 Welcome to the World Summit on the Information Society 2017. I am delighted to be joined by Robert Pepper, Head of Global Connectivity Policy and Planning at Facebook. Thank you very much for joining us. Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. So I'd like to start with a quote from your CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg. He said, connectivity is a human right. Why is connectivity so important? Well, what we know is that about 3 billion people on the planet are connected, but over 4 billion people are not. And we know that as the world becomes digitized and everything becomes digital, Facebook's mission is to make the world a more open and connected place. And there's been a lot of work done here at the ITU over many years. We know, and the World Bank, for example, we know that as people get connected, it improves their lives both in terms of social benefit as well as economic benefit. Oftentimes, you just talk about the economic benefits, which are extremely important. But we also know that there's enormous social benefit from being connected. It saves times, provides education, health care, brings families together, allows family and friends to communicate with each other over long distances. So it's just an enormous benefit that we take for granted. But if half the world is not connected, we can't take it for benefit. So what are the main barriers to having a fully connected world? So that's a really great question because we've looked at that because we are on a mission to provide connectivity for the unconnected, but also to improve connectivity for what we found to be the under-connected. When you look at it, most people on the planet today are connected by a wireless device. So it could be your mobile phone. It could be a tablet. It could be your laptop. And especially in the developing world, it's the wireless device, usually the mobile. But it could be something connected to Wi-Fi. So in order to connect people who are not connected, you're going to need more spectrum. So that's one of the things, and that's kind of obvious. But there's another piece of this which we are focusing on. I work with our engineering team. And we're very sort of strategic understanding gaps. So when we look at the parts of the world, 95% of the world has access to GSM phones, narrowband data. That's not really the internet. In order to be connected to the full internet, you need 3G or 4G, spectrum is part of that. But it also turns out backhaul is a problem. And so we're working on that. And we look at the world in a very systematic way to identify gaps. In low density areas, satellites are great. By the way, we have no technology religion. It's very technology neutral. So we'll work with satellite operators, where there's medium density in places like sub-Saharan Africa, where there's no infrastructure. There may be a mobile operator, but it's narrowband. You can upgrade the tower, the antennas, to advanced 4G. But if you don't have good backhaul, you can't use a smartphone. You can't do data. You can't be on the internet. So we're looking at developing technologies for those medium density areas. We have a project called Akila, which is using unmanned aerial vehicles. It'll fly at 20 kilometers up above all the weather. They will connect to a cable landing point, beam up by radio. And then these UAVs will connect by laser beams. And then when they're over a medium density group of villages or a community, beam down by radio again. So it's providing. And by the way, it's not to the end user. It's going to go to the community Wi-Fi point, go to the mobile operator's tower or the antennas. By the way, we're doing this. We have no intention to be the operator. We're inventing these technologies. I tease our engineers. Some of them are turning science fiction into reality and then make it available to others to use. We're working on another solution in high density areas, places where there's, for example, a large city in India or Brazil or any place where you have high density populations. There's mobile connection for 2G. How do you get the backhaul, the fiber type of connection to that community? It's not going to be fiber for a long time. So we're working with technology, super small cells using what's called the V-band, which the radio folks at the ITU understand. Working with them, they're great. And with new very high powered processors and smart radios, beam-forming antennas, using radio to create virtual fiber backhaul connections. Again, for each one, and make that available, by the way, to operators and third parties. So in each one of these, it's understanding what the gaps are in the existing infrastructure, architecture, and technology. And as a result, fill those gaps and make it easier for either the mobile operators, the community Wi-Fi operators to be able to get what they need to provide the connectivity. Many of the UISIS participants I've spoken to have stressed the fact that connectivity is not just about technology. It's almost a collaborative project, isn't it? What do you make of that? So we just did a really interesting study with the Economist Intelligence Unit. We looked at 75 countries across the world in what's really a beta test of time zero when we're now working on the next version, which will be 125 countries. And there were 46 indicators for every one of those countries. And what we found was that when you're looking at connecting and using the internet in a meaningful way, benefiting from the internet, we call that internet inclusion. And we found that there were really four components of that. The first was availability, the connectivity. But that was only the start. You also had to, we looked at one of the other major variables was affordability, has to be affordable. And then there was relevance and readiness. And so you look at it that way, it's not just about the infrastructure on the supply side. It's about the content, relevant content, local content and local language. It's how do people use this internet to benefit in a meaningful way? That's internet inclusion. So it's all of the above. The connectivity layer is only the enabler. It's the necessary but not sufficient. You need all of the applications on top of that. And that's where you get the benefit. Robert Pepper, head of Global Connectivity at Facebook. Thank you very much. Thank you.