 Welcome to our plenary session on Connecting the Last Mile, and we have a great group of panelists to share some ideas. Before we begin, we have the honour of Secretary-General Jaoha Lin to come to open our session and say a few welcoming remarks. Thank you, Alex. So, Excellencies, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. To be honest with you, I talked with my friends, my colleagues, that we started our session from nine o'clock. It may not be easy to get participants to come to our meeting room, but I found that you are already here, so that is great. So you consider this session quite interesting and useful, so you join us, so I appreciate very much your presence. It's really a pleasure to welcome you all here today to this plenary session on reaching the last mile. But my friend just told me that it's not the last mile, it's the last half of people not connected yet, so that we have even much, much harder work to do. But anyhow, the ideas, the topics, I think that still valid. The innovative solutions to remaining connectivity issues. I like this word innovative. As I discussed with many friends, that if we cannot get this half people not connected yet to be connected, we might have to look for some new solutions. And new solutions need innovative ideas. I would like to thank the World Economic Forum, our co-organiser for their support and commitment in shaping this session. Telecommunications in the ICT have evolved over the last 150 years that ITU has been in existence. The increasing pace of innovation is illustrated by the fact that it took 125 years to reach the first building fixed telephone lines, but it took only 11 years to reach the first building mobile phone subscriptions. Today, there are more than 7 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, almost as many mobile subscriptions as there are inhabitants on the planet, and 3.2 billion people of which 2 billion are from developing countries online. It is an important achievement. The internet is a global public good, but it is still far from being ubiquitous, with more than 4 billion including 2,000 of people in the developing world still offline. Even those online do not always have access to the same knowledge and opportunities. There are several reasons why this may be the case. Offerability, where there is still a significant gap in price for mobile broadband, for example between developing and developing countries. I think that the first day we heard some other ideas, why we talked about affordable price, why we cannot talk about free price. So why not? So that is something you might have to think about. And in fact, in many areas, public areas, you already have free Wi-Fi connections. So that sounds, this fantastic idea may not be that kind of a dream. If we do something, it may be possible. Lack of availability of the services that we take for granted in developing countries, social media, Apple, various e-commerce platforms, or services not being offered in the local languages as the size of the market may not be large enough to merit an investment in such services by the private sector. It could also be cause the services or applications may not be designed for persons with disabilities to enjoy full access to online resources on an equal basis with others. There is a significant and persistent urban rural digital divide, whereby urban citizens enjoy ubiquitous mobile network coverage, affordable high-speed internet services, and to the higher level of skills required to make effective use of online content and services while the opposite is often the case in rural and remote areas of many developing countries. Let me just give you an example. I visit Marikaska in August. And in this country, the telephone penetration is still relatively low, lower than 35% today. This is not easy. But in that capital, they already have 3G. And 3G seems to be popular in the capital. But in countryside, there is even no mobile coverage. And in the capital, where I can enjoy my Wi-Fi free connections, but then I suffered from the other problems. The electricity was interrupted from time to time. It's very annoying when you try to answer some emails, then interrupted by the cut of power, then all the messages I put on there are lost. So you have to start it again. So this kind of thing, we did not find normal in Europe or in some other areas. But that is the reality. So that is still apparently the big challenge to us. I talked with the president of this country, the minister of this country, and they told me that indeed the power in the countryside is big issue. But I have another good example. In 2011, by the end of 2011, I was in Myanmar. I think that we had Myanmar vice-minister here. The country had a big population. At that moment, the telephone penetration is as low as less than 5%, much lower than in many other countries. This is almost the lowest penetration in the world by the end of 2011. But the government decided to introduce a new policy, open their market. So I told the minister that if you open your market, I'm pretty sure you will reach big changes very soon. And they put target to change the telephone mobile penetration from 5% by the end of 2011 to 50% by the end of 2015 this year. So 10 times. But however, 2013, they introduced some international carriers like Teleno and Orelu. And I was very pleased to see the rapid development of ICG in this country. The minister confirmed to me today in Myanmar, the telephone penetration is already as high as more than 65%. It's not the end of 2015. It's still, you have three or four months to go. They already reached this level. So we need to encourage development of ICG. And there's still a lot of work in front of us. Of course here, there's also a gender-based divide. 200 million less women have access to the internet than men. I was very much annoyed by news that in some African countries that the men enjoy the mobile phones. And when men get out of the family and he took mobile phones away, so the whole family left behind without any means of communication. So this is again a big gender matter issue for us. And we see the gap between men and women in the ICT usage. And I also noted that not only this kind of divide, and we also have people aged. So I was in Colombia also in September this year. No, no, in July this year. I found that they have a new program to training those retired people to use internet. And I visited some local centers. I found it's amazing that those people already retired and they come together to receive this training. So the minister told me that they found that this is also the big part of the population, not really realize the advantages of using internet. So I asked them, why you come here to receive this training? And your children can give you some kind of assistance. They told me that at home, children are not that patient. This kind of thing is so easy. So they cannot get good training from their children. So they enjoy this training offered by the community. And of course, some of them already started to use internet to develop some business or some kind of life after retirement. And recently, in September in the Philippines, I also visited the Luka community. They offered their Luka community also this free training of using internet. There is also a very happy story. I met this aged lady and she told me that she retired and she didn't know how to use the internet. And I'd like to see if she can find some lovers, the friends, boyfriend from these kind of services. That is a very, very good story. So yet we know that for every 10% of increase in broadband penetration in the developing world, those countries GDP will be boosted by 1.8% on average. We need to ensure that all people, and especially the most disadvantaged and vulnerable groups, have equitable access to these vital resources for sustainable social and economic development. Dear friends, this is a very important year for the global community as we move from the Millennium Development Goals, MDGs to the newly agreed Sustainable Development Goals, STGs. We are also looking back to consider what we have achieved following commitment and agreements made a decade ago at the World Summit of Information Society, WISIS. It's clear that we achieved a lot, but it's also clear to