 Ladies and gentlemen, ITU is pleased to announce a special lightning session by the EMEA Satellite Operators Association. The session will start in a few moments in this room. Please enjoy the presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, ITU is pleased to announce a special lightning session by the EMEA Satellite Operators Association. The session will start in a few moments in this room. Please enjoy the presentation. One, one, one, one. Dear ladies and gentlemen, this is the time to start the lightning session. We would like to invite you to remain seated and those who are having the discussions to postpone them to the end of this session. Dear ladies and gentlemen, this is one more time to call for the attention. Please take the seats and postpone your discussions in case you are in the middle of them to the end of this session. And now I would like to invite our distinguished representatives of the SOA to start with the presentation and with the session. Dear ladies and gentlemen, this is the last call and the request for postpone your discussions to the later stage. We are starting the session now. I'm handing over the floor to our distinguished representatives of the SOA. Thank you. Distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon, buenas tardes. My name is Natalia Vicente and I'm here with Ethan Luccarelli representing SOA, the EMEA Satellite Operators Association. First of all, we would like to thank the ITU for having us here today. It's a pleasure and a privilege, can anyone? Okay, we are back. So I was saying that it's a pleasure and a privilege to be here in the opening day of the World Telecommunication Development Conference 2017. For those who are maybe not familiar with SOA, SOA is the voice of 21 satellite operators that have a global footprint and whose core business is satellite communications. Satellite technology is an invisible infrastructure that provides services ranging from TV to fix a mobile broadband internet and cellular backhaul. Our objective today is to bring you a little bit closer to some examples on how satellite communications impacts different harsh realities around the world and how they contribute to achieving the SDGs. We all know that access to the digital world has a direct impact on socio-economic development and a quality of life. Satellites have certain qualities that make them key for this. They are ubiquitous. That means that they can give connectivity everywhere, on land, on sea and on the air. And how is this relevant? Today we live in a world in which we are talking about 5G and IoT and connected things, but we all rely on something that is very simple, that is our mobile phones. We all go around the world with our mobile phone, relying on it for everything in our lives. We take it for granted that connectivity is going to be there. But for so much of the world's population, access to connectivity is not a given, but it's definitely a life changer. Here's a video that shows you how. If you have a mobile phone, you probably can't imagine life without it. But phones do a lot more than take selfies. They actually make the economy grow. Give 10 people out of every 100 a mobile phone and national income rises. Fishermen make more money when they call ahead to see which markets need fish the most. But building a mobile network can be tough. With rugged terrain, the cost of connecting base stations that make your phone work can skyrocket. People in cities will always have mobile phones. But take away satellite and the 45 million people in rural Central America will not. And that phone is more than just a phone. It's a pathway to raising incomes and a better life for the next generation. If you have a mobile phone, satellite connectivity has a direct impact on many diverse areas through many different applications. But all of them improve the quality of life for citizens. In fact, because of the versatility, we can say that there's a role, a key role for satellite communications in achieving all 17 of the sustainable development goals. From enabling smart cities and driving the Internet of Things to e-health, e-learning, precision farming, monitoring sea level rise and environmental change, and helping manage power infrastructure and smart grids. Satellites drive solutions that make progress on important social goals. In order to be able to provide the best solution for each specific application, satellite operators readily collaborate both with each other, with other sectors, with terrestrial operators, with governments, and with the humanitarian community. We believe that this is the only way to succeed in achieving sustainable development goals because no one technology or no one model alone has all the answers. It's worth noting that last month the U.M. Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development recognized something substantially similar through its working group on technologies in space in the upper atmosphere, which was charged with evaluating the potential for systems like satellite and haps to connect the unconnected and help achieve the SDGs. Last September, that working group adopted its final report. Among the findings of that report were that there is extraordinary technological innovation underway in the satellite sector. Exemplified by the development of high throughput satellite systems and non-geostationary orbit satellite constellations that are bringing broadband to all corners of the earth. Additionally, the working group recognized that the ubiquity, reliability, and mobility of satellite services are enabling smart society applications in urban areas as well as rural and remote areas. And additionally, the working group recognized that satellite and haps systems can work hand in hand with other terrestrial networks in order to help achieve the SDGs and be a key component of the 5G ecosystem. Among the recommendations of the working group report were that policy makers shouldn't show that technologies like satellite have access to sufficient spectrum with appropriate protection to serve their purposes. Additionally, regulators should strive to promote growth in these technologies through policies like technology neutral universal service programs and streamlined licensing regimes. Finally, the working group recommended that all stakeholders cooperate to promote innovation and technology development through things like pilot programs and standards development efforts that are inclusive of all technologies. Now we have another short video that demonstrates what happens when satellite technologies are invited to the table to make a difference. What do you pay for broadband? Not much if you live in the rich world, but in developing nations it can cost up to a full month's wages. That is one big reason that only 40% of the world's