When I worked in ITU headquarters, I visited the relics of the Roman Empire on a holiday. Among the many historic attractions and splendid architectures, I was especially impressed by the particular phenomenon, which I somehow believe is having certain connection with the work I am engaged in. What I have noticed is that the hard road stones spreading in all directions with the empire are all seamed with two deep ditches.

I did not understand at the beginning why there were ditches like this on road, but I was greatly moved by the achievement of Roman Empire when the reason was explained. The ditches are completely made out by wheel track of ancient carriages. There must have been enormous traffic to create such traces. In another word, this is the track left over by countless carriage wheels sharpening hard road stones for hundreds of years.

Despite, the ditch today won’t exist at all if the wheel distance wasn’t unified, or carriage track wasn’t specified.  It was the ditch that proved the importance to make a standard and execute it, which the wise commissioners of Roman Empire used in its administrative system.  

We come across similar cases in the world of ITU which I have served in. One of purposes of ITU is to promote standardization. It brings about many merits such as cost reduction and convenience. As the chairman of XGP Forum, a non-profitable organization promoting XGP (eXtended Global Platform) service developed by Japan with the cooperation of companies from China, U.S.A., Canada and Israel, I sincerely expect to see the technology being added as one of the standard mobile broadband communication service of TDD  to all over the world.

One major characteristics of XGP is its autonomic distribution function and interference avoidance function by TDD. As all engineers might know, one of the big problems facing wireless communication is how to solve the issue of interference. No matter how superior a service is at the beginning, when the number of users grows, interference problem, which could cause deterioration of service quality, would have to be dealt with. XGP has a technology to avoid interference automatically, and, in addition, it has adopted TDD method which effective against interference. We expect that XGP can be fostered as a core standardized system in future telecom specifications.

Chairman of XGP Forum

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Yuji Inoue

Mr. Yuji Inoue was born in 1948 in Fukuoka, Japan. He received the B.E., M.E. and Ph. D degrees from Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan, in 1971, 1973 and 1986, respectively, and was made an Honorary Professor of the Mongolian Technical University in 1999.

He joined NTT Laboratories in 1973. He was first engaged in the development of digital network equipment and systems, and then in the standardization of ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), SDH (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) etc in ITU-T. In 1997, he joined global business incubation activities when NTT was de-regulated to international business. He joined NTT Data Corporation to head its R&D in 1999 and became its board member in 2000. He moved to NTT shareholding company as its board member to manage NTT group’s R&D with 6000 researchers and engineers.

In 2006, he was the candidate for the Director of ITU-T. Based on this experience, he joined TTC, The Telecommunication Technology Committee, in 2007.

He is the President and CEO of TTC. He is a fellow of IEICE and IEEE. He wrote and edited many technical books.