me that we're still left behind as we study. For example, at WISIS, we set up a target. By 2015, all schools should be connected by internet. We are still very, very far away from this target. It is clear that information and communication technologies have been and will continue to be an essential enabler and accelerator for sustainable growth and development for everyone. And we, as the ICT community, will continue working together for the value of technologies to be available to more people in more places with more effect. So ladies and gentlemen, to ensure that all people and communities are empowered participants of the digital economy, ICT is committed to work with all stakeholders to bring the power of modern communications to all the world people whenever they live and whatever their means. As the oldest member of the UN family, we celebrate our 150th anniversary on 17th of May this year, and the UN's specialised agent for ICT's ITU is honoured to continue playing its part in bringing the benefits of CQ and chose worthy ICTs to all through the coordination of global resources, including spectrum and orbital slots through standardisation, through development support, and by convening policy dialogues. The broadband commission for sustainable development continues its excellent work on monitoring the successes and challenges of broadband deployments around the world. The commission has worked tirelessly to draw attention to the major issues in connecting the world, the importance of national leadership in policy for achieving this and the vital role of broadband for achieving the SDGs. Towards this objective at the ITU's clinical potential conference 2014 held in Busan, the international community agreed to connect 20 agenda for global telecommunications ICT development, setting out a shared vision and goals as well as universal specific and measurable targets for the development of the global ICT sectors. I mentioned yesterday in one of my speeches that one of the targets we made is by 2020, 55% of household globally will have broadband access at home. But we heard from Prime Minister of Hungary that they put a target by end of 2018 to reach all the households in Hungary not to leave any single one out to connect them by broadband connections. So we appreciate this kind of ambitious measures to facilitate the ICT development. At this global level, I would also like to recognize with the appreciation efforts of the World Economic Forum and the future of the Internet Initiative of which I'm a trustee. Dear colleagues, the key message that I would like to convey is that there is no single entry or organization that can address the whole spectrum of current and emerging challenges of the ICT sector alone. There are global issues requiring global dialogue, therefore it is imperative that we all work together. We are privileged to have here today on the panel estimated colleagues who are playing a leading role in developing innovative solutions to remaining connectivity issues. And I thank them for agreeing to share their invaluable knowledge and experiences. I would like to share with you my observations over the last few weeks, particularly at the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September. I was very much encouraged by two world leaders. One is the President of Estonia at the conference jointly organized by the State Department and the World Economic Forum. He pleased the global family, particularly those of rich nations, to do more to help developing countries. I think that this is absolutely important. I was encouraged also by some European states. I visited recently and they put 2% of their GDP to support developing countries. I think that this is also very much appreciated. The exciting moment when I enjoyed very much in New York was I was a guest speaker invited by her excellency, Chancellor of Germany and a maker. To join her at the dinner, she invited dozens of head of states and head of governments of Africa continent and a few Asia states. At that dinner, she expressed clearly that Germany wished to cooperate with our African friends to have further socio-economic development. She consented it apparently because she invited me to be her only guest. I was really excited because I complained to many friends that the ITU never be invited by any summit. It doesn't matter whether it's the American summit, Asia summit, Europe summit. You never find the ITU be invited. While in the World Bank, I may have WTO that quite often invited as a guest and WTO UNESCO from time to time. But the ITU never be invited. I also told my friends that ITU never be invited by any head of developer countries to talk about ICD development. Partly because they consider the ICD is a sustainable business, self-development. It does not cause trouble, but always profit-making, so we don't need to worry too much about that. That is some kind of perceptions. I would use the misperception because ICD does have very, very tough competitions. Among the English members, if you're not doing well, a couple of years you might be collapsed completely right out from the international stage. We have a lot of examples. And then also, to connect with those not connected yet, you need to pay more attention to Guse. We don't have any successful business mode. So we need to work more. So if you do not have enough attention from head of state, head of governments, then we may lose some opportunities. We have more difficulties. So if head of state, head of governments pay attention to ICD development, they will help us to create a good environment. They help us to have a good, you know, public-private partnership to go to those areas and need our help. And of course, you know, fair competitions could be guaranteed by those, you know, measures taken by our head of state, head of governments. So I was absolutely excited with that invitation. And we spent three hours that evening, too. And Madam Maker, you know, very carefully listened to the presidents from Africa to tell her what are the problems they have or what kind of achievement they are looking at. And Madam Maker, you know, very much appreciated this information and expressed her, you know, willingness to help. So that is also very good news and I'd like to share with you. It's not that written in my paper. So I'm sorry to take a little bit longer time, but at the end of all, I consider this message could be useful for our discussion. So, ladies and gentlemen, I wish you a great session. And I'm pretty sure, Alex, you will manage this session very well. I wish you a great success. I talked to him that that was the next year. Perhaps we should organize the similar sessions to talk about these very important topics. So thank you very much. Yeah. So thank you. And thank you, Secretary General Zhao. We're very proud to be a partner with ITU and also as Secretary General Zhao mentioned, we have an initiative called the Future of the Internet of which ITU is one of our trustees, along with many other key organizations on the panel and some of you in the audience. So I think we had a very good introduction and overview of the challenge. I think I'll reflect back on some of the conversations I've heard over the last two days and it's good to hear that this theme of the next four billion, the next two billion, the next 1.5 billion is a common theme and some very good insights already made. I think the key here on this session is the emphasis on innovation. It's in the title of our session on Monday where one of our participants from Huawei, she mentioned it's going to require technology innovation, business model innovation, and regulatory innovation. And to that I'll add collaboration. The Secretary General mentioned all the initiatives that are now starting to bubble up, including the attention because of the SDGs because of some of the recent announcements made by the multilateral institutions, but also because of the efforts of some of the organizations and companies that are in the room today. So maybe to introduce how we will proceed with this session, first of all the organizers told me I can take an extra few minutes to go into the coffee break given that we started a little late, so unless my panel has any issue we'll plan to go to 10.30 to give us an extra few minutes and of course Q&A time for the participants in the room here. The framework that we've been working on at the World Economic Forum on this issue of internet for all has been to look at four major pillars or areas, infrastructure, affordability, awareness, and content. And if we think about the innovation that I mentioned earlier that's required in all these four areas, it's a big jigsaw puzzle. And this is how we want to discuss the panel. We've sequenced our very esteemed experts and guests and sort of unpack this issue piece by piece following a bit of this framework. And then of course we have our regulator at the end who can tell us we're all wrong and why these solutions aren't as easy as they sound. So that's how we'll go through the panel and we'll then have a bit of a discussion among the panel and then of course some time for you to add your comments. So first on to my left I have the pleasure to introduce Professor H. Sama Noana. He is the Executive Director of the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance. Previously he was the Group Director of Spectrum Policy at OFCOM in the UK and we saw the UK 4G auction which has raised billions of dollars. And I think we're very honored that Professor Noana will start us off because I thought, you know, let's start from the very core infrastructure spectrum issues that we know are part of the puzzle that has to get addressed. And I invite Professor Noana to share his comments. Okay, good morning. I'm really, am I on? It's a good morning. I'm really pleased to be here. I come from Africa. The only introduction that I have to that as well is I come from Cameroon in West Africa originally. So I'm very, very keen and I'm doing a lot of projects right now on the ground in Africa. The title of this session is really reaching the last mile innovative solutions. I think I'm going to limit my remarks mainly to technology innovation, regulatory innovation as well as technology, other technology innovations as well. But I was quite intrigued looking at the title this morning because it says innovative solutions for the remaining connectivity issues. So I'll underline the word remaining connectivity issues. It almost, using a doc analogy, it almost makes it sound as if that's a tail problem, that's a small tail problem. The actually thing is the biggie doc itself, which is a problem here, right? If I were to mix metaphors a bit, it's really the bottom of the pyramid which is much larger than the top of the pyramid. So this is a really, really big problem. I'm going to split my remarks into three points. Alex is a very good moderator. He's asked us to talk about three core points. And my three core points this morning are going to be access and reach to start with. Then I'm going to move on to competition and regulation for access and innovation because we absolutely need that. Then I'm going to conclude on the fact that I think it requires a new innovative spectrum policy in order to really address this challenging problem. So let me just start with the whole access, affordability and access problem. One of the things I say in a book I wrote, I put out last year is that and I keep saying this on the conference circuit, reach without affordability is completely futile. So if you've got all the reach in the world and then people cannot afford it, completely futile. And affordability without reach is completely sterile. So in that regard, the unaffordability problem, many times I don't think people actually understand how pernicious it is. So I'm going to give you some numbers. So some of you have got some paper in front of you, quite feel free to write some of these numbers down. But this is all based on a really critical analysis of ITU and World Bank data from one of my friends who used to work at Ofcom. So what he did was he took the 7.4 billion of us on Earth. They took all of us on Earth and ranked us from the first, the richest person in the world, Mr Bill Gates, to the poorest person in the world in Africa or in India or whatever that person may be. The first billion of us would have an average annual income of $49,000. Annual average income of $49,000. Most of you in this room mind that first billion, obviously. In fact, all of you in this room mind that first billion. And you will be prepared to spend $205 a month on communication services. $205 a month on communication services. Second billion, it drops to $12,000 a year. $53 on communication services. Third billion, $5,400 a month. $23 a month $23 a month on communication services. That is why 3.2 billion people are connected today. Because if I give you the number for the fourth billion, the average income drops to $3,000, and they're only prepared to spend $12 on communication services. And that $12 includes phones, TV, everything. Fifth billion, $1750, $7 a month. It now starts becoming impossible. Six billion, which is where most of Africa and Asia comes in. A lot of southern East Asia. $1,000 a year. $4.4 on communication services. And then the third billion is just bad news. $2.25. So it is no surprise that there are only 3 billion people connected today. And I put it to you that there are only 3 billion. Unless you understand these numbers, they're not going to be connected anytime soon. The second biggest problem as well, certainly in my part of the continent of the world, is power. If you go to a country like mine, Cameroon, you look at the ITU numbers, only something like 50% of the country is on the grid. So how on Earth do you connect the other 50% of the country, when they're not even on the grid? Or you take a country like DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo, 50% of their power comes from backup generators. That's a real challenge. And these are some of the real realities that we really should deal with. So I hope I've painted the real difficulty of the affordability and the access and the rich problem across connecting the next 4 billion. So that's my first point. So I've got only 2 points to go. My second key point is that this problem is so difficult that in my time at Ofcom, you need to throw competition at it. So you really need competition across new business models, competition about new spectrum policy models and competition about new technology models. And that is what personally the sort of things that I'm doing at the Dynamics Spectrum Alliance. So don't, as this emerging technology, please run the sort of spectrum policy that I used to run at Ofcom. Or you see the spectrum policy. It will not work for Africa. It will not work for this unconnected. It just wouldn't. Because you have to get up every morning and think about how you regulate for affordability and how you regulate for access. I didn't have to worry about that every single day at Ofcom, as I think you need to do. You need to look at all three GPP, 2G, 3G, 4G type solutions as well. I think you also need to look at which is the license ecosystem. I think you also need to look at the on-license business models as well using technologies like Wi-Fi to be able to address this issue. And if all of you in this room are using Wi-Fi today for your broadband here in this room, here in Budapest, if it's good enough for this room, it must be good enough for the on-license business models to be able to address this affordability issue. And that puts into competition both the license ecosystem as well as the on-license ecosystem. And so that takes me now to my third point, which is all this require a different type of regulatory policy. You really, you the regulators in the room must really provide regulatory competition across the world. I did that in the UK. I did the 4G auction in the UK which was a license ecosystem, but I was also pushing very heavily the on-license ecosystem using technologies, the regulatory approaches like TV white spaces. And so the sort of vision I have for my continent and for some of the unconnected is where you have the access layer, the last mile access layer, you have Wi-Fi like we all have in this room right now the TV bands. So I encourage you guys to try and encourage regulations which allow for Wi-Fi over the TV bands. This time next year you are going to have 802.11 AF chipsets, which is going to allow for, you're going to have three radios in this, 802.11 