The International Telecommunication Union is the United Nations agency for information and communication technologies, and its Constitution, Convention and Radio Regulations form the treaty framework governing international spectrum allocation, satellite orbits and numbering. Its ITU-T arm publishes technical recommendations that underpin global interoperability.
ITU Constitution and Radio Regulations
Statute International
The ITU is the oldest institution in this catalog and operates a layer above national regulators, allocating the resources that make international communications possible at all.
- Radio Regulations - A binding treaty instrument allocating spectrum and satellite orbital positions between states.
- Numbering and identification - E.164 international numbering, the plan behind every phone number a network API verifies.
- ITU-T Recommendations - Technical standards underpinning interoperability across national networks.
- Treaty-based, not developer-facing - The ITU regulates states and administrations rather than platforms, and mandates nothing about API exposure.
E.164 deserves a note for anyone building against network APIs: it is the identifier every CAMARA number verification and SIM swap call is keyed on, and it is an ITU artifact. The State of Telecom APIs also recorded an honest caveat about the ITU’s presence in the API Evangelist catalog — the two machine-readable definitions attributed to it were reconstructed during enrichment, and the ITU has not published, reviewed or endorsed them.
