How The Internet Killed The Phone

TWENTY YEARS OF MEASURING THE MISSING LINK
Article prepared by Dr Tim Kelly, Head, Strategy and Policy Unit, ITU In 1985, in the report of the Independent Commission of the Independent Commission for Worldwide Telecommunications Development: The Missing Link, Sir Donald Maitland and his team reported on the lack of telephones worldwide that was impeding the world’s economic and socialdevelopment. Some 20 years later, in its September 16 2005 edition, The Economist reported on the “death” of the phone business, supposedly killed by the rise of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). The capacity of the Internet, which is optimised for data, is so great that telephone calls can be carried at a marginal cost which begins to approach zero. What happened in the 20 intervening years to convert aglobal shortage of phones into a glut of over-capacity? How has the world changed in those two decades? How has the science of measuring the “missing link”—or the “digital divide” as we are more likely to call it today— affected our understanding of the problem?

1

WHAT A DIFFERENCE 20 YEARS MAKES

The Missing Link report is probably best remembered for its aphorisms, some of which do noteven appear in the report (see Box 1) it also contained some memorable charts and graphs, based on data from ITU. The ITU had been collected telecommunication indicators since the 19th Century and this process was formalised in the 1960s with the first publication of the Yearbook of Statistics1. More recently, in 1994, on the 10th anniversary of the Missing Link report, ITU launched the “WorldTelecommunication Development Report” series, and a couple of years later the “World Telecommunication Indicators Database.” These reports provide a much richer range of statistical data that was available to the Worldwide Commission, but nevertheless, comparisons between the Maitland report and more recent data make for fascinating reading.

Box 1: Some telecom myths and near misses In trying tocharacterise the digital divide, it is still common to cite from the Maitland report, even though it is now 20 years old. But many of these aphorisms are no longer true. For instance • “There are more telephones in Tokyo than in the whole of Africa”. WRONG. Although this was true at the time the Maitland report was written, it was already false by the late 1990s. As of the start of 2004, there werearound 25 million fixed lines and more than 50 million mobile phones in Africa, which is several times more than the total population of Tokyo. “Half of the world’s population have never made a telephone call”. WRONG.2 This particular soundbyte, which is still repeated by some of those who should know better, is frozen in time. It does not appear in the maitland report, though it may have beencorrect at the time. Now it is almost certainly false. Although there are still large segments of the world’s population that do not have access to a telephone, and probably could not afford to make a call, this is far less than half the world’s population. ITU estimates, based on the number of households and villages that have telephone access, suggest the number is close to one-fifth of theworld’s population that have no telephone access. “There are more Internet users in Iceland than in Africa”. WRONG. This particular soundbyte came from ITU’s 1999 report “Internet for Development,” and again was true at the time, but has long since been overtaken by technological progress. At the start of 2004, there were an estimated 12.4 million Internet users in Africa, which exceeds by around 40times, the total population of Iceland.

•

•

Source: ITU (2005) “Multi-stakeholder partnerships for bridging the digital divide”, available at: http://www.itu.int/wsisbridges

1

Figure 1: Distribution of the world’s telephone users, 1982 and 2002 Breakdown of population and telephones from the original Maitland report, 1982

Breakdown of population and fixed-telephone lines as it...