N which allows you to do 2.4 GHz, AC which allows you to do 5 GHz, but also 802.11 AF which allows you to do UHF bands as well. And obviously UHF goes much further. So imagine a world where you have AH and AF in the last mile. In the middle mile as well you can also use some AF as well as AH, Wi-Fi type or license type technologies. In the last mile as well I also encourage you to use low cost 2G solutions in emerging markets. There's a company which Facebook is doing some really fantastic work in that particular area. Middle mile, as I said, you use some of this TV white space technology like Wi-Fi. And in the last mile you use satellite type technologies for backhaul as well as fiber as well as point-to-point multi-wave. So you need to also allow for those sort of solutions and those sort of blueprint. But the only way you get to these unlicensed solutions is using a regulatory term which people like us invented at Ofcom. The real technology which people are going to use is Wi-Fi in the TV bands. And for some of those my critics will say there's no technology which works for TV white space, that's just nonsense because it's a big ecosystem of Wi-Fi out there which members of my company, members of DSA are manufacturing. So three core points, access and affordability, big big issue. I've given you some numbers but you really need to look at competition and regulation, regulation for access and affordability and for innovation, how people innovate in these countries and last but by no means links I've given you some of the technologies like Wi-Fi in TV bands which are going to help address these problems. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm glad when I introduced Professor Wanda and I said that he raised billions of dollars for Ofcom. I'm glad he raised billions of dollars. That's great. I wasn't incentivized to raise billions though. Next to my left is Christian Olson. Christian Olson is with O3B and that works which is a satellite company focusing specifically on the access connectivity issue. And Christian maybe I'll pass it over to you now to share some thoughts on that infrastructure access innovation that you're working on. So there were three networks. We called O3B because it means the other three billion. So we found it in order to connect everyone who wasn't connected around the world. At that point in time it was three billion today it's four. But what we found now a bit more than one year into service is that most of the people who connect are actually not necessarily the ones that were unconnected. They were just unconnected. So we found that ITU used for many years that broadband meant 256 kilobits. That doesn't do you any good. Our customers talk about the turnout distance because they're so remote. They're more reliant on connectivity than you and I. We have a lot of support systems just locally. They just simply don't. And they need to access that connection. So I definitely think there's a need to redefine what is really proper connectivity. I think Akamai does it pretty well. They talk about mobile broadband and measuring the amount of subscribers that access a connection higher than four megabits per second. And if you look at that numbers, you have a number in Nigeria, for example, that's 15% of all users. In Pakistan it's only really connected. It looks a bit different. So I think it's dangerous to look at just taking the box and saying someone is connected. You really have to look at what kind of connectivity they have. And that's what we've done so far. We're enabling this for our customers. And the response has been great because many of our customers said they're very remote. They need to rely on the global ecosystem in order to sell their products. And those kind of platforms are usually not adapted for poor networks. They're just adapted to whatever is available where they're developed, maybe in Silicon Valley, maybe somewhere else. We connect universities, which is a really big thing. We have a lot of students out there still poorly connected. And they don't have a lot of content available locally either. So Google Classroom, for example, it's a really good thing. Some of our universities we connect today in order to enable them to have a better learning system. And that's also a cloud-based application which also sets some kind of requirements on the connectivity you have available. So definitely I think there's a need to redefine what broadband really means. And as I said, maybe you're disappointed that most of the time we're seeing we go into the next step and connecting the unconnected. And here there are some things that really needed. Alex, you pointed out that someone mentioned the business model. And the business model is completely different there. And I think the level infrastructure you need to put in these remote areas is just prohibitive many times. And we see some things that need to come together in order to make sure that the spectrum propagates better than your signal just goes further and you can connect more people with limited amount of infrastructure. That's something that's key really to driving in these areas where people are more scarcely populated areas. Another one to that is network sharing. We talk a lot with the mobile operators. And it's not really a market out there. But again, the economics don't really add up. And in some countries, you're actually not allowed to share your network. And that's I understand it from the competition point of view, but today most of the mobile operators, they compete on the retail side, not on the network side. So in order to allow them to share their networks, you can actually share your network with the mobile operators. And that's something that's out in more remote areas. And I think, you know, last point is as everyone talks about is electricity. So we done some studies looking at how much people spend on connectivity and not only on what they spend paying their subscription or they prepaid card mostly to the mobile operator, but then actually do another phone bill. And because they have to go there, they have to take transport and get somewhere where there's electricity, they have to pay to charge their phone, and they have to pay to get home again. And that may work when you're a 2D phone, but if you get one of these smart phones, I don't know what kind of battery life you get, but if I get a day, I'm pretty happy with that. So I had a conversation about, you know, many streets and communications. Sometimes it's separate. Sometimes you have it together with transport. Sometimes maybe, you know, you should also collaborate with the ones building infrastructure when it comes to electricity in order to create the whole package that enables connectivity in these areas. Those are my points. Thank you. So Christian has raised more questions and challenges, but we'll come back to how it could be some of those solutions as we continue. We'll continue moving left. And next I'll call on Chris Weasler. Chris is Facebook's lead on spectrum policy and connectivity planning. And then this role is one of the leaders in the internet.org's connectivity strategy. And as I've learned and many of us have learned in speaking to Chris over the last couple of days, there's a lot of innovation going on around the world. We've come now into the business model innovation, content innovation. Chris comes from a very private sector experience before from the telecom industry, the wireless industry. Chris, over to you to share your thoughts. Great. Thanks, Alex. Let me start out by saying that just personally it's a real treat for me to be here in Budapest. I lived here as a consultant for about a year and a half and I'm working on a project to privatize the Hungarian telecommunication company, Matov. Of course, back then I think there was a seven year wait for a landline in Hungary. And that was the last mile technology and of course today everything is wireless. And so as Alex mentioned, I do work on spectrum and connectivity planning at Facebook. Spectrum is oxygen for wireless networks so it's a very exciting space to be in. We also participate in the dynamic spectrum alliance so really happy to be working so closely with leaders like H in the space. And also applaud all the work that O3B is doing because it's