Hong Kong Tops ITU Mobile/Internet Index

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, September 17, 2002

Hong Kong Tops ITU Mobile/Internet Index

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Hong Kong (China), Denmark and Sweden are the top three regions in the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Mobile/Internet index, according to a new ITU research book released Tuesday in Geneva.

Their Mobile/Internet scores are 65.88, 65.61 and 65.43 respectively. They are followed by Switzerland, the United States, Norway, South Korea and the United Kingdom.

The index measures how each of more than 200 economies is performing in terms of mobile and Internet technologies and how likely they are to be able to take advantages of new developments in this field. Each economy's score on the Mobile/Internet Index fluctuates between a maximum of 100 and a minimum of 0.

According to ITU, the index covers 26 variables sorted into three groups: infrastructure, usage and market structure, which include fixed lines per 100 inhabitants, mobile cellular subscribers per 100 inhabitants and number of ISPs in the country.

ITU experts hold the view that it is not an easy task to determine which economies are likely to provide the most fertile ground for the development of the mobile Internet.

They said that while the economies that score high in the report, like Hong Kong (China), Denmark or Sweden, are all of high income, there are low, middle income economies, like the Philippines and China, doing much better than their relative GDP per capita.

According to the ITU report, the combination of mobile and Internet technology, such as the short message service and i-mode,is already transforming the way people interact and the way business is done. Some 24 billion messages were sent worldwide in the first quarter of 2002.

"Individually, mobile communications and the Internet have been the two major drivers of consumer demand for telecommunication services in the last decade of the 20th century. Put them together and you should have one of the major demand drivers of this century," said Dr. Tim Kelly, head of the ITU's Strategy and Policy Unit.

The ITU report shows that teenagers appear to be the most avid users of the mobile Internet, notably in markets where it is at an advanced stage of development, such as South Korea and Japan.

According to the ITU press office, the new ITU report will be submitted to the 16th ITU Plenipotentiary Conference to be held in Marrakesh, Morocco next week.

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