Ruminations from Rio. (International Telecommunication Union's Regional Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

A regular readers know, I try to attend several international telecom shows each year to keep track of what is happening in the rest of the world. Hopefully, these meetings also help me uncover trends, directions and products that we haven't seen yet in the U.S.

For those reasons, I spent the week of June 10 at Americas Telecom in Rio de Janeiro. This ITU (International Telecommunication Union) Regional Conference attracted some 20,000 attendees, and there were five days of sessions which addressed the theme "Telecommunications and Sustainable Development - From Potential to Growth." About 244 exhibitors consumed 4.5 acres of display space.

As shown in Figure 1, the Latin America/Caribbean area has relatively few main telephone lines installed compared with the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Penetration varies from a high of 10 percent of the population having telephones in the Caribbean area to 8.5 percent in South America and less than 8 percent in Central America.

However, overall, this geographic area is expected to grow at approximately 6 to 12 percent per year. Taking the 12 percent number across the entire region, this translates into roughly 5 million additional main line telephones per year.

That sounds impressive, but let's put it in perspective. The growth rate for the U.S. and Canada, while only about 3.5 percent per year, equates to an added 5.9 million main line telephones every 12 months - roughly 20 percent more in actual line count than is implemented across the rest of the western hemisphere.

Those numbers illustrate a …