The quality of an economy's infrastructure, including power and communications, is an important element in investment decisions for both domestic and foreign investors. Government effort alone is not enough to meet the need for investments in modern infrastructure; public-private partnerships, especially those involving local providers and financiers, are critical for lowering costs and delivering value for money. In telecommunications, competition in the marketplace, along with sound regulation, is lowering costs, improving quality, and easing access to services around the globe. Today's smartphones and tablets have computer power equivalent to that of yesterday's computers and provide a similar range of functions. Device convergence is thus rendering the conventional definition obsolete.

Comparable statistics on access, use, quality, and affordability of ICT are needed to formulate growth-enabling policies for the sector and to monitor and evaluate the sector's impact on development. Although basic access data are available for many countries, in most developing countries little is known about who uses ICT; what they are used for (school, work, business, research, government); and how they affect people and businesses. The global Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development is helping to set standards, harmonize information and communications technology statistics, and build statistical capacity in developing countries. However, despite significant improvements in the developing world, the gap between the ICT haves and have-nots remains.

Access to telecommunication services rose on an unprecedented scale over the past two decades. This growth was driven primarily by wireless technologies and liberalization of telecommunications markets, which have enabled faster and less costly network rollout. Mobile communications have a particularly important impact in rural areas. The mobility, ease of use, flexible deployment, and relatively low and declining rollout costs of wireless technologies enable them to reach rural populations with low levels of income and literacy. The next billion mobile subscribers will consist mainly of the rural poor. Access is the key to delivering telecommunications services to people. If the service is not affordable to most people, goals of universal usage will not be met.

Over the past decade new financing and technology, along with privatization and market liberalization, have spurred dramatic growth in telecommunications in many countries. With the rapid development of mobile telephony and the global expansion of the Internet, information and communication technologies are increasingly recognized as essential tools of development, contributing to global integration and enhancing public sector effectiveness, efficiency, and transparency.
Secure Internet servers (per 1 million people)
The number of distinct, publicly-trusted TLS/SSL certificates found in the Netcraft Secure Server Survey.
The survey examines the use of encrypted transactions through extensive automated exploration, tallying the number of web sites using HTTPS. This analysis relates to those sites found in the survey where the certificate is valid for the hostname, and the certificate has been issued from a publicly-trusted root. The indicator refers to valid, third-party certificates. Included are sites found in the survey where the common name in the certificate matched the hostname, and the certificate's digital signature was not detected as being self-signed. The location is derived from the hosting location of the sites using the certificates (rather than the countries indicated on the certificates themselves.) "Netcraft's survey counts (unique) valid certificates issued by widely-trusted third-party certification authorities. A certificate must be valid, that is it must be within its validity period (certificates are usually valid for up to 39 months), and the digital signatures on the certificate must check successfully. It must be issued by third party certificate issuer that is recognised by Netcraft. Netcraft investigate new issuers each month and determine whether they are third party issuers that could be expected to be trusted by some user base; CAs that issue only for one company are generally excluded, as are self-signed certificates." Netcraft note on the term “valid certificates": “There is nothing inherently "invalid" about private certification or self-signed certificates. But neither of these types of certificates are generally accepted by end-users' browsers, and browsers would typically report them as "invalid", so our terminology is consistent with normal user expectations.” [https://www.netcraft.com/] The data reflects the December survey in that year.