 As you said, I was asked to speak about Actors Perspective on the connected continent proposal of the European Commission today and indeed, as you said, it is very timely to discuss the digital thing at market now when there are quite some interesting developments. First of all, in the legislative process, we already know the position of the European Parliament, so the European Parliament has adopted already its first reading, and it is a rather clear view, I would say, that the European Parliament has taken. The Council is looking at the proposal right now, so they are really trying to find common ground on it. And at the same time, as we are on the doorstep of having a new European Commission, the political guidelines of President-Elect Juncker, as well as the mission letters that he has sent to the Vice President, Digital Single Market, as well as to the Commissioner, Digital Economy and Society, very clearly prioritized the completion of the Digital Single Market, and they call for ambitious legislative steps in this regard. Now, with regard to the legislative process and how we come about a well-founded legislative proposal, Acta is a very firm believer in transparency and in due process. And we believe that any comprehensive and ambitious legislative package must be based, first of all, on a robust and very clear analysis of the problems to be addressed. And in this case, we think that the genuine questions to be asked are really what are the genuine barriers to the Single Market? Are these regulatory or legal obstacles at all? And if they are indeed found to be legal or regulatory obstacles, then can these obstacles best be addressed by new legislation or perhaps by a more vigorous implementation and enforcement of already existing EU rules? So I think that is kind of the first issue, which I would call something like the problem analysis and identification. And I think what we also need is a well-founded and clear assessment of the likely impact of the proposed measures on the economy as a whole, on end users, be they consumers or businesses, as well as the industry. And last but not least, very importantly, a proper public consultation and public debate should precede the adoption of any legislative proposal. And now if we start perhaps looking at the substance of the Single Market and maybe the premises and the preceding discussion, what were these premises and what was the discussion about? Some argued in the course of this discussion, and we see a lot of public statements. We have seen a lot of public statements in this regard, is number one, that the EU is seriously lagging behind other parts of the world. Then it was also argued by some that there are too many operators in Europe compared to some other markets, which is withholding the development of a single European telecoms market. Thirdly, that the telecom sector is in a crisis. And fourthly, that there is a robust lack of investments, which must be addressed. Now if we look at these premises, I think one by one, just quite briefly, the first one is that the EU is lagging seriously behind other parts of the world. I think that if we carry out a thorough analysis, and indeed the European Parliament has asked some independent consultants to carry out a quite thorough analysis on these premises, I think it is fair to argue that the European Union, to the extent you can call it a homogeneous area, is faring actually quite well compared to its global peers. There are some areas in which some parts of the world are ahead. So for example, it seems quite clear that the United States has a much more extensive coverage of 4G LTE networks than Europe does. But then if you look at the reasons, or if you look behind the reasons, it is really that in the United States, the respective spectrum band had been allocated and assigned, I think in 2007, so much earlier than the first such spectrum assignment took place in Europe. And then if you look at the reaction of the market in Europe to such spectrum assignments, you could see that for example in Sweden, from the spectrum assignment, it took about two years for the operators to achieve something like 96% coverage. So actually, I think it is much more kind of a time lag rather than an issue that can be easily addressed by new legislation, especially in light of the fact that we have a legally binding measure, the radio spectrum policy program, which actually sets out a deadline for member states to assign that specific spectrum band, which has not been assigned yet in several countries. So if anything, this is more of an implementation issue rather than something to which we should, in my view, react with very urgent new legislative measures. And if you look at the fixed, sorry, with regard to MOBA, maybe just one more comparison, which is often overlooked, is that although Europe doesn't have nearly as extensive coverage with regard to 4G, LT, as for example the US, if you look at the measurements on the speeds, the MOBA broadband speeds that the consumers are actually getting on existing technologies, we are not really behind. So even though we have, I would say, an older generation of networks, the speeds that the customer actually gets are not worse. When you look at fixed broadband, then also there are some quite clear measurements. There are some reports which have been actually commissioned by the European Commission by Sam Nose, which measured broadband speeds on both sides of the Atlantic. And actually the figures of the European Commission show that European consumers get significantly higher fixed broadband speeds on every single fixed technology than, for example, consumers in the US. So I think that yet you can argue, of course, that there is more fiber, for example, in Japan than there is in Europe. But I think what I'm trying to say is that overall, if you look at many factors to compare, then it doesn't really occur to us. And I think that was also kind of the view that the regulator's group, BEREC, has voiced that the situation is as gloomy as has been, I think, staged by some groups. Then the other issue, there are too many operators in Europe compared to some other markets. Now, certainly there are more operators, thanks to competition in a quite vibrant market in Europe than, for example, in China. But I think, for example, in the United States, although we have some very large operators, there are also quite numerous smaller regional and local players. So it is not at all that far, I think, from the European number, as some would argue. Now that the telecom sector is in a crisis, I think we have heard quite a few times the argument that the revenues in the sector are declining. Now, that is certainly correct for some operators, it is not correct for others. But yes, there are operators for whom whose revenues are indeed declining. But I think the big question to ask is that, is that something that can be easily addressed by a legislative package or by regulation? Or is it more of