ITU is organizing the third Global Standards Symposium that will take place on 24 October 2016 in Hammamet, Tunisia and will be hosted by the Government of Tunisia.

The exponential advancement of ICTs has dramatically improved real-time communication and information sharing, and has enabled billions to send, receive and impart digital information on a worldwide scale. But at the same time, it has become clear that the use of these technologies, which rely heavily on standardization outputs, brings about a host of challenges with respect to the privacy and security of communications, and ultimately, with respect the end users’ perception of these technologies as trustworthy or potentially harmful. Responding to this critical issue, ITU is organizing this third Global Standards Symposium that will be preceding ITU’s quadrennial World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA-16).

The event will bring together thought leaders in the standardization sphere to discuss how standards efforts could best integrate the consideration of security, privacy and trust. In focus will be regulatory principles relevant to security, privacy and trust, as well as how industry players and supporting standards bodies plan to meet end-users’ expectations in this domain. The agenda brings together a diverse range of industry players such as Deutsche Telekom, Google, Huawei, Alibaba, Symantec and SAP as well as representatives from government, civil society and standards development organizations.

On the other side, ITU is also organizing a meeting of senior industry executives to explore the new industry dynamics ushered in by the rise of over-the-top (OTT) business models, as well as means to accelerate the deployment of innovative broadband access solutions such as giga-band through a combination of LTE, WiFi and ITU G.fast technology.

The invitation-only “CxO meeting” will be kindly hosted by Tunisie Telecom on 23 October 2016, the day prior to the Global Standards Symposium (GSS-16) and the following World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA-16).

Innovative OTT messaging, telephony and streaming services have become a staple of the wide range of services now on offer to end-users. The conclusions of the CxO meeting will feed into ongoing discussions in ITU on the promotion of OTT innovation, possible regulatory approaches to OTT, the value of partnerships between OTT players and network operators, and incentives for infrastructure investment and the protection of privacy and personal data.

G.fast is a new ITU broadband standard that allows delivery of up to 1 Gbit/s over the traditional telephone lines that still make up a substantial proportion of so-called “last-mile” networks. The effective combination of broadband access solutions such as G.fast, 4G LTE and WiFi could prove to be a cost-effective means of bringing end-users within reach of bandwidth-intensive services such as Ultra-HD ‘4K’ or ‘8K’ streaming and next-generation IPTV, advanced cloud-based storage and communication via HD video.

A common thread running through the discussions of CxO meeting will be the consideration of the specific needs of developing countries, both in terms of developing countries’ demands of international standardization and the particular challenges faced by these countries in the deployment of advanced ICT infrastructure.

The conclusions of the CxO meeting will be reflected by a communiqué agreed by the meeting’s participants which will be presented to WTSA-16.

The CxO meeting targets C-level executives of ICT companies and invited guests representing other industry sectors. If you would like to participate in this meeting, please contact Honora Daily at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .