand using 1W of power is cool, but making an 5W VHF or UHF radio is so 1970's.

>

Alright. South Korea and Japan already have average connections around 20 times faster than the U.S. or EU average (~100 Mbit/s versus ~5 Mbit/s). What new types of services have these superspeeds provided Korea and Japan which we Americans/Europeans do not have? If the answer is "nothing" then the upgrade is not necessary, because their superspeeds have not produced anything to justify the expense.

Good question. I tried to do some quick research just now. All I came up with was this interesting report on South Korea's development of broadband. Although investment in ICT had taken place for years, it looks like some crucial investment was designed to pull them out of the Asian financial crisis, and succeeded in doing so.

I've been guestimating that the growth due to this infrastructure is due to new services and opportunities. Perhaps the bulk of the benefit is more mundane than that. Google staffers say that the number of hits for the search site is directly and significantly affected by response time (including latency). Improve response times by a few ms on average, and hits go up. Could it be that removing a second or two of load time on every site that you visit, for the entire web-enabled population, actually makes everyone more productive?

I'm stabbing in the dark here, but I'm sure there are tangible economic benefits. I just have no idea how you would begin predicting them, which would seem to be an important precursor for investment in the infrastructure.

One thing about the DNS system is that it is very hierarchical (if you want everyone using the same root servers at least). And when the organisation that controls it all is a corrupt organisation answerable to the US government (not the most pristine government in the world), that's a problem.

So, my question is, why can't these functions be handed off to an international organisation dedicated to standards, that isn't a part of the US government and has got a history of not being corrupt? Perhaps the ITU (official ITU website)? (WIPO, who administer domain name disputes, is part of the UNO, and no one complains that they are run by China and Iran.)

As for expanding how many TLD's there are, I don't see why there should not be more. It would be nice if the prices were less of course.

And finally, imagine how many poorly written filters are going to break because they think that all TLD's are two or three chars.

The United Stats (TFS:"The U.S. National Security Agency is also participating in the "IP Traceback" drafting group") and major western corporations (PDF linked from article) also support the proposal. What a surprise.

"What's distressing is that it doesn't appear that there's been any real consideration of how this type of capability could be misused," said Marc Rotenberg"
Wait... How can you correctly use this service? It seems like something only the clandestine agencies and major corporations of the world would like to see happen.

Anyways, according to TFS, this proposal would almost certainly have to modify existing protocols. Can't that be blocked by the CS/Engineering community members who sit on respective committees? Can international/national governments really force IETF to do something, as the article claims?

Is a space real estate with very good value. It is a little more than a volume of space as emission rights come with them.

The International Telecommunication Union manage the satellites. http://www.itu.int/net/about/index.aspx. Some states may reserve the usage of some slot but they have to use the frequency not to block other nation to use it. e.g. even they were very late in thei rproject, the Gallileo project had to launch test satelite to use the frequence at a certain date or they would have lost the frequency.

If you were just selling the frequency, some big pocket state/people would buy them and would not have anymore money left to use the frequency. 3G in europe anyone?

When we will have commercial space flight and I talk here real space flight (reaching LEO orbit) then we may need a body like that for the moon. Up to then, any development will be centered on a few location choosen by the big space agencies who will ibnstall the basic infrastructure like an 'oxygen extraction plan'.

PS: If you could buy the moon! who would collect the money? To do what?
The UN to help poor countries go to the moon?

Are the offsets going to be 32bit or 64bit? LSB or MSB? Do we pad data-structures? Will strings be zero terminated or have a prefixed length? And how do you tell the value 16 from the tag 16?

Read this document.

http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/studygroups/com17/languages/X.691-0207.pdf

It's not the only solution to the problems you thought of in a few minutes. But actually if you'd spent a few more minutes you would know there are many possible solutions to them. The people who invented ASN.1 have actually spent rather more than a few minutes thinking about this stuff of course, and it might be a good idea to read what they have written before you claim those problems are insoluble.

I would like a demonstration of that with the example of Microsoft Word 2003 format, the binary variant, please.

Hmm, so if I can't read Finnish it proves that written languages are impossible? Email the Journal of Linguistics and them your important discovery!