a commercial problem or is it more of a problem that could be addressed by other types of measures which could boost demand? I would also argue that actually competition, very vibrant competition and innovation and affordability delivered by competition are the key factors which actually boost demand. I think that is what history of broadband in Europe tells us. I think quite a few years ago, people were arguing that, well, who would use one or two megabits per second, that's just such a huge bandwidth. And as unbundling happened and as the competitors came to the market and they have started offering not standalone internet but triple play packages at really quite affordable prices, then the consumers became more interested. And actually if you look at the take-up figures of that period, you can see that when competition was kicked off by unbundling, then broadband take-up has started to skyrocket in Europe. So actually, I think the fact that there are declining revenues in a sector doesn't necessarily mean that that is something that regulation can easily solve. And fourthly, I mentioned the argument that there is a robust lack of investment. Now, I wouldn't argue that we shouldn't think about fostering investments. Indeed, that is, I think, a very important part of even the whole regulatory framework to incentivize efficient investments. But if we look at, for example, the year-on-year deployment of new fiber or partly coppery networks, for example, I am thinking of a study that was published by the European Commission I think towards the end of last year. It was by point topic who looked at basically a network mapping in the year-on-year development. We can see that there is quite a lot of deployment happening in Europe and there is a quite significant increase in the number of fiber lines installed. If I'm not mistaken, there is also quite an ambitious plan here in Ireland to deploy more advanced fixed technologies. So at the same time, as I've already mentioned, in mobile broadband, we can see that wherever the sector was made available, there was a very quick deployment of the latest 4G technology. So I think that there is ongoing investment in Europe. There is ongoing investment both by incumbent operators and also very importantly by alternative operators. I think alternative operators are a very important part of the investment seen today. They have started investing in local loop-unbundling, but then many of them went on and they are now investing quite actively in fiber, either fiber to the home or a fiber to the cabinet. And in some countries, the alternative operators are still the leading investors when it comes to fiber technologies. So I would argue that these claims that have been made as the kind of the premises of the discussion about the single market would misguide really the discussion. And the discussion should focus on identifying the genuine obstacles to the single market and solve the problems that can be genuinely solved by legislation or regulatory action in the spirit of the treaties, which is to enable free movement across borders and to ensure unrestricted competition. If we look at some of the parts of the proposal on the connected continent, one part of the proposal was addressing a single authorization regime. So that is that if you would like to start your activities as a telecoms operator in any given European market, then it would be extremely easy because basically you would only have to notify the national regulator that you plan to do so. And then with that you can just start your activities. I think we have seen that the practices, so really the implementation of this rule on the ground has some divergences. So it is necessary to address probably this issue, but maybe there can be a quite simple solution. And indeed, we welcome the European Parliament's proposal in this regard that it should be really the regulator's group, BEREC, who should sort out this issue, which is much more of an implementation issue rather than something that needs a legislative response. The other very important part of the proposal for the EFTTA members was the part about the wholesale access products. The proposal sought to harmonize some aspects of wholesale access products. And we thought that that could, the way in which it was prepared, we thought that that could potentially have a detrimental effect on the current competition model of the EU framework. And we think that certainly the current competition model of the EU framework is something that has brought probably the biggest benefits to European consumers, European citizens in a global comparison. And ultimately it is really the user who should be at the center of the action of the EU institutions. The statistics of some international organizations is not active statistics, so statistics that we have looked at from the ITU, from the OECD and also the European Commission itself clearly show that European consumers get higher broadband speeds, so that's what is actually being delivered to the end user. They have more choice. They can choose from more innovative offers and more affordable prices than their global peers. As a consequence to this, in Europe there is a higher take-up, there is a higher usage of broadband than, for example, in the US, Japan or China. And if our ultimate objective is to have a knowledge-based society, if our ultimate objective is to actually ensure that there is a growth generating factor, that there are more jobs, that it has an impact on employment, it has an impact on education, then I think probably the single most important factor there is actually the take-up, because we can have all the networks we want to have in the ground, but if people are not using them then they are actually quite useless. So I think that looking at take-up and under what conditions are the consumers most likely to actually start using broadband where they are not using it yet is something that should be very carefully looked at in any future legislative package as well. So therefore I think we very much believe that this competition law principle-based and also a very future-proof approach that we have in the current framework should be maintained in the long term. It is very clear that it is technology neutral, that it is really based on sound economic principles that can be applied today and tomorrow. This is something that we should preserve and build on. It is very clear that last mile power cannot be a lever for gaining unfair competitive advantage and that is true today and that will be true tomorrow. We think that another very important factor with regard to access regulation and the pro-competitive model of the EU is the question of investments. You probably heard I think the other side arguing that there would be more investments if access regulation was removed. Actually if we look at the study, that independent study that the European Parliament had carried out, that study found that access regulation doesn't