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The Universal Postal Union (UPU), the International Telecommunications Union(ITU), World Bank and the World Resources Institute (WRI) provide data on telecommunications. The UPU data is free, while ITU provides a large database by subscription with only limited free data, WRI provides a searchable online database while the World Bank provides very limited free data on a country by country basis.

Universal Postal Union (UPU) -- the UPU has a large database of postal statistics which is available online. The data base is somewhat more complicated to use than some of the others. You start by selecting country, category, and dates and then running a query. If you want to download the material, once the query has run, click "Personalize" at the end of the query. This will create a report in text format. I found the easiest way to convert it to a database was to copy it to a text processor (like Wordpad) and to import it from there into Excel.  The data base is available at http://www.upu.int/pls/ap/ssp_report.main?p_language=AN&p_choice=BROWSE

International Telecommunications Union (ITU) -- The ITU sells a data base of 80 sets of telecommunications statistics for more than 200 countries. The database is accessible from the Internet or can be purchased as a CD-ROM.  The cost for a single download of the whole data base is Swiss Francs 200 and an annual subscription is Swiss Francs 750. ITU provides a free download of the definitions of the key indicators. More information is available at http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/publications/world/world.html . Limited free data is available, including some time series data at the country level, but it is available mainly in .pdf format which means that it would have to be copied by hand to a data base. This data is available at http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/

World Resources Institute -- The WRI provides online data in EarthTrends: The Environmental Information Portal". WRI provides a searchable time-series database with coverage of more than 500 indicators for 220 countries. Topics include Water Resources and Freshwater Ecosystems; Climate and Atmosphere; Population, Health and Human Well-being; Economics, Business and the Environment; Energy and Resources; Biodiversity and Protected Areas; Agriculture and Food; and Forests and Drylands.  The searchable database permits searching for a single indicator but over a full range of countries and years. The result can be downloaded into csv format. The system also provides data tables and country profiles in pdf format, maps and feature stories. The database is available at http://earthtrends.wri.org/ . The data is also available in a CDROM for $US 125 . Information on the CDROM is available at http://www.wristore.com/woredacd20.html

World Bank -- The World Bank provides communications data in time series on its subscription data base  World Development Indicators data base. You can get the data for the latest year for a single country from links on http://www.worldbank.org/data/databytopic/databytopic.html .

United Nations -- Data on the communications indicators related to the Millennium Development Goals is available at http://unstats.un.org/unsd/mi/mi_goals.asp .