 Welcome to ITU Telecom World 2019 here in Budapest, Hungary. We're very pleased to be joining the studio today by Konstantinos Maselos, who is President of the Hellenic Telecommunications and Post Commission. Welcome to the studio. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. Now, let's talk a little bit about innovating together and connectivity that matters. What does that mean to you? Well, it's also the theme of ITU Telecom 2019. So connectivity, in my opinion, leads to complementarity. And if we want to consider ourselves parts of a global society, we have to accept that connectivity is all about bringing together ideas, people, nations, industries. So this is what connectivity matters, in fact. So it's about building bridges or lowering barriers and increasing cooperation. And in my opinion, innovation is more or less the same situation. So innovation is not only technology. It can also be good leadership, a nice piece of regulation, or even an efficient dispute resolution approach. So I think that discussing about, in a digital economy, discussing about connectivity is more or less, and the significance is more or less standard. It makes sense to discuss why is connectivity that important? So telecommunications and computing have been interacting for a long time. And it was semiconductor technology that enabled developments in both computing and telecommunications. But computing has been shifting between centralized and decentralized approaches throughout the years. So it was telecommunications that enabled this decentralization and decentralized computing. And on the other hand, computing supported telecommunications. So there is a kind of strong interaction. So in my opinion, today, if we want to have efficient computing and efficient communications in terms of power efficiency and cost, we need to take advantage of this connectivity that can allow us to have the right mix of remote computing and local computing between the cloud and the edge. So connectivity is the right tool to achieve the efficient implementation of this hybrid paradigm. And I think this is why connectivity matters today. Now, Greece hosted the ITU forum towards 5G-enabled gigabit society last year and is moving rapidly towards 5G deployment. I wanted to ask you, what are the main initiatives in 5G in Greece and then how will its implementation bring socioeconomic benefits? Well, there is no doubt that 5G represents a great development opportunity globally. So around the world, it's not only in Greece, but... And it's a game changer. So Greece needs to follow up and exploit this opportunity for the country. It is true that we are a bit lagging compared to other countries, compared to 5G, but we try to cut up. What we did last year was to develop a very friendly framework to incentivize 5G pilot projects. So very low cost licenses, wide area coverage, city level, and long period for the licensing for trials. But, of course, we need to do more. We focus on how, and this is what I believe, how to reduce the upfront costs of operators in order to have a fast deployment of 5G. Otherwise, it may be the case that 5G will be delayed in Greece. So we focus on spectrum award processes because it is very, very critical. And currently we work on designing our 5G spectrum auctions to be development-friendly. This is what we want to do. So we want to look at the long-term result and the long-term investment, not something very fast and very immediate next day. So development-friendly auctions is one direction. Infrastructure sharing is the other direction. Infrastructure for 5G is going to be very capital-intensive as well, not only spectrum. So infrastructure sharing is a very nice tool to reduce this cost, but we need also to develop the right policies in this direction. We should not forget the EMF issues when discussing about 5G. There are a lot of citizens who are concerned about their health and we should respect this. Citizens' health comes first anyway. So I think the right way to go with EMF is to create awareness that 5G is more energy-efficient technology compared to previous generation wireless technologies and also to be transparent. So in Greece what we try to do is to give all information around antennas to be easily accessible by any citizen through portals and web interfaces. And we see that complaints decrease from the time we started doing this. With respect to socio-economic impact of 5G for Greece, we have seen several studies. And of course these are estimates of the impact 5G may have, but they are already indicative and quite impressive. So there is one study saying that all sectors that will be digitized through 5G will have by 2026 revenues of $4.2 billion. This may sound small for other economies, but for Greece, which is a small economy, it's very, very important. And we also, the same study, also foresees some revenues and business potential for our 5G operators of the order of magnitude of $2 billion by 2026. So we expect quite a lot and we should not miss the opportunity. As President of the Regulatory Authority and Vice-Chair of Berthi, the body of European regulators, what is your perspective on regulatory challenges facing the development of the Gigabit Society and what role could ICU play in assisting its member states? Well, if we see regulatory efforts today in Europe, they are mostly focused on how to achieve the target set by European Commission of one gigabit per second connectivity for all European citizens. So the focus of regulation is how to provide incentives, this is the main focus of our regulation, to attract investments to build ultra-fast broadband networks and gigabit networks. So this is the focus and this represents mainly the supply side of the networks, how we have ultra-fast broadband networks supplied to our citizens. And it's quite timely because we discuss 5G, we discuss fiber 2DX technologies these days, we discuss what is the right mix between 5G and fixed wireless access to fiber to the home, for example. So this is quite timely, but in my opinion this is, let's say, only the one part of the problem of Gigabit connectivity in Europe. We have not discussed much the demand side of the problem. I mean, what are the reasons why we need this one gigabit per second connectivity and developing strategies to increase the demand and policies for the demand side of the ultra-fast broadband connectivity problem is not easy in my opinion. For example, we know for quite some time about e-government and e-learning but are these enough to drive the demand for ultra-fast broadband connectivity and have we measured the results in increasing the demand of these approaches like e-learning and e-government? So I have been working on a paper these days, this period, with ideas to increase the broadband demand in Greece, how we can increase this in Greece. And one of the topics I have been considering is digital nomads. So how to develop policies for digital nomads in order to increase the demand for ultra-fast broadband networks in this way? We all know the trend for remote working. So now the trend is to work from our place, from home, etc. Digital nomads go one step further, so they work remotely but moving from one place to the other. And in Greece we have quite good hospitality infrastructure. Our population is 11 million but during the summer period we have visitors 30 or even more millions per year. And we have accommodation facilities of 1.5, 1.2 or 1.3 million beds in Greece which are not utilized throughout the year. So this is a good basis to attract digital nomads. I believe it would make sense to look at policies around digital nomads like health taxation and visa issues, etc. to attract digital nomads and increase the ultra-fast broadband connectivity demand. I think IDU can play a very critical role in creating the awareness on the need to develop policies for demand side of the ultra-fast broadband connectivity problem. This is going to be crucial. That's great. That's fantastic. And finally, what's the value for you of events such as ITU Telecom World 2019? You're taking time to be here. There must be some value for you in it. I have been following ITU events for a long time. So not only ITU Telecom but also the WISIs Forum, the GSR, the Global Symbols for Regulators, which is more focused on regulation, but anyhow, I believe that events like ITU Telecom are the most efficient platform for international collaboration and for networking. So events like this, you can find decision makers from the whole spectrum of ICT, governments, regulators, industries, SMEs, innovators, academia, everything. And in the same place, the right mix of decision makers and experts in the same place. So these events are the place to explore collaborations, explore opportunities for investments, discuss some success stories, some interesting cases, discuss about innovation. So I strongly believe that we cannot achieve much without collaboration and there is no need to reinvent the wheel. So events like this is a very useful tool to achieve this. Thank you very much for joining us in the studio and we'll hopefully catch up with you again soon. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.