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ITU 06 diary - BT's bacon sock, mobile medicine and 3G backlash
Day 4...

By Jo Best

Published: Thursday 07 December 2006

Over a breakfast that included what appeared to be a testicle in a bacon sock, BT revealed it's going into the consulting business, reselling the knowledge it built up from rolling out its 21CN - read more about it here.

Some questioned the wisdom of passing on 'competitive advantage' to rivals. It's not an argument that holds water with BT's CEO of Wholesale, Paul Reynolds, though. "If [carriers] didn't work together, a phone call couldn't get from one country to another," he said.

Aside from BT's chat, today saw a session based around two of the biggest themes of ITU this year - connecting the unconnected populations of the world and using mobiles for health.

Microsoft was showing off its idea to bring the two together. In remote areas, Redmond theorised, those without access to doctors could take advantage of telemedicine by means of their phone handset.

For the illiterate, the interaction with an operator would take place by selecting symbols to indicate the nature of the problem - for example, a simple, emoticon-type image of a person sneezing for a cold or something that looked surprisingly like the Happy Eater logo for vomiting and so on.

Others have taken the idea further. Earlier this week, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said he believed one of the most significant trends in tech will be the advent of communication between mobiles and sensors worn on the person. One example might be a personal sensor network that monitors a diabetic's glucose levels and reports progress to medical personnel.

I also heard some interesting ideas from Martin Varsavsky, the entrepreneur behind FON, a company trying to convince individual wi-fi users to resell some of their connectivity to itinerant consumers and create a network of "user-generated infrastructure".

Speaking yesterday, Varsavsky didn't miss a chance to trample on the dreams of 3G as a broadband pipe for data services. "3G is what you use when you can't get wi-fi, right?" he asked. The chuckles from the conference floor would tend to suggest the business travellers in the room agreed.

3G has no shortage of critics but, as ITU has shown, it has its fans too. A representative from the Russian Federation's telemedicine agency revealed how 3G is facilitating the advent of teleworking in Russia, giving some of its more geographically dispersed workers a better shot at jobs in cities miles away. Touché.

Read more of Jo Best's ITU 06 Diary:


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