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HONOLULU – The Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC) this week hosted the unveiling of Intelligent Community Forum's annual finalist list, which this time included several cities from the United States, which had been absent from the two previous lists. However, the conference chair said that national telecom policy is "pathetic" and warned that the United States is slipping behind other countries in broadband use, even as Internet video takes off.
The PTC, based here in Hawaii, opened its 30th anniversary conference this week with the largest attendance in five years, and a 20% increase from last year, as thousands of ICT professionals converged in the biggest East-West conference in the industry.
Organizers cited revitalized industry economics, global technological innovation, and currency strength relative to the U.S. dollar among the factors for the rebounding Pacific hemisphere telecom sector.
Conference Chair and PTC Vice President Ken Zita’s annual issues and trends presentation spotlighted video on the Internet as already having a huge impact. In 2006, U.S. Internet users watched 86 billion video streams, averaging 67 per user a month at 8 minutes each. Within five years, Yankee Group estimates the total will grow to 221 billion video streams annually; YouTube and news clickthroughs are popular with all demographics, not just the young - 69 percent of video users are over 35 years old.
The Internet video boom comes even before widespread IPTV deployment, which is still relatively modest at a million viewers each in China and the U.S. Compared to cable and satellite, IPTV is still costly to deploy, yet growth should average up to 700 percent in the next three years.
Zita said mobile video will grow as fast as networks can absorb bandwidth demands, pushed by the iPhone effect along with other smartphones, and will drive innovation in converged services.
Yet, he noted, “service convergence and technology continue to race ahead of government regulation.”
Better policy needed
He commented that current “U.S. policy is pathetic.” Korea and especially Japan, which is pursuing a goal of completely overhauling by 2011 the regulatory structure for technology policy that has stood for 60 years, will erode U.S. broadband leadership.
and there is always a but... firebug doesnt work :(- Anonymous
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