 Welcome to WSIS Farm 2018. I am delighted to be joined by Dr. Robert Pepper, who is head of Global Connectivity Policy and Planning at Facebook. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for inviting me. So Dr. Pepper, to start with, 2018 marks a milestone for WSIS. It's been 15 years since the Geneva Plan of Action. So how do you reflect on the efforts made over the past 15 years to build an internet society? Wow. So if you go back 15 years and go through the thought exercise, there was no Facebook. It was four years before the iPhone, before Android. Before, if you think about it, we now, everybody can have a very powerful computer in their pocket. Nobody back then would have thought that mobile broadband would have been everywhere, or the goal of having it everywhere. It was before the UN Broadband Commission set out a goal of countries having broadband plans. And now, you know, I don't know how many, over 100 and close to 100 and whatever have broadband plans made a difference. I mean, the entire conversation has completely shifted, right? Back then it was, oh, these ICT things are important and trying to convince governments that it's important. Everybody gets it. And now the question is how can I deploy it? How can I use it? How can I benefit from it? So in many countries across the world, there is real internet society. Yet some communities remain unconnected. So what part can the private sector play and companies like Facebook play in delivering this goal and connecting everyone? Yeah, so great question. And that's exactly my day job. We believe very strongly and are committed to the symbiotic relationship with the network operators, right? We need terrific networks for them to build them, and yet we provide the content and applications that drive the demand. So we partner with mobile operators. Again, a lot of the investment is going to be its private sector investment. So a great example is doing the diagnosis. What prevents an operator from migrating from 2G to some 3G, 4G, especially in rural areas of developing countries? And it turns out that one of the biggest barriers is the lack of good backhaul. Because if I have a tower and I have a coverage for 2G, I can't really do broadband internet. I can't do 3G, I can't do 4G, because I have a narrow band radio connection for backhaul. It might be two megabits to be shared. Your smartphone will consume 10 to 15 megabits, just one device. You can't even support one device. So one of the things that we've done, for example, is in northwest rural Uganda, partnering with Airtel and a small operator called BCS, is we just finished building a fiber core network, right? It's 780 kilometers across rural Uganda, crossing the Nile, to enable them to get fiber backhaul to their tower and be able to upscale to real broadband. And by the way, since we open source everything, that fiber is an open fiber. Any operator has the ability to join that fiber. So that's a very concrete example of working with other stakeholders, private sector, to advance the agenda of connecting everybody on the planet. Now finally, Dr. Pepper, Facebook is a forward-looking company. We have talked about the work that has been done over the past 15 years, and how the picture now looks radically different to 2003. How do you see connectivity evolving in the next 15 years? What's the future of connectivity? I don't know about 15 years, but certainly within the next five, what we're seeing is dramatic increase in demand for more data. Everything's being driven by video, right? So it's even when we talk to each other on the applications, we're doing FaceTime or Google Video or video on WhatsApp, it's part of communications. People are uploading their own videos. People are becoming creators, not just consumers. And so we see the ability to create community, the ability to connect people to people, build on personal and family relationships, and get the benefits from the internet. That's going to include increasingly video, as well as the existing social interactions, but there's also going to be eGov applications. And so the demand for the networks is going to increase, and it's going to be easier for people to communicate with one another and within groups. Dr. Robert Pepper, thank you very much. Thank you.