South Korea topped the International Telecommunication Union rankings for the countries with the most developed information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure in a report released yesterday, while the Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis was the most improved. The US ranked 15th.
Source: ITU ICT Developoment Index, 2016
The
International Telecommunication Union (ITU) published its annual
Measuring the Information Society report yesterday, which evaluates the state of global ICT development. This includes the ICT Development Index (IDI), which tracks and analyzes ICT developments in 175 economies worldwide, evaluating progress by identifying top performers and those that have most improved their IDI ranking. It also analyzes trends and developments in the "digital divide" and highlights the role of ICT in advancing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) based on an agreed SDG indicator framework.
The report also found that nearly all of the 175 tracked countries improved their IDI statistics in the past year, but that "there are still huge investment opportunities for the private sector to connect the unconnected." Interestingly, there has been more progress on actual usage than on adoption of ICT technologies. The study puts this down to uptake of mobile broadband, particularly in emerging markets.
Other key findings included:
The spread of mobile network coverage has made Internet access available to most of the world's population. In 2016, mobile broadband networks covered 84% of the world's population, but Internet penetration stood at 47.1%, substantially lower than the number of people with access.
However, in developing countries, approximately 20% of the population still does not use a mobile phone, though prices for mobile services continued to decrease in 2015, and at a faster rate than before. The least developed economies saw a 20% fall in cellular prices, the sharpest in recent years, largely resulting from the availability of prepaid packages bundling messaging and local calls.
It is the cost of the handset, rather than the cost of the service itself, which is the constraint for adoption in emerging markets. And there is also the "network effect" or Metcalfe's Law -- the value of a networked service is related to the number of people on that network. If others in the community are not using mobile services, it is less useful for any new adopter.
Europe had the highest IDI value in the study, while several Latin American countries (Bolivia and Mexico, in particular) have made significant progress. The growth of mobile broadband was especially important in these countries, as in other emerging countries that have shown rapid growth in the 2016 IDI index.
The APAC region was the most "heterogeneous" in its IDI statistics. The top seven countries ranked high, and others such as Bhutan, Myanmar and Malaysia improved significantly in the past year. But nine out of the total 34 countries in the region were among the least connected in the world.
— Aditya Kishore, Practice Leader, Video Transformation, Telco Transformation