 Your Excellency Chairman, Your Excellencies, Honorable Ministers, Senior Officers of the ITU, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen. I'd like to first of all express my thanks for organizing this conference and for the generous hospitality of our hosts in particular Dubai. It gives me great pleasure to have this opportunity of addressing you and sharing some information about the challenges we face in providing telecommunication services in my country of Qidipas and some of the unique solutions we are developing. With our small population of about 100,000 people living on 21 of our 33 islands spread over 5 million square kilometers of the central Pacific Ocean and with our low tele-density of 18 phones per 100 population, the World Bank has often called us a very least developed country. Yet, we are resilient and determined people. We are working hard to promote economic development and to overcome the challenges of our isolation and exposure to the threat of sea level rise, sea level, sea levels caused by global warming. High frequency radio services remain the main communication links for over one third of our people and our highly fragmented population means that costly and technically complex networks based on satellite links are perhaps the only option for much of our domestic network and international connections. As part of an ambitious plan to bring our telecommunication services up to at least the standard of our Pacific Island neighbors, we have therefore embarked on a program of comprehensive reform. Our new national ICT policy promotes an open and competitive market and now a new law to allow to make competition possible were passed last year. My government has decided to privatize our national telecommunication and to find a new owner with the management skills and access to capital resources that will be needed to operate successfully in a competitive market. This sale will be advertised shortly and our regulatory agency, CCK, is planning to license a second mobile operator later this year. We expect that these strategies will bring us better services, improved coverage and penetration of services as well as better prices just as they have in the countries of our Pacific Island neighbors. However, we also know that our difficult geography and associated high costs mean that these measures alone will not be sufficient to achieve our vision of delivering high quality mobile voice and broadband internet services to our inhabited islands. Even voice services let alone broadband internet for about 25 percent of our people living on 15 of our outer islands are almost certainly not commercially viable with current technologies. So we have developed a plan and we are discussing it with our development partners. The plan is to use aid funding to construct an Outer Island network based on state of the art 3G mobile technology. The network will have local call switching capability and intelligent call routing that will ensure that at least 90 percent of our calls, including international, will encounter no more than one satellite hop and it will be delivering broadband internet services to the out islands. It turns out that the cost of constructing this network closely equate to the amount of subsidy that we need to make the provision of these services to the out islands commercially viable for private operators. So we expect that making this network available to our licensed operators will make it possible for them to provide 3G voice and broadband internet services to our remote islands on a commercial competing basis provided, of course, that their networks are technically compatible. The biggest challenge for QBUS, like many of the small islands developing states, in delivering broadband internet for sustainable development to our people, is the very high prices for satellite bandwidth to link our islands together and to link us with the rest of the world. However, we are very pleased to recently see the new O3B satellite system offering us much better prices than the existing operators. QBUS therefore plans to use this O3B system to help us to realize the vision of affordable broadband internet for sustainable development for our urban main island of Tarawa and for as many of our rural out islands as possible. Thus, we are confident that we now have an economic model and a viable plan that will ensure or enable us to meet our goals. And this goal is of providing affordable services to every inhabited island in QBUS. This will deliver to QBUS the developmental, economic and social benefits that we know will flow from country-wide access to modern voice and broadband internet communication facilities. With those few remarks, I thank you all again.