GENEVA – The Director Engineering and Communications Infrastructure at the Uganda Communications Commission, Ms Irene Kaggwa Sewankambo has this morning had a meeting with the Director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardisation Bureau, Dr Chaesub Lee on the 5th floor of the Montbrillant Building.
A delegation headed by the Uganda Communications Commission Executive Director, Mr Godfrey Mutabazi is in Geneva, Switzerland participating in the ITU Council 2019.
Ms Irene Kaggwa congratulated Dr Chaesub upon re-election to the ITU Executive team and committed the continued support of the work of the Standardisation Bureau.
She informed on Uganda’s focus to continue building local capacity in terms of contributions towards the work of ITU Standardisation Sector and also informed of the Commission’s ambition to encourage increased participation of local stakeholders especially academia and industry.
Dr Chaesub Lee lauded Uganda’s commitment and involvement in ITU Standardisation work.
He recognised the contribution and Uganda’s leadership in the African Study Groups; SG2, SG5 and SG13.
He retaliated that while the capacity building is essential, there is a need to realise a balance between imparting knowledge and being able to use that information by bridging the standardisation gap practically.
Uganda has two chairs of the African Study Groups (SG) where Ms Susan Nakanwagi chairs SG 2, Ms Helen Nakiguli chairs SG 5 and Mr Simon Bugaba was the Vice Chair of the SG 13 that was chaired by Dr Chaesub Lee.
The two directors discussed the status and preparations for the World Telecommunications Standardization Assembly (WTSA) 2020.
“We areconstituting a national preparatory Committee to review with the long-term standardisation goals and to increase the participation of stakeholders, mainly academia and the private sector in the work of ITU – T,” said Ms Sewankambo.
She emphasized that the Commission would like to work closely with the ITU Standardization sector to address issues including; the use of Network Colour Codes (NCC) in border sites; Call location of emergency service; the use of telephone numbers by stakeholders other than operators; Harmonization of essential numbers of social values, such as emergency numbers; E-fraud (Electronic fraud) using E.164 Numbers, IMSI and USSD Codes; SIM Registration challenges and SIM Boxing; Caller ID spoofing and Calling Party Number Delivery; Number portability including NP for IoT/M2M numbering resources and Issues of costing and interconnection.
