WRC DELEGATES FOCUS ON HOW TO TRIM FUTURE AGENDAS

Rawat and other top officials stressed that amid continued ITU belt-tightening, delegates were being urged to develop an agenda for the next WRC that kept in mind the financial implications of the ITU’s workload, particularly the Radio Bureau, which analyzes study results and carries out research in advance of conferences. How to reform management and trim expenses across an array of ITU programs, including the WRC, has been a long-standing issue, but several sources here said the enormity of a 48-item agenda was bringing fresh attention on the need for fixes for what some called the Super Bowl of spectrum. If the ITU doesn’t have adequate funds in its 2004-2007 budget cycle to stage a WRC in 2007, the next one could be pushed back a year, said Bruce Gracie, senior adviser-international organizations for Industry Canada’s Telecom Policy Branch. “We have to hammer home this point -- that we have to be realistic in what we are demanding for the next conference,” Gracie, who is chmn. of the budget committee at this WRC,, told us.

Looking ahead to the agenda for the next WRC, for which a committee is vetting proposals at this year’s conference, Rawat said one factor that should help were guidelines that emerged from the Conference Preparatory Meeting (CPM) in Feb. She said they included: (1) Having WRC preparations, including budgetary items, extend over the course of 2 WRCs. The CPM report said some proposals became “rolling agenda items” that come up year after year. (2) Supporting regional harmonization of proposals for WRC submission. (3) Encouraging collaboration in the period between conferences. The thrust of such guidelines would be to lend accountability to the agenda-setting process, Rawat said. “If you want to propose an agenda item, why do you need it and what does it mean for the ITU’s RadioCommunications Bureau?”

Several participants said this year’s conference put particular emphasis on moving items that could be approved quickly in the plenary sessions, where they were read twice before final passage. One dynamic this year’s session faces is a tendency for administrations occasionally to link relatively unrelated items for mutual support. “What we are asking for is more efficiency in the process and we are also asking chairmen to deal with this issue by issue” and not give in to arguments that participants can’t deal with an issue because they're waiting on the outcome of a separate agenda item, Rawat said. “We are trying to tell them ‘Deal with each issue on its own merits.'” This year’s conference has generated significant private sector interest, with many issues involving commercial services, Rawat said. She said it also had one of the largest slates of public interest issues, including proposals to harmonize public safety spectrum and items on radar, maritime communications and aeronautical communications.

Despite the uncertainty over how changes in the WRC management process will shake out, some participants said this still was a conference of firsts: (1) It’s the first time a woman has been approved as conference chmn. (2) It has the largest number of delegates to date -- 2,500. (3) It’s the first move toward a “paperless” conference, with proposals available online through a dual 802.11a and 802.11b system set up with Cisco-donated equipment. The U.S. has the largest single delegation yet accredited, with 172 participants. The cost and relevance of the WRC was questioned in the opening session in a speech by ITU Secy. Gen. Yoshio Utsumi, who wondered whether the price tag of past WRCs had been in relation to their results (CD June 10 p4). This year’s conference will cost 5.6 million Swiss francs, Gracie said.

At a plenary session late Fri., Gracie reminded a packed assembly that the ITU’s Constitution and Convention required that conferences, before adopting proposals or taking decisions that had financial implications, consider the union’s budget, “with a view to ensuring that they will not result in expenses beyond the credits which Council is empowered to authorize.” In a note distributed this week, he also reminded delegates that WRCs must “take into account the foreseeable financial implications and should avoid adopting resolutions and decisions which might give rise to expenditures in excess of the financial limits” laid down by the union’s plenipot conference. He said no WRC decision would be put into effect “if it will result in a direct or indirect increase in expenses beyond the credits that the [ITU] Council is empowered to authorize.”

Gracie told us that the ITU’s Radio Bureau in 2000, faced with a significant number of study requests to prepare for the WRC, sought to defray a cost estimate of nearly 4 million Swiss Francs. The ITU Council authorized a withdrawal on the reserve account to underwrite that the withdrawal pulled the reserve down to an unacceptably low level, Gracie said. “We can’t rely on that account,” he said: “That’s not a solution anymore.” He said part of the responsibility lay with ITU members, including sector members, who had a particularly direct impact on the demands they made for conference preparation in studies that the Radio Bureau was directed to undertake. The budget and future agendas committees will meet for the first time in recent memory at this conference to begin discussing some of issues jointly, he said. The conference has faced long- standing requirements to ensure that functions related to agenda items are in line with the union’s resources, he said. “Nobody has taken that seriously in the past and we really have to now,” he said. “We don’t have the money to impose activities on the ITU as we did in the past.”

Beyond budget implications, hanging in the balance of pending WRC changes could be an eventual power shift, some observers said. Some administrations rely particularly heavily on how past procedures have been administered at the WRC, citing bureaucratic precedents when opposing or building support for a particular item. In the opening hours of the conference June 9, Syria’s permanent representative to the ITU, Nabil Kisrawi, cited the way the conference had split allocation and regulatory decisions among committees to raise concerns over a key U.S. proposal that would pave the way for a secondary global allocation for aeronautical MSS. The issue over which committee would handle which pieces of the proposal involved a detailed regulatory point but was seen as setting up a potential way for Syria to link that U.S.-backed issue to gain support for another agenda item sought by Arab nations. Through a compromise, purview over that item ultimately was split between 2 committees. Sources said efforts to streamline the conference could make such past procedural elements somewhat less relevant.

Another area providing relief is a move toward a paperless conference, Rawat said. In the past, delegates’ boxes typically would be overflowing with paper documents, a scene that’s being seen less at this WRC, she said. The conference has received fewer requests for paper documents as delegates obtain more information online, although Rawat said she hadn’t yet seen an estimate of how far document demand had fallen.

Aside from cost savings, one byproduct of a WRC that aspired to be paperless was that far more delegates were toting laptops than in the past, several observers said. In some particularly tedious sessions in working groups last week, several persons could be seen playing solitaire on their PCs. The reliance on technology also brings a new transparency to how various proposals are stacking up, some participants said. For example, for the first time the ITU provided a CD at the start of the conference with all documents filed as of June 6, allowing delegates to search the proposals or line them up by govt. With equipment donated by Cisco, the International Conference Center of Geneva for the first time was wired for wireless LAN access, including both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz systems. That means that documents can be acquired from the ITU’s Web site, including those submitted during the conference. This WRC for the first time also offers an online searchable list of delegates, even including status information such as whether they have arrived.