going to take the efforts of a lot of different companies and a lot of different approaches to connect the last four billion people. So I'd like to do two things to sort of set a little context for why this is so important to Facebook and how it fits into Facebook. And the second is to talk a little bit about one of these sort of innovative approaches that we've been working on for the last year and a half or so. So I guess the conversation for us starts with Facebook's mission. Our mission is simply to give people the power to open and connected. And we're an 11 year old company. We've been on that same journey for all 11 years. Over the course of that 11 years we have connected a decent number of people to Facebook. About 1.5 billion people use our service every month. And about 85% of those people live outside the United States. So when we develop services, when we develop technology we have the power to connect with people and with an eye towards deploying that technology and services outside the U.S. I think along the way we've learned a lot about the hurdles to connectivity as a more general matter and the hurdles that we've identified map almost exactly to the ones that Alex called out in his opening remarks. So awareness, affordability, sustainability. And that conversation is more focused on the last mile and on infrastructure so I'm going to try to stick to that. It's really important to have this conversation now and to have it among a diverse group of stakeholders because today while there are 3.2 billion people on the internet, the rate of internet penetration growth has slowed. So in 2010, we had 14 percent, 14 percent growth rate in 2010. By 2014 that had slowed to under 7 percent. So our take away is the first 3.2 billion were the easy ones and I do think there's a dynamic that H called out related to affordability but the next 4 billion are going to be a lot harder and we think that calls for more innovative technology. And when it comes to connectivity platforms, Facebook takes a completely unreligious view to connectivity platforms. We think there's a role for all of them and so when we look at terrestrial connectivity, we know that many people connect via fiber and sort of the microwave extensions of that fiber and we think that's great because that will often be the biggest problem and we hope that fiber continues to grow. But we also think there's a role for satellites and oftentimes in some of the most hard to reach places and sometimes these approaches map to different population densities that satellites always going to play a role and Facebook is investing in satellite capacity as well. We've recently announced a deal to start making some of that in the second half of the second half of 2016. The third area that we think there's been a real under investment which can serve to meet connectivity needs in the low to mid population density areas are stratospheric platforms and more specifically the use of solar planes that fly between 20 and 25 kilometer altitude that can beam internet down to earth. So let me tell you a little more about that. About a year and a half ago Facebook acquired a company based in the UK that was an aviation company. It has become the nucleus for a lot of our research and development on this approach. The team has developed scale aircraft that we've been flying already and we've completed our first full scale aircraft. It's a very large wingspan aircraft. It's 42 meter wingspan about the same as a 737 and it's extremely lightweight. So it weighs about 400 kilograms. The wings are covered entirely by solar panels. It's powered by the sun during the day and the electric motors on board are powered by lithium ion batteries. So there are sort of three major technological advances that make this approach work today when it didn't work even a couple years ago. One is the improvement in composite materials. So carbon fiber, lightweight, cheaper, stronger than it used to be. The second is improvements in battery technology and we're riding the same sort of cost and performance curves that cell phone companies are riding and that electric car companies are riding and we're benefitting from all of that activity. And then the third is the efficiency of the solar panels that are on the wings. And so when we launch we intend for these planes to stay in flight for three months at a time. And with further improvements in all three of those technologies we think that these aircraft can stay aloft for up to a year. And they will fly in a circular pattern over a nominally fixed point over earth and project a beam of coverage down to earth that's about 100 kilometers in diameter and that beam of coverage will generate 10 gigabits per second of capacity. So it's a very high capacity approach and it's a very high connectivity. One important thing to note is that this is not a service that will go directly to an end user. It is a backhaul service. So the intent is to provide that connectivity to mobile operator base stations or to wireless ISPs access points or hotspots and help overcome one of the big hurdles to infrastructure connectivity which is the lack of connectivity of mobile operators. So of course to make this successful not only do we have to engage with a lot of global aviation authorities and we are but we also need to engage in a conversation about spectrum. And quite honestly this was one of the things that led Facebook to formally join the ITU. We have been working on the development sector. We're active participants in all the preparation for the world radio conference and we're we've got a U.S.-based proposal which has now become a region 2 proposal to study a number of candidate bands of spectrum for use by these high altitude platforms. So I'll cut myself off there to keep the conversation going but that is good. So we're going to keep moving along our spectrum and now we move to Anat Bhargara. Anat is chairperson and founder of UME Africa. It's the latest of a series of ventures as a serial entrepreneur that's now focusing on connectivity and access in Sub-Saharan Africa. Anat also serves on our global agenda council on the future of digital communications at the World Economic Forum so we're very proud that she's been contributing to that from an Anat's perspective and she can talk more about the content layer and some of the innovation that's happening there in terms of what's making UME work. Thank you very much Alex. Just as background for our context, so we are a fast-speed internet provider in Sub-Saharan Africa. We hope to be able to help close the digital divide. This is actually what we're working on. We're a for-profit company so our business model has to work on a economical point of view and in our life what we found out is that the rural areas, there is a real problem here. Everybody before me have been speaking about the rural areas but in the areas that we're active on in Sub-Saharan Africa we started in Cameroon, we moved to Ivory Coast. There is a real problem still in the urban areas. So as an average number in Sub-Saharan Africa, 6% of the people have subscription for broadband internet access and it's not even necessarily still the fast-speed broadband that we're used to or we're talking about here in the developed world. We're providing 4G LTE so our thought is that we want to give fast-speed where the user is feeling the real benefits of the 4G broadband offering so our users are able to do Skype so they can do telephony over IP seamlessly and they can drive a car and they can still have this conference call on Skype and be undisturbed if they are within our range. They can stream so we're working on streaming TV stations coming not from Europe necessarily but using a content which is a local content and people can exchange data for business purposes in a way that can make them included in the digital world in the global digital world so we're not looking at 2G or 3G it's definitely 4G LTE this is what we're working on. What we found out that the takeoff by the market is much slower than what we experienced in our previous companies in Europe and one of the reasons as we see it is that the content is not there. In places where the connectivity is poor or not existing there isn't a generation of relevant local content and it's a