I am delighted to be here and I wanted to say something about the
promise of 3G.
We are this week hosting a visit by the newly appointed Chinese
Minister for the Information Industries, Minister Wang Xudong, and we
are delighted that he has chosen to make the UK his first overseas
destination. He has told us that the number of telephone users in China,
fixed and mobile, increased by 100 million last year. China already has
one in five of the world’s mobile phone users, and penetration is
still less than 20%. China’s plans for 3G have been high on the agenda
in our discussions, and the Minister also expressed strong interest over
lunch yesterday with Patricia Hewitt at Lancaster House in 4G, but more
of that later.
A couple of weeks ago, I paid a ministerial visit to Sussex to
address concerns about the low penetration of broadband in rural areas.
On the way back we boarded a train in a very rural railway station and I
impressed my colleague Alun Michael the Minister of State for Rural
Affairs by showing him, as we rolled through idyllic countryside, the
ITN midday bulletin on my 3G handset.
I was in Silicon Valley last month to visit some of the numerous
start-ups, which have appeared over the past year and a half developing
wireless Internet (wi-fi) technology and services. I enjoyed soliciting
admiring gasps by playing back to them on my 3G handset video highlights
of the West Ham-Manchester City Premiership match. Unkind companions
suggested that the gasps were due to seeing West Ham actually wining,
but there was no mistaking the fact that seeing this demonstration was
pretty breathtaking for wireless mobile start up specialists in Silicon
Valley.
One of the people I met in the US was Martin Cooper, the inventor of
the portable cellphone, who made the first cellphone call ever as an
employee of Motorola in 1973. It was only thirty years ago, but what a
long way we have come in the meantime. The report tells us: it’s “a
pacifier, a dummy for adults”, a “friend of last resort” when we
while away, otherwise dead time, fiddling with its buttons. No doubt the
Ravensbourne schoolgirl quoted is not alone when she says “I keep mine
under my pillow”.
My Italian counterpart Marizio Gaspari told me this week there are
now in Italy more mobile phone subscriptions than people. It has become
one of the most inclusive technologies in society. I am always impressed
that when an asylum seeker comes to see me in my constituency surgery in
East London, and I ask for their phone number, they invariably have one
and it is a mobile. It has been a great example of bridging the digital
divide through pure market forces, supported by inspired commercial
innovation, and there are important lessons for our social policies as
well as our economic policies in the future.
There have been some unflattering comments about 3G in practice, in
comparison with GSM and GPRS networks. But these networks have had years
to iron out their problems. Indeed, had there not been any problems,
commentators would have cited it as evidence that 3G was not a big
technological step forward. However, compare the launch of 3G with the
launch of the first GSM networks and I think you get a far truer picture
of how 3G launch has been.
There have been concerns about the use of 3G to deliver inappropriate
content to young people. I welcome the moves by mobile service providers
to join with and support the Internet Watch Foundation, taking advantage
of the very successful self-regulatory approach, which has been
developed there for the terrestrial net.
The range of potential applications is huge. I read last week that
junior doctors in Glamorgan are using mobile phones to send picture
messages of X-rays to specialist consultants for advice on the best
course of treatment. Specialists are not always on hand so in the past
these X-rays had to be sent by courier or telex, both expensive and time
consuming. It also meant the Specialist Consultant had to be on hand to
receive the papers. Whereas now the specialist can receive the pictures
and advise on treatment instantly and from wherever he or she is. Not
only does this save time, to the obvious benefit of the patient, but it
saves money as well.
We are going to see many more imaginative uses for the technology, in
e-commerce for making businesses more effective and in e-Government for
improving public services. I would like to say a little about each of
those two.
We want the UK to become a leader in e-business. It is a key aspect
of our aim to help achieve prosperity for all. This means helping UK
firms improve their productivity and competitiveness. Surveys by Cisco
Systems and the British Chambers of Commerce have shown that investment
in information and communication technologies has made an important
contribution to output growth in the UK and helped improve labour
productivity growth over the last decade.