I don't have a modem because ADSL technically can't have MODEMs (ADSL lacks modulating AND demodulating)

Unfortunately, very likely due to undue influence of Emca on the ISO/IEC JTC1 Fast-Track process (ca 80% of their fast-track submissions are from Ecma, and ISO/IEC seem to consider it good and valuable to get many such submissions) the ISO/IEC rules about patent disclosure are not applied to the fast-track process, but Ecma's much lower standards (requiring only a RAND commitment) are applied. (To this day Microsoft has not disclosed the patent numbers of their alleged patent rights claims on OOXML.)

You are right. I should have said 56 kbps. V.92 modems run at 8000 baud.

This was a spirited discussion, although Kneuer intentionally missed the point about the un-auctioned 2.4GHz band. Knowing enough (far too many, really) economists, this is a fairly common tactic, to provide responses that completely miss the point and allow you to repeat your opinion ad infinitum ad nauseum. The current slang for this seems to be "talking point". Kneuer knows that the 2.4GHz wifi market is booming because of lack of regulation (I'm talking forcing a particular modulation scheme or licensing, not FCC/ART/TUV limits on power and antennas), but he can't admit it, so he re-iterates his "talking point" about not regulating the monopolies. I'm pretty sure this was quite intentional, Kneuer was a lobbyist far too long for that to have been a mis-understanding.

the 700 MHz band, by nature of its frequency, can readily be a more long-distance transmission medium than 2.4 GHz spectrum could ever hope to be (Watt for Watt)

700 MHz can go longer distances, and is less vulnerable to the line-of-sight problems of the microwave frequencies of WiFi, but that is not what makes it interesting. 700 MHz can penetrate walls, windows, trees, and other structures with greater ease than higher frequencies. This means that municipal 700 MHz WiFi/WiMax local distribution could become a reality, one antenna covering a few hundred houses within a 500 meter radius would not require external boxes for each house as with the current 2.4GHz WiFi setups. Although the 65 MHz bandwidth being talked about in the speech would only be enough for 10-12 WiMax channels with a maximum throughput of 6 Mbps each.

The 2.4 GHz band was chosen because it is completely unusable for longer distance communications. Water vapor absorbs too much energy, so concrete, brick, trees, rain, fog, all block 2.4 GHz signals, and degrade 5.4-5.8 GHz signals. The worst absorption comes at 22 and 60 GHz.

The WRC/ITU-R hasn't discussed opening a new worldwide band, the 700 MHz spectrum would be for the U.S. market only. There would be no economies of scale with only the U.S. market for cheap wireless gadgets. The U.S. only accounts for about 10% of the worldwide electronic gadget market. Here in ETSIland, any reclaimed spectrum would be different for each country.

This is the main reason WiMax has the ability to run on any frequency, because there isn't going to be another worldwide lightly regulated band like 2.4 GHz for the foreseeable future. The WARC (predecessor to the ITU-R/WRC) first proposed the 2.4 GHz band be opened up for general public use worldwide in 1979, after almost a decade of committee wrangling. Once the band was decided (because 2.4 GHz is the most useless band in the spectrum for a whole range of technical/physical reasons), it still took from 1979 to 1993 to agree to push national regulators to free up the band from existing licenses, most countries had it reserved for military use or it was unused. Just opening up the band as unlicensed created whole industries like cordless phones, baby monitors, with WiFi coming along much later.

My conclusions:... There's money to be had for the US government in them thar spectrum

Governments aren't concerned about the revenues an auction would bring in, small change compared to the money to be earned from sales tax revenues and new industries from something like WiFi. This is all about protecting the revenues of the incumbent duopolies that have taken over the American market. If the government holds an auction, an incumbent can grab and hold the spectrum, preventing any "free market" competition, and forcing U.S. citizens to pay obscene amounts of money if they want access to the internet. The government limits access for physical media, granting right-of-way easements for fiber/cable/copper phone lines, which create an artificial scarcity and keeps profit margins healthy. Licensing spectrum to one auction winner also creates scarcity, and keeps any competitors from innovating. Look at the innovation in the 2.4 GHz space to see what happens without auctions or licensing, but Kneuer is paid to ignore that.

the AC

Not really, beyond telling him to read the H.263 specification...

http://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T -REC-H.263-200501-I!!PDF-E&type=items ...where he won't find any reference to the MPEG (let alone MPEG-4, which was published after H.263).

MPEG-4 is "H.263 compatible" in the sense that a basic H.263 stream can be correctly decoded by a "complete" MPEG-4 video decoder, but MPEG-4 decoders aren't required to be "complete" (which is not to say that a lot of them don't cover what's required to decode ITU H.263). And a MPEG-4 encoder certainly isn't required to produce H.263-compatible streams.

Of course, he might be saying just that the full MPEG-4 standard "covers" everything you need to decode basic H.263, in which case he's correct. But H.263 is not "a part of MPEG-4" (it was developed before MPEG-4, by a different organisation), unlike H.264 which was atually developed along with and is part of the MPEG-4 standard (it's "part 10", a.k.a. "AVC").

Why, the same organization that should probably be responsible for *all* critical Internet infrastructure standards, just as it is responsible for the standards relating to telecommunications and radio communications.

The ITU (also here.

Go ahead, laugh, but I think it's long past time for control of such functions as DNS, NTP, assigned numbers, et cetera, to be transferred out of the hands of primarily US-based corporations and loosely coupled organizations such as the IETF and IANA and into the hands of some sort of international treaty organization.

Since the ITU not only fits this description, but in fact was founded to deal with precisely these sorts of issues, why not let it do what it does for the Internet as well?

After seeing your typo, I was interested in finding out if there was an H.234 standard. Turns out there is, and it describes encryption and key management for audiovisual services. Whether or not this is DRM or just encrypted communications, I do not know (probably the latter), but that's kinda funny as it's almost a Freudian slip (if you had known what H.234 was previously).

Valid prior art would be some form of H.323 to PSTN gateway (called a H.323 Gatekeeper), or maybe any sort of way to bridge PSTN with IP.

FWIW, Cisco's IOS v11.3 implemented this functionality, which puts it around 1999

The PDF to the H.323 standard is at http://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T -REC-H.323-200606-I!!PDF-E&type=items but I believe it was finalised in 1996, which puts it a bit too late. I think we'd need to be looking at SS7 Gateways to bust this patent.

This isn't much of a response to the previous post, but I didn't want to start a thread with the same title...

The ITU has way too many things on its agenda to do a good job improving security in any area. Consider the ICANN, whose focus on Internet addresses is rather one-dimensional. IMO, it isn't even clear that ICANN does enough for security and efficiency. For example, every time the ICANN releases a new domain extension, the majority of memorable names get taken up almost immediately by domain squatters who proceed to make big bucks off of nothing. This is inefficient in the sense that monopoly is inefficient (not to mention annoying and responsible for the proliferation of firms with nonsense names that make you want to punch them). This is also a security issue because of the information people could inadvertently release by accidentally going to domain squatters' web pages.

I guess there are good things to be said about ICANN's being hands-off. But my point is if such gaping issues can exist within the single area of assigning addresses, imagine how many things the ITU would have to deal with if they were serious about security...

more like the whole world.

Here's the chart. Agreed that they should have included it in the article.

Looks like they're saying it about China.

Looking at the list, you notice two trends. (1) Cold northern countries are in the top 15... Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Canada etc... (2) Smaller countries with highly dense population centers are in the top 15... Korea, Netherlands, Denmark, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Iceland (Iceland which is both cold and small is at the very top)

That said, we probably could do better with increased compensation because we're so goddamn rich, and compared to other countries on the list, we have such a low penetration of DSL.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and on what grounds?

Procedures are a mess (a mixture of first come/first served, proportionality to country's size, use-it-or-lose-it, and just plain "who shouts loudest at the WRC"), and described here (sorry for the Word doc, but ITU is somewhat akin to a banana republic...)

I'd guess the only reasonable territorial claim would be by equatorial nations directly below the geostationary orbit.

Nope, any country can apply. Obviously the satellite needs to be visible from the owning country (or else it would be rather useless, at least for use by the country itself), but the country does not need to be directly underneath it.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and on what grounds?

Procedures are a mess (a mixture of first come/first served, proportionality to country's size, use-it-or-lose-it, and just plain "who shouts loudest at the WRC"), and described here (sorry for the Word doc, but ITU is somewhat akin to a banana republic...)

I'd guess the only reasonable territorial claim would be by equatorial nations directly below the geostationary orbit.

