Larry Irving, assistant secretary of commerce for communications and information, says that no country will be a truly rich country unless it has a robust telecommunications and information industry. He emphasizes that developing nations can and must be a part of the information age. Irving says that millions of people who are living in poverty "will be lifted out of poverty because of what telecommunications will provide them in an increased standard of living."

Question: How far is the world from an information society?

Irving: You're looking at a world where 80 percent of the households don't have a telephone. We're living in a world where 50 percent of the people don't use a telephone, and 50 percent of the people live two hours from a telephone. We take for granted in western society PCs and cellular phones and pagers, and those things don't exist in a lot of societies.

The promise of the information revolution is that you're going to improve medical care and education, and you're going to drive economies; you're not going to just drive telecommunications economies. When you put a telecommunications infrastructure in a country, you improve their overall economy.

You can't run a 21st century business anywhere on this globe without access to the telecommunications infrastructure. So there are hundreds of millions of people who live in poverty, who, as this Information Age begins to accelerate, will be lifted out of poverty because of what telecommunications will provide them in an increased standard of living. And that's exciting.

Q: What about the growth of the telecommunications sector in the United States and in the world?

Irving: In the developed world, there is the potential to improve health care, education, and job creation. With the current U.S. edge in technology, the telecommunications sector will be a larger part of the U.S. economy. Some 10 percent of our economy right now is based on telecommunications and information technology. We expect in a decade it will grow to 20 percent. Probably the largest single segment of our economy will be telecommunications and information industries.

It will probably grow from 6 to 12 percent of the global economy. What oil and coal were for this century, that's what telecommunications information technology will be for the 21st century. And if you want a job or if you want an economy that works, you've got to understand and exploit these technologies. No country will be a truly rich country unless it has a robust telecommunications and information industry.

Q: Can the developing countries skip old information technologies and start with advance telecommunications?

Irving: The potential for developing nations is that advanced technologies, like wireless and satellite technologies, are all going to leapfrog them into cutting edge systems.

When you think of the tremendous expenditure in this country of putting copper wire across the length and breadth of the United States, imagine what it would cost to do the same thing in Africa or Asia.

The reality is you don't have to do it that way anymore. You can now use satellite and wireless technologies at a fraction of the cost of what laying wire would be, and provide significant cost savings, and still give people access to a cornucopia of telecommunications products and services.

The prices of advance information technologies are falling in the face of competition. Developing nations are able to enter the information age at a steeper point on the learning curve and at a lower point on the cost curve.

Once the basic technology, for example, the cellular phone, is worked out in the United States, engineers in Brazil or Sierra Leone or India can improve it just as well. Once they understand the basic technology, a lot of engineers around the world can do it. They become not just importers and users, but they become the manufacturers and creators, too.

Q: Then in the long run, the United States and other industrialized countries will not dominate the market for telecommunications equipment?

Irving: The United States or Western Europe or Japan or the developing Asian countries are not going to dominate these technologies for very long. There are large untapped telecommunications markets in China, Indonesia, the African continent, and India. When you start manufacturing electronic products in those areas, you're going to begin to develop your own technologies, your own skills.

Bring people telephones, open up markets, increase foreign investment in developing countries, and then these nations can grow their own economy. You will see partnerships between countries. And we all learn something from each other -- that a truly free global marketplace in telecommunications benefits everybody.

Q: Administration officials have said the building of an information infrastructure should be driven by the private sector. What is the role of government?

Irving: The role of government is to steer, not to run. We're going to try to develop a framework that permits industry to make the investments it should make and provides consumers the choices they want and in the areas and the marketplaces that wouldn't otherwise work.

In sectors of governmental expertise -- providing health care, providing education, providing a social safety net -- the government has got to find ways to use information technology more efficiently.

There is a clear governmental role: creating a structure so that these technologies can be used for improving the quality of life of its citizens.

Q: What about the role of regional organizations in encouraging the building of a Global Information Infrastructure?

Irving: The APEC nations are talking about developing an Asian-Pacific Infrastructure, and there have been information discussions among the Latin American nations. There is a lot happening, and all of these activities build on each other. We're trying to take the core vision, as expressed by President Clinton and Vice President Gore, and use that as the core for developing a national, a regional, and then a global information society and information infrastructure.

All of the global and regional efforts to build an information infrastructure are really based on "Local Information Infrastructures." It comes down to the decisions made in either states or cities or countries as to how they are going to deploy their infrastructure in a way that they can fit into the larger infrastructures. I'm real excited about the potential for some of these regional cooperative relationships.

Edmund Scherr writes on information and other global issues for the U.S. Information Agency.