 Pleased to be here today with Professor Thomas Vigant, who's one of the co-authors of ITU's world-winning H.264 video codec and its successor H.265. Welcome to ITU TV, Thomas. Thank you. I understand that you're working on a new project, the tactile internet, which sounds like an internet that you could touch. Could you explain to us a little bit more about what it is? The tactile internet connects things that move, like cars, robots, humans, it even has an application in smart grids. And what are the key challenges that you're facing in the development of this technology? The current wireless and mobile infrastructure adds too much delay to all sorts of communication in order to connect things that move. The latencies that we see are around 100, 200 milliseconds, and that's too much in order to connect cars, for example, in a reliable way. So how do you go about reducing that latency? The goal for the tactile internet is to have communication with a latency of about 10 milliseconds. So we will have to basically touch all components of the network and redo them and optimize them for low delay, but also for security, so that all the communication that is relevant in order to control moving things arrives safely. So that would include, for example, the communication between chipsets themselves? Yes. We would need to make sure that we reach a high degree of security unseen before. So what are the next steps? There's some research required. We need to basically move away from the old Shannon paradigm that you make use of interleaving and channel coding the way we have. We need to consider new technologies. And that is, of course, also subject to research and technology development. Broadly speaking, you mentioned some application areas, but I wondered if you could outline more specifically what types of applications you foresee. The tactile internet touches many areas of our life. For instance, network cars, we can increase safety on the street very much. Or we would allow cars to drive in a convoy with like one meter distance between each other. Another area is network augmented reality. So anything that involves multiple sensors and things are changing, we can connect them and allow these to be used. Or we can connect robots wirelessly in a factory. For example, they would lift the way together and be coordinated by this type of communication technology. Tactile internet has been described as a key driver for 5G. So I'm wondering if you could explain to us how that works and whether that implies a time frame of 2020. We are looking roughly at that time frame 2020 for the tactile internet. Up to 4G, we have been increasing the throughput that we get to the user in order to transmit just information that humans typically consume. We're now getting into a time where we need to connect moving things, cars, machines, robots. That is something that the tactile internet and 5G will achieve. I understand. And lastly, this is ITU-TV. So I was wondering what role you could foresee for ITU in the development of the tactile internet. At some point when the research is done and the technology is developed, we need standards in order to allow the economy of scale so that these communication components that we will use in the tactile internet are affordable to make this vision a reality. Excellent. Well, it really sounds like something that's going to be worth watching over the next few years. So thank you very much for coming in today and describing to us this fascinating new technology. You're welcome. Thank you.