SINCE the birth and subsequent proliferation of the telephone, any statistical analysis of the telecommunications industry has tended to quantify physical infrastructure.
For people who care about these things - which generally means equipment manufacturers - the industry has always been measured in terms of the number of phones per capita, exchange lines per capita, or in the physical capacity of things like undersea cables or satellites.
These statistics have long been useful as indicators of economic development (and, therefore, market potential), but not a whole lot else.
If we are in the throes of an 'information' revolution, then it is more than a little surprising that there have not been efforts so far to quantify the actual information.
Now that the telephone has proliferated internationally (along with all its data network offspring), far more relevant economic and social data is to be found by looking at how the information flows on these networks rather than the actual networks.
A new publication jointly researched by the Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and a private research firm based in Washington D. C., TeleGeography Inc, has attempted to add some meaning to the international telecommunications networks by measuring the information that flows on them.