itu

The United Nations is considering a new Internet tax targeting the largest Web content providers, including Google, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix, that could cripple their ability to reach users in developing nations.

The European proposal, offered for debate at a December meeting of a U.N. agency called the International Telecommunication Union, would amend an existing telecommunications treaty by imposing heavy costs on popular Web sites and their network providers for the privilege of serving non-U.S. users, according to newly leaked documents.

The documents (No. 1 No. 2) punctuate warnings that the Obama administration and Republican members of Congress … Read more

The United Nations has seized on the appearance of the Flame worm, which targeted computers in the Middle East, to argue that it should have more authority to deal with cybersecurity threats on the Internet.

Last week, the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union circulated a statement about Flame saying the malware "reinforces the need for a coordinated response" that could come from "building a global coalition." It took credit for Flame's discovery, saying Kaspersky Lab identified it "following a technical analysis requested by the ITU." (See CNET's FAQ.)

ITU spokesman Paul Conneally … Read more

Democratic and Republican government officials warned this morning that a United Nations summit in December will lead to a virtual takeover of the Internet if proposals from China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are adopted.

It was a rare point of bipartisan agreement during an election year: a proposal that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin described last year as handing the U.N. "international control of the Internet" must be stopped.

"These are terrible ideas," Rep. Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, said during a U.S. House of Representatives hearing. They could allow "governments to … Read more

The number of mobile phone subscriptions has reached 5.9 billion, an impressive figure in a world of 7 billion people.

Surveying the mobile and online landscape in 2011 for a year-end report (PDF), the International Telecommunications Union found that mobile phone subscriptions have now penetrated 87 percent of the entire world and 79 percent of all developing countries.

Among all those mobile phone users, mobile broadband subscriptions number almost 1.2 billion. Such subscriptions have jumped 45 percent each year for the past four year and now outnumber fixed broadband subscriptions by 2 to 1.

To push forward with … Read more

Ericsson yesterday demoed a new version of LTE technology that's 10 times faster than today's current standard and delivers speeds of nearly 1 gigabit per second.

Conducted in the company's home base of Sweden, the demonstration of LTE Advanced was presented to the Swedish Post and Telecom Agency (PTS). Using existing commercial hardware, Ericsson was able to use a test frequency provided by the PTS to show off certain features of LTE Advanced for the first time.

One feature of LTE Advanced that Ericsson demonstrated was carrier aggregation, which combines signals from multiple carriers to achieve a … Read more

The cost of broadband globally has dropped around 50 percent in the past two years, according to data out this week by the International Telecommunications Union, but such access is still beyond the income of many around the world.

As individuals may still be getting hit with high bills for broadband Internet, the ITU said that the overall drop was driven by decreases in developing countries, where broadband fell on average by 52 percent the past two years. That compares with price drops of just 35 percent in more developed nations.

The ITU noted, however, that even with the lower … Read more

A rare rift has developed between national governments and the nonprofit organization that oversees Internet domain names, with neither side showing signs of backing down in a dispute that includes trademarks and free expression.

In a statement released over the weekend, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, listed 23 areas of continued disagreement over the rules for approving new top-level domain names. Hundreds of applications for these suffixes are expected later this year, including .car, .love, .movie, .web, and .gay.

ICANN chairman Peter Thrush wrote (PDF) that his organization "has made a good faith effort … Read more

Wireless carriers in the U.S. have turned 4G into a meaningless marketing term, and standards purists are none too pleased about it.

With good reason: All four of the major U.S. wireless carriers are calling their faster wireless networks 4G, but the truth is that none of these networks meets the International Telecommunication Union's specifications for 4G.

Top on the list is the speed requirement. The ITU defines 4G or IMT-Advanced as technology that offers download speeds of 100Mbps on mobile devices or 1Gbps on fixed wireless connections. The technologies used by the four major carriers in … Read more

For most of this year, "4G" has became the latest war-of-words battleground for U.S. carriers. But even as Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless rushed to outboast each other with claims of operating the best high-speed data network, the International Telecommunication Union declined to officially acknowledge their respective technologies as 4G.

The carriers, of course, never acknowledged that tidbit--admittedly, "not quite 4G" doesn't sound as exciting--but two weeks ago the ITU decided to cut them some slack anyway. At its December 6 meeting in Geneva, the ITU, an international standards body that officially designates wireless … Read more