World Telecommuncation/ICT Development Report 2010: Monitoring the WSIS Targets (A mid-term review)

Published at the half-way point between the 2005 WSIS and the 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) target date. Global progress has been made with close to five billion mobile cellular subscriptions worldwide and two billion people with access to the Internet. However, three quarters of the world’s population still have no Internet access. Affordable fast broadband access benefits the efficient provision of services including healthcare, education, power, water, transportation, and e-government. The next decade will be the decade of broadband. This report offers mid-term review of global progress in reaching the ten targets identified in the Geneva Plan of Action and finds that: “more public Internet access facilities are necessary in order to bring more people online, governments need to set clear targets and ensure that in the long term schools are online, at high speed; the bandwidth of countries’ national research and educational networks ranges from just a few Megabits to over 10 Gigabits; more should be done to encourage public Internet access through libraries and post offices, especially in areas where household Internet penetration remains low; substantial efforts in interministerial cooperation and funding are required to connect health centers and hospitals with ICTs; sophisticated interactive and transactional online services are not yet available in developing countries; more schools use computers than the Internet to deliver educational content; the lack of electricity and content are major barriers to overcoming the broadcasting divide; the internationalization of domain names is expected to increase demand for linguistic diversity on the Internet; and more than half of the world’s inhabitants are expected to be using a mobile phone by 2015.” [directly quoted findings from the report]