seem to have a very significant impact on the investment decisions of incumbent operators. So if you look at I think European countries and you look at the stage of deployment of fiber networks, you look at the regulatory regime, the study found that it is very difficult to actually find a straightforward correlation between the existence of access regulation and the levels of investment by the incumbent operator. However, what is I think very important to note that if our objective is to maximize investments so that it is not only the incumbent operators who invest, but it is also the alternative, the challenger operators who invest, then access regulation has a very key role to play and the letter of investment principle I think is something that has proven to work in practice and we see several alternative operators across Europe who have climbed the letter of investment and who are running a healthy business. Alternative operators started investing first in local loop unbundling, so rolling out their network up to the local exchange and they're renting the last mile from the incumbent operator, but now we also see some alternative operators for example in Italy who are going further than that, who are rolling out fiber to the street's cabinet and rent only a very small last part of the incumbent operator's network and that is a quite important step in investments. That's to learn that there is an investment made by alternative operators in fiber to the home, but for example if you look at the Spanish market the key enabler of making those investments in fiber to the home is having access to the ducts of the incumbent operator. So having physical access products and this focus on physical access products in the European regime has been the key enabler of investments made by alternative operators and I think it is extremely important that if we go forward we really think of a regulatory environment that incentivizes investments by all and enables investments by all players, not only by incumbent operators or indeed by alternatives. Another area which I think has interestingly come up in the connected continent context and which has been taken forward a bit by the European Commission and where I think that the creation of the single market could probably have the most important economic effect is the provision of more competitive communication solutions to businesses in public administrations, in particular multinational businesses. We think that there is genuinely an urgent need for more European action and more harmonization or coordination in this area in order to help European businesses to become more effective and productive. Boosting the efficiency of companies in all sectors can have a singular great effect on growth and jobs and indeed the studies which preceded this connected continent proposal I think there was a study entitled the cost of non-Europe which calculated a very large sum I think 110 billion euros that could be generated by having more Europe rather than less Europe. A large part of that was actually the creation of more competition in the provision of communications services to businesses and this is an area which has not been specifically addressed I think by the European regulatory regime. We have been very much focusing on the consumer as the key end user but businesses are also end users of communication services and their efficiency and productivity depends quite a lot on the competitiveness of their of their communications businesses so I think this is the key area where the European commission came up with a proposal to harmonize wholesale access products which are of the grade of business usage so business grade wholesale access products that is an area where I would certainly agree that more action would be needed and sooner rather than later. In terms of the institutional setup the current institutional setup the proposal also contained some elements with regards to bear at the body of European regulators and it also looked into the possibility of more powers to the European commission. We actually think that the current division of powers has worked really quite well I think there is a good balance. We don't really see a deficiency in that and we also think that it is necessary to have a good checks and balances between the different institutions so we actually support the European parliament's take on this issue. Maybe just one I think short remark on spectrum policy. Spectrum policy is also one area in which the new commission's political guidelines and the mission letters foresee more action. I think that probably all operators would agree that it would be extremely useful to have a more coordinated approach in which operators are able to plan ahead and see better when auctions would for example take place so I think that certainly a planning ahead certainty some more coordination in this area would be much welcome. There is an issue I think which has come up in a lot of discussions therefore I guess I cannot avoid speaking about it which is international roaming. Actually it's supportive of the objective to abolish excessively high roaming charges for end users and to create a very positive roaming experience for consumers traveling across borders. I think that what is important with regard to roaming however is that the industry has legal certainty and predictability with regard to the applicable rules and the investments that are necessary to be made in order to comply with those rules and at the moment I think we feel that different measures and proposals on the table are pulling in different directions and there is currently a roaming regulation in force which also has a deadline in it. The deadline that has already passed with regard to the coupling of roaming services yet we are discussing and that is also very clear I think in the political statements with regard to the objectives of the new commission that there should be no roaming surcharges faced by consumers but if then basically the future is the phasing out of roaming charges then it doesn't make very much sense for industry to invest in a solution which has been designed to create more competition and competitive offerings in the roaming prices. So I think here the plea of probably the whole industry would be that please only require sensible investments by legislation and make sure that the industry is able to plan ahead and has legal certainty with regard to what it has to do. I think that these are the key thoughts about the proposal itself I think we need to see the further developments in the council and what will come next whether or not there will be adoption and when and what will be adopted also as well as it is interesting to note that the the political guidelines of President-elect Juncker for see adding more ambition to the ongoing reform of the telecoms rules and I think it will be interesting to see what what that actually means. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.