ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure ranked number one in the global ICT industry

Global Telecoms Business has decided to name Hamadoun Touré, the secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union, as the most powerful position in this year’s GTB Power 100.

This is the fourth time GTB has named the top 100 people in the industry: last year’s leader was Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T; the year before it was Rob Conway, at the time CEO of the GSM Association — a position he resigned from earlier in 2011.

That Touré has reached the first position, in GTB’s list, should not be taken as a judgment on Stephenson: he remains the most powerful leader of an operator in the world. But in the past year Touré at the ITU — the world’s oldest United Nations agency — has done much to elevate the international status of our hugely important industry and put it on the world’s political platform.

Touré has been the visionary driving force behind the Broadband Commission, a team made up of a dazzling set of the industry’s leaders — no one else on the planet could have rounded up John Chambers of Cisco, Carlos Slim Helù of Telmex, Paul Jacobs of Qualcomm, Wang Jianzhou of China Mobile, Hans Vestberg of Ericsson and a team of others to work together to develop a broadband development policy for the world.

Touré’s work in setting up and steering the Broadband Commission means he more than deserves his selection as the most powerful of the Power 100 for 2011.

---