China makes great progress in bridging digital divide: ITU official

China has made great progress in bridging digital gap in the past 10 years, an official from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) told reporters on Thursday.

"China has made a remarkable step forward in closing the digital divide," Tim Kelly, head of the policy and strategy unit of the ITU said at a press conference during the second day of a World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), which opened here on Wednesday.

China now is the biggest country in terms of both mobile and fixed line subscribers, which stand at 335 million and 312 million respectively, said Kelly, adding that the numbers of fixed line or mobile subscribers in China were only a few millions back in the early 1990s.

While commenting on how to further shrink the digital gap, a major agenda of the WSIS, the ITU official said that China has been a good example in providing wide-range covering telecommunication equipment in rural areas, which help people have easy access to information and communication technologies (ICT).

Besides the remarkable increase in the numbers of fixed and mobile subscribers in China, the world's most populous country will also overtake the United States to take the first place for both Internet subscribers and broadband subscribers in 2005, said an ITU data release.

There are some 800,000 villages representing around one billion people worldwide still lacking connection to any kind of ICT, the ITU estimates.

Delegates from over 170 countries gathered in the Tunisian capital on Wednesday for a three-day meeting on internet governance and implementation mechanisms to bridge the digital gap.

Hours before the start of the summit, negotiators agreed to form an internet governance forum to continue discussing all issues concerning the internet, clearing the way for talks on the digital divide, which is viewed as more important than the internet governance.

The UN General Assembly endorsed the proposal by the ITU in 2001 to hold the WSIS in two phases, with the first already held in Geneva in 2003 and the second in Tunis.

Source: Xinhua