vicious circle if there is no generation of relevant local content then people are not using the internet they do not understand why is it relevant to the life of our customers and the benefits that we are getting here when we use them in the developed world. So although our money our business model is such that we're making our money on selling data packages to our clients and just in parentheses we're selling prepaid cards we start from very small affordable packages even using the internet. We found ourselves on the road of becoming a catalyst for a creation of local content. Not that we want to create it ourselves but we feel that we need to ingite it to start some sort of a process that the market produces its own relevant local content. So we approached it in different ways. We went to the University of Duala it's a university with 70,000 students and before we've done that there was no internet connectivity on this huge campus so students had to practically walk out of the campus to internet cafes to be connected so you can assume what it does to the academic level of such university. We talked to the rector and we talked to the rector and he said this is a campus affordable, stable. This took us about a month and since then the students can benefit from that. So here's the connectivity. Then we brought a Swiss university, a PFL which is a technology technical university and it's ranked number 15 on the Shanghai ranking so very good which makes a lot of sense and they teamed up with the local professors to build up a curriculum which is good academically and relevant. So now we have a package which is connectivity and content and this is the first one but it's of course to be copy pasted to the next universities not only in Cameroon but in Sub-Saharan Africa as such and we saw great response from regulators, education providers and other countries that we either expanded in to like every course or that we plan to expand to and they really like to take that on. The second thing that we've done we realized that again in Douala which was our first city in Cameroon there was no yellow page sort of business directory not online and not offline. So if you wanted to go to a restaurant or book a hotel you can ask what to do because there was no information available. So we took students we send them to the streets they mapped out the small medium enterprise of restaurants hotels in the city on a Google map with GPS and then we brought 13,000 local enterprises to our website we called it ec.cm which means here and it's about everything that is happening in that city. So now we went to this 13,000 SMEs we did a big press release and we told them look you are here online here is your business it's a photocopy it's your address it's what you're doing and the next step for you is to purchase broadband subscription and then from then on also start doing business online sell your services and sell your products online so it's a lengthy process I don't want to make the impression that it will happen within a day but we're making progress there and now being inspiration is that the market takes it on its own and develops it further we had the airline company coming to us wanting to put their schedule there and the train companies so that's a very good sign people come out of restaurants and they write a blog about the experience they had so this is what we wanted to create. Third thing we closed the deal we were the first merchant for PayPal in West Africa. The importance of this innovation it's not an innovation as such because it's really PayPal's business but in Sub-Saharan Africa the very little means of paying online basically in West Africa there isn't anything like that our clients previously to doing that had to go outside if their data package was finished they had to go outside and purchase prepaid cards again in order to use the internet so being able to do it online is not only lubricating that process but it's the first step into financial inclusion and such the next step that we see in our vision is that the small medium enterprises will go on that platform and they themselves will start selling their services online and using online payment it's not a shift from the offline payment but it's even a shift from mobile payment which is very strong in Africa but it's on text, on telephony and we feel this thing has to happen on IP, on the internet and the last thing I mentioned shortly which is the entertainment feature I think my colleague will agree with me the availability of entertainment offline is very limited I haven't seen, I have hardly seen TV stations in Cameroon and very few in Ivory Coast if at all and TV stations, you might have two or three but the content is very poor, it's basically boxing from 20 years ago and what we're doing we're working on streaming TV stations, again not European ones, not something that is to our taste but something that we found out is compatible to the taste of our markets it's a very long term investment from our point of view as a for profit organization as I said our money making thing is from selling the data packages but we believe that by providing content or having the market starting to create content we'll be able to reach our pools which is the average revenue per user which are much higher than what we would have done without that relevant content it's our investment but we believe and hope that we'll get it back great, well done thank you Anat and I think Anat's story is another piece of that puzzle on the content and the usage and I'll share a statistic that Michael Michael Kendi from Internet Society shared which I thought was a great story about Brazil 90% of the population has 3G access the cost of that access is roughly 3% of income costs so within the the target area but only 52% of the population is actually using the internet versus the 90% that have access and the statistic is that when asked why you're not on the internet 25, 26% talked about the affordability or don't have the access but 70% of the people responded it's because of lack of skills and lack of need or perceived lack of need so this is exactly about even if we get the access and the affordability right we still don't have to figure out how to get the right content on so I think I turned to our last panelist, Mr. Chakram Moha who is the chairman of the telecommunications regulator of Cambodia so you've heard a whole bunch of suggestions related to spectrum affordability network sharing, airspace I guess you might have to get into at some point power and then of course let alone all the code content development and so forth so be great for you to share of course a bit of your perspective from Cambodia and if you wanted to add any reflections on some of the comments you've heard from our other panelists please do thank you Alex good morning experiences ladies and gentlemen would like to share some experience about what the regulator is issue and the government thought the industry grow after the 95 and of the monopoly of telco the internet start booming as so far the connectivity infrastructures and also the content development is not the same time growing and this is the problem that regulatory body needed to thinking about in fact Cambodia try to get the sector reform joining globally to diverse operations from that time 2006 and later 2012 we have separate regulatory body and we try to solve that issue example what is the infrastructure development access my solution we have a different and separate offer and with the new technology sometimes the industry have to try compete very hard with each other because the new technology in fact 2006 Cambodia opened the market what the regulatory body thinking about this we talk about next generation services with ITU and the only one solutions that we need to open is open for the market and the license regimes have to concentrate on operation license and frequency license the operation license we have to open a new technology licensing regime and the frequency license we provide by some like first come first serve and we start exercise with this everybody join in the market open the operations system is there we have 2.5 2.5 3G now we have 4G as well started from last year April but we see that the growing of that spectrum needs never