Telecoms & Broadband Business Newsletter - March 2015

Editorial - Je suis Charlie

I hope you had a good start of 2015, it is already February and lots of new activities are happening. As you read this newsletter I will be in Europe for the 11^th meeting of the UN Broadband Commission at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris and from there on to Barcelona were I will participate in the biggest telecoms show on earth the GSMA Mobile World Congress, I am a judge in their annual awards and as such have a great opportunity to sample some of the latest innovations in our industry.

The Christmas break was, however, also scarred by some hideous events and I would like to address this in my first blog of the year.

Let us, together, make 2015 a good year.

Following up on my Christmas blog Let’s discuss equality, I would like to devote my first blog of 2015 to what I believe is part of the same issue.

Over the Christmas and New Year break we saw the frightful terrorism events in Sydney and Paris, followed by the enormous emotional outpouring from the people in both those cities and beyond. It is wonderful to see such unity and support, but the question is whether we are focussing this positive energy in the right direction.

There is no argument that we must fight the criminals who are involved in these hideous crimes, but they should be treated as what they are – hideous criminals.

They are hiding behind a religion, using it as an excuse, as people have been doing throughout the ages. And the underlying elements that are providing the feeding ground for these criminals are poverty, social inequality, lack of education, wars, corruption and so on.

In my work with the United Nations the consensus is that the best way to address some of the serious social problems we are facing as a global society is to educate the people. This helps people to start thinking for themselves and, at the same time, gives them the tools to move out of their poverty-stricken circumstances.

It is far more difficult for criminals to create the environment they need if that environment consists of educated people with at least a basic level of social wellbeing. We only have to look at developments in Europe over the last 100 years to see that a more equal society creates stability.

Unless similar social equality is created in the regions that are currently the breeding ground of these criminals there will be many more terrorist attacks similar to the recent events in Sydney and Paris.

I believe that our industry can assist in this. It is producing tools that can be of enormous help in allowing these people to inform and educate themselves. We can provide access to the internet, with its enormous stockpile of information. This is something we can contribute in fighting these evil forces.

Creating a better environment is going to take a long time, so the best way is to make sure that our youngsters have the tools that will allow them to make the decisions that will start changing the world that they and their parents and grandparents live in. We know that these young people love the telecom tools that we produce and the services that are provided through them, so we have a willing audience.

As we can see in counties where the economy is under pressure, opportunities in the future will increasingly be linked to a globalised economy. Jobs that traditionally could be created in local economies are often no longer available. In order to address this, global strategies and policies are needed; trying to sort this out on a country by country basis will increasingly become more difficult to do.

If we can aim our massive outpouring to the cause of assisting the next generation to build a better future for themselves then we are not just fighting the criminals of today; we are also preventing new ones from developing.

We need more Charlie’s to address the problems that will eventually prevent the breeding of the criminals that are terrorising our societies.