COVID-19 makes universal digital access and cooperation essential: UN tech agency

GENEVA. KAZINFORM As the corona virus, COVID-19, pandemic reshapes the way in which we work, keep in touch, go to school and shop for essentials – across the world – it has never been more important to bridge the digital divide for the 3.6 billion people who remain off-line.

The International Telecommunications Union, ITU, who outlined the implications of the new coronavirus pandemic during a digital briefing on Tuesday to correspondents in Geneva, WAM reports.

«Digital new society already came into our life, but we never imagined that we could be forced to stay at home and to use the digital worlds to connect ourselves and make our business continue. So that is something absolutely new», said the ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao.

He praised workers in the Information and Communications Technologies, ICT, sector during the pandemic, described by another ITU official as the «unsung heroes» of the pandemic.

«We should also recognize that ICT services and ICT networks, are not so easy to manage, because nobody could imagine, under such circumstances, that traffic could to some extent triple», Mr. Zhao said, referencing the massive surge for videoconferencing and smartphone call capacity that the health crisis has engendered. One important challenge has been the massive shift in broadband usage in urban office buildings, toward the suburbs and rural areas, where people are now telecommuting from their homes.

«Additional spectrum has been identified,»said Mario Maniewicz, Director of the ITU Radiocommunication Bureau, adding that such resources can be used by countries «for new technologies that can help provide coverage at affordable prices to underserved communities. These technologies are both satellite and terrestrial, and can cover large areas, and they promise to enable affordable broadband access in rural and remote areas.»

In addition to expanding access, the ITU has been studying different technologies that have been submitted to it for contact-tracing during the pandemic, although Dr Reinhard Scholl, the Deputy Director of the organization’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, said that the world would have to wait for the «dust to settle» before recommendations could be made as to which works best.

The ITU’s top official, Mr. Zhao, said that as the world contemplates the post-COVID future, the global development of 5G networks would be absolutely essential to deliver such services as remote surgery and autonomous driving technologies.