end of that and because the speed of the access is always not enough for us we have a big pipe in the world we Cambodia try to have something like IP connectivity through neighbor countries especially just last few months we issue the submarine cable license for 3 operators we do hope that we can join this quickly we have 4G and 5G meaning for the access for last mile because the content sometime we start right now we exercise since that the access from the mobile phone to the on the internet when we start access it's a 64 kilobyte per megabit per second or sometime up to 75 megabit per second but what does it mean 75 megabit access from the mobile to MSE behind the MSE is IP transit is not played a role for that what we can do so we have to regulate from the spectrum for the access as well as the content because if one of those not the same time growing then it's no meaning for 5G or 4G Cambodia we don't have the submarine cable so content access to the world leaking in fact 4G we have but very slow downloading so that is mean that it's not enough the answer to the whole high speed development for that last mile solution however the mobile penetrations in Cambodia we have now 24 million subscription of the mobile phone and the internet is only 6 million subscription the gap between this one is because the urban areas and the rural areas needs services and applications are different so much now government forced to do to help on how to create a last mile solution for rural areas that's why before Cambodia provide first come first serve before we came government already approve the telecom law and pass the bill to the parliament and we start also trying to do auction for 700 megahertz the digital dividends from there broadcasting will move to digital 2018 or 2020 latest and this is the way that we can take the whole 700 megahertz frequency band for auction try to do it and this is the government exercise sees that from the last internet growing until now and next what the government have to do the frequencies very scary of the government of the nation we try to find probably investment and operation not only in the urban but also in the rural example we join right now the connectivity of the Asian and the member state of the Asian country to focus on the digital switch over and also the submarine cable and this one is a content three major we have to develop together but lastly when we see the growing about mobile phone and the internet they try to compete with each other too much then we notice that the quality drop of the access because they compete and the investment okay secretary general Mr. who lives outside this morning price effective but not free what does it mean it means that we can provide where is the first of investment with the new technology example 4G but the rural we don't have it so that's why government try to have an auction policy we will start study how to do it with different stakeholders to be a team and looking for that and this one is one of the major talking about the industry sites we notice that with the growing of the new technology they are difficult to select such as 4G or 5G in the future on top of the current system what they have because the break even of the investment that is the first point second point is the access and the users third point is the contents where they get the contents to access there and that is the decision making of how they can invest for the new technology in terms of last mile solutions so this is what we have the different challenges we have to develop that one that's why we are very happy to hear our colleagues to have the different experience sharing together in fact Cambodian regulator and on behalf of the government we would like to learn a lot from this and join how to support industry and benefit for the users this is very important thank you so I have done a terrible job at managing our time we only have around 5 to 6 minutes why don't I invite a couple 1 or 2 questions we'll let our panel respond and then we'll have to wrap up so we can get out to have the coffee so I have the hand over here on the left and one of the very back let's go with those two and then we'll and also the back there so let's start right there I'm sorry I thought you were yeah we'll just go around so let's have three comments make them very quick if you could I want to do one brief comment I'm sorry my name is Heather Hudson from the University of Alaska Anchorage and I've been part of the forum for many times and I just wanted to say follow up very briefly on the Secretary General's remark about including ITU I think it's worth paying tribute since this is the 50th anniversary of the forum to some of his predecessors who really paved the way for being able to have a panel like this today starting with Richard Butler and then Pekka Tariani and Hamadun Ture they opened the door to including developing countries and rural development in the ITU I guess my question is briefly for Facebook coming back to Dr. Guana's comment about the futility of access without affordability if you provide access to dominate carriers that are covered by your planes or whatever how do we know that the service to the end user will be affordable great and then let's go to the far back there was a hand up yes there thanks okay thank you very much I think that it's very interesting and very high level discussion just to focus on something which is very important in Africa sorry just a little presentation my name is Modusal from Senegal my company is Sonatal the incumbent operator okay as I said the key point is content for Africa it's very important to know that it should be really difficult to have affordable access without having content development or international global content located in Africa just to give an example today we pay for internet transit I think it's something which is real we receive the report from my team yesterday we are around 48% of streaming video today regarding all the internet content we receive in Senegal in our telco perspective I think that it's something which is really important and in order to support internet growth we need to invest in the internet links which is very costly you have to invest in submarine cable you have the maintenance part you have also to pay for IP port to access in global internet and it's very very important in order to have affordable access to tackle this point the other fact also I talk about 48% of streaming video this content is not local content it's global content from Google Facebook and from other stream provider and the fact is that our customers they access content but international global content my question to Facebook is any plan to have content located as close as possible to our internet users in Africa or some part in Asia I think that is the main question and is there also any plan to push for local content development thank you very much thank you and one more here at the front yeah thank you thank you for your insights I'm Ricardo Nobren a founder of cross-border talents we are committed to train in the next five years half a million of software developers this is not wishful thinking this is a proposal to escalate our model already presented to the European Commission which has elected us as one of the ten best practices in labour mobility I need to connect this with the topic of nice to see the breakthrough into creating more connectivity my point is what is the point of creating connectivity to a person that currently does not have a job in five years 80 million people will see their skills completely obsolete in the market because they are not keeping up with the digital literacy that your companies are imposing in a better way so my question to Christopher is besides providing connectivity what are you doing to engage more people around the world to study mathematics and to become an added value for the market otherwise they will be completely obsolete and they will not use our services okay so Chris you're getting picked on here I'll let you respond and then if anyone else wants to add something then we'll probably have to close the panel okay great I'll try to do them in order and help me out if I don't remember these so I think the first question was about in essence what good is the connectivity