Nope, any country can apply. Obviously the satellite needs to be visible from the owning country (or else it would be rather useless, at least for use by the country itself), but the country does not need to be directly underneath it.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and on what grounds?

Procedures are a mess (a mixture of first come/first served, proportionality to country's size, use-it-or-lose-it, and just plain "who shouts loudest at the WRC"), and described here (sorry for the Word doc, but ITU is somewhat akin to a banana republic...)

I'd guess the only reasonable territorial claim would be by equatorial nations directly below the geostationary orbit.

Nope, any country can apply. Obviously the satellite needs to be visible from the owning country (or else it would be rather useless, at least for use by the country itself), but the country does not need to be directly underneath it.

They have to do something to make sure that the UN doesn't get control. The UN is so corrupt, incompetent, and inept that it make the U. S. Govt look brilliant! Think about Rwanda, Darfur and others where the UN might as well not have showed up for all the good that wasn't done. NATO had to deal with Yugoslavia because nobody in Europe trusted the UN not to screw it up worse. Yeah, just look how badly the ITU has been at running the international dialling code system! Oh wait.. They're actually doing a pretty darn good job at that. Quite unlike ICANN to date, really.

I can't really comment on american shows but people get the same impression here in the UK, however the audio level actually stays the same, the audio is compressed to enhance the volume of the commercials. It has now become common practice to boost the sound level of quieter passages so there is more sound power in the frequency range where the ear is sensitive. Because most TV programs do not use audio compression in the same manner, the result is that commercials are often perceived as louder. In actual decibel range, there is no measurable difference between the programs and the commercials. There are (at least in the UK) strict quality controls placed on transmission material which a programme or advert must comply with before it is transmitted. The ITU have written guidelines and specifications for this although unfortunatly these are only available for subscribers to view. Essentially the material should average a PPM reading of 4.

The United Nations
The European Union
NATO
Interpol
World Health Organization
International Civil Aviation Organization
The International Telecommunications Union
The Red Cross

I don't know what to say about this one though:
International Network for Bamboo and Rattan (INBAR)

And more: Google it

Not to mention the sloppy rules for registration:

To register in the .int domain, the applicant must be an intergovernmental organization that meets the requirements found in RFC 1591. In brief, the .int domain is used for registering organizations established by international treaties between or among national governments. Only one registration is allowed for each organization. There is no fee for registering an .int domain name.

This is just plain not going to happen. The satellite/aeronautical/test community is running out of spectrum as it is with more systems and systems of systems coming online. You're going to see proposals coming to the 2007 ITU WRC (World Radiocommunication Conference) to allocate even more spectrum for these areas.

Simultaneously with these proposals, are studies being conducted to greatly increase the amount of data that can be sent and received with the existing spectrum and to reduce if not eliminate inefficiencies. Of particular interest is the DoD-sponsored study on the INET (Integrated Network Enhanced Telemetry) architecture.

BTW, satellite receiving stations do *not* have to make use of dishes. Some amazing things are being done with small phased array antennas.

i would much rather have the united states in control than some beurocratic UN organization that's been proven it has members that can be bought.

Again with the "corrupt UN" replies.. Can you folks find me some newsarticles about rampant corruption at the ITU? No? Gee.. Now, which organization is running the international phone numbering plan, again? And organized the WSIS?

The first half of the article is very parochial - kind of ooh the nasty Americans want to diminish the importance of Greenwich.

Which seems to be simply the delusion of the author, and has nothing to do with the subject of the discussion. The author has cast the entire thing as a US versus UK contest, with the noble UK scientists defending the importance of Greenwich, and the evil US overlords trying to steal it away and disrupt the lives of the common folk. First of all, I think if you polled US scientists, you'd find the vast majority of them quite content with the current system, and not calling for any change. In fact, you have to read halfway down the article to find out that the only people proposing a change are "US members of the International Telecommunications Union", without specifying which company they are referring to. Then somehow a handful of people at a telecommunications company issuing a proposal is amplified by this author to represent all US scientists and the views of Americans in general.

This is just a classic case of crappy sensationalist reporting.

I think UN control of anything technological will fail.

Yeah. If you want an example, if it weren't for the ITU then the phone system would have been quite succesful instead of the total failure it has been.