people are online. As broadband becomes a bigger part of the global economy, developing nations are losing ground. They're missing out on the power of broadband to spread knowledge and to create opportunity. So how will broadband get to the billions of people who need it? Not over the ground. The best hope for getting the offline to go online is in the sky. In Peru and Brazil, the government is using satellite to bring the internet to tens of thousands of rural schools. In the rich world, most people get internet from wires, cables and optical fiber. But more than 500 million Africans live beyond the edge of the network. That's more people than live in the European Union. For years to come, they will look to the skies for help in claiming their fair share of the global economy. Your world's better with satellite. Brought to you by the Society of Satellite Professionals International. I would like to take a couple of minutes to focus on a few specific use cases, along with some compelling visuals that demonstrate some of the direct relevance of satellite communications to achieving sustainable development goals. One important example that's always on close to everyone's mind is eHealth. With the growing and aging population globally, the demand for medical services is increasing and putting a strain on existing healthcare frameworks. Satellites can help bring diagnosis and treatment to people who might otherwise not receive it. Many satellite operators have diverse eHealth and telemedicine applications. These range from managing cloud access, secure electronic record sharing, billing and compliance, remote monitoring, connected clinics, video conferencing, consultations, and more. SatMed is an example of a high-quality eHealth platform enabled by satellite that's open, easy to use, readily available, and accessible anywhere. It provides access and storage to patient eRecords, medical imaging, virtual consultation, eLearning, remote monitoring, eHealth management, all via satellite. SatMed has already been deployed 10 times in both Asia and Africa from areas including Bangladesh, the Philippines, Niger, and others. Another relevant example is a project by InMarsat, the company that I work for, which has deployed this project with SOS Children's Villages in Benin. This provides healthcare to children and their families in remote areas using portable satellite terminals. So since 2014, SOS Children's Villages has used a mobile satellite-enabled telehealth application to monitor, diagnose, and treat adults and children in two rural communities. The clinics gather medical information on tablets and send it in real-time via a secure satellite link to a server where urban doctors can monitor and evaluate the villager's health and make diagnoses and recommend treatments. Within just the first three months of this program, remote doctors identified instances of conditions like diabetes, hypoglycemia, hypertension, and other conditions in 850 men, women, and children. Additionally, more than 70 individuals were identified with serious conditions that required immediate treatment. This is a tension they would not have received otherwise for weeks or months, if at all, thanks to satellite communications. These are two specific examples of projects that are directly relevant to the healthcare sector, but of course, we know that health is affected by any number of other factors, including environmental circumstances, climate change, water quality, soil fertility. And satellite applications are working in all of these areas as well to try to improve the world. For example, satellite applications are tracking swarms of locusts that can devastate crops and cause famine or spread malaria and other diseases, and they're doing that work for the World Health Organization. Another example that we would like to focus a little bit about is related to education. Education is one of the fundamental ways in which we can try to ensure equal opportunities and we can try to fight the gender inequalities. It's just by providing the tools to avoid illiteracy that we can manage to get there. I know Ledge and I'm Lango are two projects in Tanzania and Kenya that are developed using satellite communication, and they give high-speed connectivity to rural and remote schools and provide online training. In Kenya, for example, over one million children do not regularly attend school. Girls, for instance, are often marginalized by societal issues, including poverty and distance, which prevent them from getting an education. These results in 20% fewer African women completing their education. These two projects have had an enormous impact on hundreds of thousands of students, and especially on girls. In Lango, for example, has a collaboration with an Irish-European university in which, through Skype calls, girls are encouraged to take part on science competitions. So what they do is actually in real-time conversations with the peers in Europe, they do some experiments on science. I think that's an amazing tool just to bring people closer. There are also many other examples here in Latin America. We have heard some of those also from the Argentinian minister. In Panama, for example, the Ministry of Education works very closely with satellite operators to provide connectivity in rural areas that allow e-learning. Usually, besides giving connectivity to schools, they also allow and they also are used to give connectivity to local communities. This is a benefit for everyone. But not only do these services help in the context of education, but in addition they open the door for the creation of new jobs. Local technicians receive training on installation, working and maintenance of satellite links and equipment. Just for the photo, and because it's another example in Africa, in which African women are trained to become satellite installers, and they are trained also to become marketeers and run their own businesses. Here they are showing their certificates, and who knows, maybe the day of tomorrow they will run their own company and they will be satellite installers. But it's easy to think that SDGs is only relevant to emerging economies. And this is absolutely not true. Even in European countries, many communities are left out and are left behind. This is a picture of a Greece, of an island that's called Gapdos, in which there's only 50 people living there and there's only one school. Thanks to satellite, these children, their teachers and their families can benefit from the modern digital world without the need to leave their houses. These are just a few of the many applications that can be directed towards sustainable development goals that are driven by satellite. But all of this is only possible because of some of the key unique characteristics of satellite communications. So two of the characteristics that we talk about a lot that are distinguishing satellite from other technologies are their ubiquity and their ease of deployment. Satellite operators can deploy immediate solutions in difficult circumstances as you can see anywhere in the world. With terminals designed for operation in harsh environments, it just takes the time needed to get there, put up the equipment, and then you have service, regardless of the existence of any other local infrastructure. Two other important characteristics are the resiliency and reliability of satellite communications. In the recent weeks and months, we've been offered powerful reminders in this Americas region as well as elsewhere of the awesome destructive potential of natural disasters, tragic reminders. And when terrestrial systems go down after these disasters, sometimes they're down for days, sometimes they're down for weeks or longer. During those times, people are essentially blind. They're without connectivity. They can't communicate home to let people know that they're okay. They can't reach out to others to seek help. However, satellite services provide instant, reliable connectivity with mobile and portable satellite units, and those are used that are vital for first responders, relief workers, and affected populations during these times when communications are really essential to life, really critical. Natalia already mentioned how satellite projects can help drive economic growth and create jobs. By enabling local infrastructure projects in areas that otherwise might not be connected, satellites create jobs and give local skills that they'll continue to use locally over the long term. Additionally, bringing this connectivity to communities that would not otherwise have it can support education and training platforms, helping to create the next generation of digital citizens who can use these platforms to have an even greater economic impact and really help change the world for themselves and their communities. Finally, satellite communications also often offer a complete end-to-end connectivity solution, overcoming barriers of distance, security, and power. Here you can see how satellite connectivity can make possible a self-contained mobile broadband base station without the need to be connected to the power grid or any wired backbone. This enables users to connect to the global network using low-cost mobile devices. Effectively, an installation like this can turn any mobile phone into a satellite phone and help bring that connectivity, 2G, 3G, 4G connectivity, and soon 5G, to any community using satellite and other renewable resources like the Sun to power it. As you have seen, many governments do know about the strengths of satellite, their reach and resilience, and they are making sure their citizens' lives are improved by using it. We encourage everyone in the room to do the same. There is enough satellite for everyone and no reason for anyone to be unconnected in the planet. The SDGs set a clear vision for the future, a world of equal opportunities, a world that is taken care of and a world of inclusion and partnerships. No single solution holds the key. We will need to work on a level playing field, ensure access to satellite spectrum, but most of all, we need collaboration. All stakeholders have a role to play and no person, country, or technology should be left out. When we started today, we said satellites were that invisible infrastructure. After this presentation, we hope that you can see and feel the difference they are making. On behalf of all the SOA members, we thank you for your attention, and we invite you to take our brochures outside that shows the cases in more detail, and I think we have a few minutes if you want to ask any questions. Thank you very much. Thank you. If there's no questions, you can all enjoy your lunch. Thank you. I think there's a question in the back. Please. Thank you very much for your nice presentation. I have two issues. One is availability of this year's presentation to the delegates or participants, inclusive of the video coverage. Is that available? Two is the issue of standard component in 5G. Typical experience in the ITUT meetings, I don't want to talk much about the WRC preparations because you should be there, but I want to talk about the ITUT. Recent deliberations in ITUT, particularly study group 13, is trying to divorce satellite issues from the implementation of 5G. What role is the satellite organization contributing in this activity of ITUT, particularly study group 13 because there's a group already established by ITUT. Thank you very much. I don't know if the first question was asking about the availability of our presentation. Is that what the first question was? If that's the case, I'll let Natalia speak to that. Regarding the satellite role of 5G, I'll tell you that we believe strongly that satellite is going to be essential to realizing the 5G ecosystem. It's going to be involved in not just powering 5G base stations, but also working hand-in-hand with terrestrial networks, supporting new types of applications, internet of things, connected vehicle, really enabling that ecosystem. With respect to the work being done in ITUT study group 13, and we're at the development conference, so let's not spend too much time on ITUT issues. I can tell you the satellite industry has been involved in there, too. It's been the focus group on IMT 2020. Some of the work being done there recognized specifically in the context of network virtualization, the need for the IMT 2020 standards to be developed in a way that can accommodate different networks, including satellite as well as terrestrial and others. The satellite industry is also engaging in ITUR, and really in all the venues where these discussions are happening, it's important to recognize that in order to realize the 5G vision of the future, the ubiquity and the reliability that we all hope for, and that it's going to be necessary in order to enjoy the applications that we've been promised, there's no way to do that without using a diverse, heterogeneous network approach that's going to include satellite communications. So we're really excited about that and excited to keep having those conversations. Thank you for the question. Is it okay? Good. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. We know that one of the biggest problems in satellite communication is the latency. So that's why probably the geo is out of question. So what kind of satellites you are talking about, Leo or me or something like that, number one, and number two is how much cost effective this is compared to the regular communication, regular mobile, you know, BTS based or three node B based communications. Thank you for that question. We do hear about latency a lot that's often brought up in these conversations and it's true that with geostationary orbit satellites latency is an effective nature. You know, one point I would make is that when you look at the applications that we're talking about for 5G, when you're looking at really what people use broadband for, I would assert that latency is not as significant as some might make it out to see. Aside from some of these fringe use cases like remote surgery, when you're talking about delivering content, when you're talking about high speed connectivity, video, two way communications, really the latency that we see doesn't break those communications on satellites. However, for latency sensitive applications you're absolutely right to bring up some of the innovation that's happening in different types of satellite constellations. You know, we've got some of the non-geostationary operators represented at this conference. I know that SES-03B and OneWeb are both here and they'd be thrilled to talk to you about some of the low latency services and high availability, high capacity services they're going to deliver. So really the interesting thing to keep in mind about satellites is that there isn't just one solution. It's a diverse sector that has high reliability mobile applications, high throughput applications and services, low latency services. Those are really, you know, we can span the water on that. Regarding cost, this of course has always been a challenge and an individual satellite phone, although I would argue the recent announcement of $1,000 iPhones starts to put satellite phone prices into a different context, but that's not my argument to make. But the thing to remember about cost, when you think about putting down a terrestrial system, particularly if you're connecting someplace that's unconnected, it's not simply the cost of one base station. You have to lay fiber. You also need security. You need everything that goes into promoting and delivering that ecosystem. When we launch a satellite constellation, when we want to launch a single satellite, we're providing capacity for a large region. And that capacity can be used in many different places, and those costs can be spread out amongst many different places. Additionally, we're seeing a huge increase in capacity in the global satellite system. Many new operators are putting up, have already put up new high throughput satellites, and there's several more in the work soon. All this capacity is going to be driving down prices. These satellites are getting cheaper to put up. We're putting less fuel on them using these devices. As I'm sure you're aware, we're getting farther and farther along with reusable launch vehicles. All of these issues are driving down the cost and making it really a competitive market. What's important to remember is that particularly from a perspective of public private partnerships or doing development programs with governments, sometimes you really just need to have that initial connectivity put down, and then people can bring their own device and connect with it. We're not talking about putting my company in Marsat's phones into everybody's hand. It's more once you have the connectivity there, people can bring their own devices, low cost commercial devices, and connect that way. The latency issue is something that perhaps more is made of than is important for those low latency applications. Those services certainly exist. I think the cost argument is getting stronger and stronger every day. Yes. I had the experience to use a big service of the Marsat in the remote island in the Pacific. At that time, the bill after the two weeks staying in the remote island, it was so expensive, 2,000 US dollars. So it is very important for those areas, the rural and remote areas, satellite is a very important means for the connectivity. And I would like to ask that everybody says in the island countries that satellite capacity is very expensive. So affordability is my question is about affordability. So it is very important for those areas to have the satellite connectivity. But to solve the affordability problem, do you have some arrangements for subsidizing or special tariff arrangements for those rural and remote areas, or this developing countries and island countries? My question, yes. Thank you. Yes. So again, affordability has always been a challenge and getting these solutions into the hands of the people who need them at a cost at a price that they can attain. As I stated just previously, we think that the affordability argument is getting better all the time. We think that the services are getting more affordable, costs are going down. But also I can only speak for one company really but I know that all the companies are very open to working closely with partners, through public-private partnerships, working with governments to come up with programs and ways to get these technologies deployed. You know, the cost is always going to be a consideration, but I think what's important is recognizing identifying opportunities to have an impact when really there's no other solution that's going to operate in that way. But again, we work very closely and in the Pacific Island areas in particular and elsewhere, these services are really quite essential. But yes, I know the affordability challenge is something that we work closely on. We think the argument is getting better. We think the costs are going down and we're always happy to work on programs to try to deliver solutions. And I think that's one of the things that we're working on, what my colleague has said. I think everything is an evolution. Everything is about innovation. Everything is about also the investment of all the companies and operators to make the costs lower, to collaborate. And that's an important and huge point that we are making here today, that without the collaboration with the terrestrial operators, with the governments, with other sectors, this cannot be a solution without the collaboration in between the sectors and between the government and the private sector. I don't see any more hands. So I invite you all to get our brochure outside. I think the presentation may be available. I will check that later. They say me yes. So yes, it will be available later. And if you want to continue talking, we can continue talking with some lunch. I hope you have enjoyed it and I wish you all the best for the rest of the conference. Just on behalf of the BDT, we would like to thank you very much for holding this session and thank you very much to the delegates for joining this session. I'm calling just for the round of applause for our distinguished speakers and for their contribution to the development projects through their sponsorship. So thank you very much and we see at the plenary session just at the end. Thank you very much.