that we can deliver these new approaches to connectivity if there's still an affordability barrier out there and I think it's a really good point that in a lot of places where people are not connected to the internet there are multiple barriers and so to get them connected it requires overcoming multiple barriers and so in the case of this service that I described this backhaul service to deliver connectivity through solar stratospheric planes the idea is not to make that available just to dominant carriers which is how I think you described them it's really to make it available to any service provider which could be a service provider like a mobile network operator that uses a licensed air interface to the end user but it could also be a wireless ISP that offers connectivity via wifi to the end user our goal is to make it available to all of them in a market and often times what we see is at least on the mobile network operator side it's not the dominant carrier that would take advantage of something like this and it's always sort of in some ways scrappier and looking for ways to differentiate and might be more of a price leader pressure on other players prices we'll have to see how it plays out but our goal is fundamentally to make that backhaul capacity available at as low a cost as possible to then make it possible for the end users to have cheaper capacity the second question I think was about trying to locate content closer to the users and you know I think if someone from our infrastructure team were here they would say we're trying to build out global infrastructure and locate data centers and as well as some of the I'll call them tentacles to those data centers that do get closer to users in places that allow us to deliver the best service we can from a performance standpoint as low a cost to the company as possible we offer free service we don't charge the end user to use facebook and so there's really a dynamic at play here where we want to deliver the best service as cheaply as possible and oftentimes it means that the content isn't real close to the end user but our infrastructure team is constantly looking at ways that we can optimize those two things of cost and performance jobs and skills to your head it's interesting we talk about these barriers including the affordability barrier and the question of you know make the internet available but they can't afford it what good is that it's a fair point I think what we're seeing is that to the extent that you can put a net device in someone's hands if you don't actually have a device connected and affordability side because oftentimes it's that very act of giving them connectivity that all of a sudden gives them income potential and we're seeing stories of like this around the world so a classic one we've seen in multiple countries now is that farmers who are selling their goods in markets that might be 100 kilometers away trying on middlemen to take those goods to the market and they're agreeing to a price without really knowing what the price is at the market and all of a sudden with connectivity they know exactly what their food is being sold for and they can negotiate a better deal with that middleman and bring more profits to their family so I think that's a real dynamic play and sure there needs to be something to jump start their ability to pay something but oftentimes that's a shared subscription or something like that or some form of free capacity in the beginning okay does anyone else on the panel want to add a comment to any of those three questions that okay so since time is out I'm going to ask our panel to end with the one one recommendation we give to ITU we don't have secretary general in the room we have other ITU colleagues in here so what is the one thing ITU should focus on from your perspective to help solve one or several of these puzzle pieces if I were to push one thing I would say ITU should try and encourage countries to link their power policies with connectivity policies and if you can actually use connectivity policies to drive power policies I think that would get a lot of countries further interested yeah I have to pick one obviously we're a bit disappointed in the digital dividend and how the progress we made there so I would see a further push there to unlock more suitable spectrum to target these areas great so I spend most of my time focused on spectrum and in traveling the world quite a bit over the last couple of years it seems that the FCC and OFCOM often times have an outsize influence on spectrum policy around the world and in some cases I think that's fine in other cases it might not be so good the fact that there are four nationwide LTE networks in the United States that cover more than 90% of people puts it in a very different situation when it comes to spectrum auctions and trying to raise money than it does in other countries the ITU is absolutely a huge influence on a lot of countries when it comes to spectrum policy and I think having a more sort of concrete point of view to offer on pro coverage spectrum policy I think would be very valuable excellent okay I can't avoid it I have two recommendations the one is very straightforward and it relates to Africa might be applicable to other regions as well if there was a way there is a way we need a commitment and agreement of all of the stakeholders to do a strong regionalization process in the sense that frequency allocations and licenses allocations will not be done but all over the region for example Sub-Saharan Africa or the whole of Africa so for operators like us it's doable operators like us instead of going country by country by country if we can offer it to the whole continent it will jump start Africa it will give it such a great advantage and I can imagine think of the American of the US market so I can imagine the other regions in the world where it could be very helpful as well and I go a little bit back to what my colleague here the regulator from Senegal was insinuating our experience is that it's not only about regulators giving letting more competition with regards to getting licenses and frequencies obviously this needs to be done but regulators can be much more active with regard to diminishing the prices of the international capacities we think that the high prices that are being paid in Africa for international capacities it's not only a result of a must because these things are expensive as such it's also a result of the fact that sometimes the incumbent operators get a great advantage they just block the whole market that people like us are forced to buy it from the dominant operators and it's monopoly quasi-monopoly that brings the competition down and the prices up which in turn goes to the customer to the end customer who pays much more expensive prices for internet connectivity than such customer would pay in Europe all right, Shakra as an actual client of ITU what's your request so we think about the frequency allocation as well as the harmonizing of those frequencies after we have LTE 700 MHz band what is the 3G frequency doing and this is we join activity with ITU as recommended all together and WRC 15 we're looking at that issue for the next what is the frequency plan for example below 600 MHz band have to be allocated for 2020 2023 or something this is one major that we need to engage together for the next session the second one is the broadband policy we need to develop that broadband how is the broadband roll out in the fix and the mobile the fix is we understanding that the last mile solution become a backhaul and the access the wireless access is Wi-Fi as our colleague mentioned before Wi-Fi is only solution for the last mile and the fix the backhaul we divide into part and that is we have to bring out within the broadband policy to develop that one help to industry to growing on that part the more access the more reliable quality performance the more users can benefit for all and economic growth so these two points want to do thanks thank you so on the World Economic Forum side we're committed to continuing the conversation and also move to some facilitation of action we hope in the coming months and years and look forward to working with many of you let me join me in a round of applause for our panelists thank you