International benchmarking places us close behind Sweden and the US,
the leading nations and on a par with Germany and Canada. Other measures
such as the Economist Intelligence Unit’s measurement of “E-readiness”
place us 3rd in the world, level with the US. But we want to do better.
3G is part of the enabling technology for our aim of the UK being a
leader in e-business. It is “mobile broadband”. It will allow
greater access by consumers to the Internet, it will offer more
sophisticated services and it will reduce costs to the business user. We
have just seen the number of UK broadband subscribers pass the two
million mark, just eight months after hitting one million and the number
is rising by well over 30,000 a week. Broadband availability, at around
72% of UK households, exactly matches now the US. 3G add a mobility
dimension to broadband Britain. The Demos report has an impressive
example from the Isle of Man of a mobile classroom of PCs all having
broadband through a single 3G handset.
One of the topics I discussed on my recent Silicon Valley visit was
how the prospects for 3G were impacted by the rapid development of wi-fi.
The conclusion of most people I spoke to was that wi-fi would generate
acceptance of broadband availability outside the office, leading in turn
to demand for the fuller mobility which can only be met through 3G.
3G inherently has the potential to support lower charges for mobile
voice, and the exploitation of messaging through 3G, for example in
sales applications coupled perhaps with one of the location applications
James mentioned, these are likely to be very powerful.
In time, 3G will allow invoices to be sent on the same day with data
downloads direct from the staff in the field to the office, rather than
relying on people to key in information or download from a modem in a
hotel room. 3G from a laptop will allow access to office e-mail and the
company intranet from anywhere with 3G coverage at broadband speed.
There are major implications for both e-business applications and for
home working.
The second area picking up Eddie’s point about citizenship is
e-Government. Improving the public services is the reason we were
elected. New technology gives us the opportunity to redesign services to
meet people’s needs. There is enormous potential for improving the
quality and responsiveness of government services and for increasing
their efficiency. So we are providing sustained investment in those
services, on an unprecedented scale. At the e-summit held last November,
attended by e-Government leaders from around the world, the Prime
Minister announced that £6 billion would be invested in IT over the
next three years, a billion pounds of that in broadband connectivity.
So, for example, we are making good towards the target of all services
on-line by 2005, with 63% of them, or 357, enabled at the end of 2002.
We are a world leader in developing e-democracy, in terms of progress
towards e-voting, and voting via mobile through text messaging for
example, has been one of the successes of the recent pilots.
But a great deal more remains to be done. The Health Service will be
reorganised around the introduction of electronic patient records, and
the changes that will result from e-Government will be very far-reaching
indeed.
The UK online programme is designed around people, rather than
departments. The Government Gateway, which provides the cornerstone of
this initiative, is in place. Registration, enrolment and transaction
handling are operational. In the future it will be possible for the
first time to undertake electronic transactions involving many
departments at once, in a joined-up service.
Our aim is that the government services people want most should be
available electronically as early as possible. So we are giving a
greater focus to getting key services online, like those related to
health, education and those provided to business and on increasing the
usage of them.
The NHS Direct Online website receives half a million visits per
month. In education, Learndirect reached over 246,000 learners last year
who, between them, took over half a million courses. We need to focus on
providing quality services, which are easier to access and design with
the customers’ needs at their heart. Add mobility to all of this, and
we can see a route map now to our goal of everyone being able to
interact with government services at the time and place that best suits
them.
I mentioned the interest of Minister Wang in 4G. There will, of
course, be a 4G. There is work going on to make it a reality. I think we
do need to make it clear that 4G will be a phenomenon for the next
decade rather than for the current one.
I want to see mobile technology becoming one of the key enablers in the
transformation of how Government interacts with the public, as well as,
one of the drivers of e-business. We have in 3G a powerful new tool and
in the UK a very high concentration of the expertise, technical and
creative expertise, which will allow us to deploy it successfully.
I am looking forward to working with the mobile industry across the
spectrum and I have noted the suggestion in the report for the DTI about
that. But I will want to work with the mobile industry across the
spectrum to help deliver the promise of 3G, a very rich promise both for
our economy and for our society.
Thank you.
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