 Welcome to ThinkTech on Spectrum OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things in matter-to-tech and Hawaii. I'm Jay Fidel. And I'm Elise Anderson. In our show this time, we'll cover the Pacific Telecommunications Council, PTC, an annual Asia-Pacific conference for global telecom. Thousands of people come to Hawaii every January for the conference. This year, it was called PTC-19, from pipes to platforms. PTC is a global nonprofit membership organization promoting the advancement of information and communication technologies, ICT, remember that term, ICT, in Asia-Pacific, the most dynamic region in the world today. PTC is at the nexus of two of the most important trends, the rise of the network digital society and the exponential growth in Asia-Pacific. PTC attracts more than 45 countries, 300 companies, 3,500 representatives, and 7,600 participants. Organized in 1978, PTC had its first conference in Honolulu in 1979. It was incorporated as a Hawaiian nonprofit in 1980 and over the years has become a center for ICT in Asia-Pacific. Through PTC's annual conferences, committees, and events, PTC brings telecom leaders together to share insights on industry trends, strategies, policy, regulation, and best practices, as well as cutting-edge ICT products and services. PTC-19 celebrated PTC's 41st anniversary this year. Thousands of members and attendees showed up to share and explore the seed changes in global telecom. PTC customarily meets at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, and this year was no exception. As a membership organization, PTC attracts and connects global leaders in telecom and information technology industries who drive the development of ICT in Asia-Pacific. As a nonprofit organization, PTC is dedicated to educating professionals in the region. It stimulates conversations and collaborations that set the stage for the growth of ICT throughout Asia-Pacific. PTC's vision is a better world, where people in business organizations are better connected and can enjoy a better quality of life through the innovative use of ICT. PTC's outreach initiatives include its academy, its broadband report, its projects initiative, its young scholars initiative, and its annual PTC conference here in Honolulu. The conference is unique and is Asia-Pacific's premier telecom event, a springboard for the telecom industry, and a platform to discovering what ICT will bring in the new year to follow. The conference took place over four days, every day more chock-a-block than the last, and that doesn't include all the meals, networking, and social events, the charity walk, and the Innovation Awards gala, honoring individuals and companies who have made the most notable contributions to move ICT forward. We attended, of course. We walked the halls as we always do. We stopped and spoke to the members, speakers, and visitors who were there, and we toured the exciting exhibits and technologies on display. Many international companies and ICT professionals who came from around the world. We asked them what they hoped to gain at the conference. Some were old friends who look each other up every year. Others came for the first time to see what PTC-19 offered. Yes, I'm Jill Gooding. I'm working for Glory Tech, which is a startup company based in Paris, and we are distributing new technology, which is called LIFI, and from LIFI we have different products. This one bag just in my bag is called LIFI Max that provides fast internet, 100 megabits per second download, and 40 megabits upload, and it's totally secure and radio waves free. That means there's no radiation. We don't use any radio frequency, any microwave. The LED by itself, it blinks naturally several million times per second, and we just use this natural blinking of the light to be like two status, turn on, turn off, turn on, turn off. This is the basic for IT, so this equivalent of zero and one. And then by saying that, the principle is there, and then we have to manufacture a device that could read those blinking and transform those blinking in something like computers can read. LIFI is more like something secure, good for you. There's no radiation, no microwave. We don't use any radio frequencies, just the light. The light we know doesn't go through your body. It's secure because you need to be under the beam of light to get access to the network. People say, yeah, but I want Wi-Fi because it's more like I can get the signal outside. They say, yeah, that's the problem. If you get the signal outside, you don't know who's coming inside your network. Anyone can come and hack your system. This one with LIFI, you need to be under the beam of light. So you will see technically, you will see that person coming next to you and then trying to suck all your data. Any LEDs technically can be transformed into something intelligent. That's why the project is for the smart cities of tomorrow. We can use any street lights, any LEDs to make them communicate. And today, a lot of us are using smartphones. Tomorrow, Samsung, Apple will integrate the LIFI technology that they have already. Wi-Fi is already integrated. You don't need dongles, you don't need anything, any more devices integrated. Tomorrow, I think they will integrate the LIFI technology inside the phone. So you just see your phone, your camera put under the light and then you have the connection and you can receive messages. Yeah, just to show you, this is a LIFI Max, which could be considered as a hard spot that, you know, delivers internet access. You just put this device on top of the ceiling and it covers under the beam 100 megabits download internal speed, forward upload, and then you can connect 16 different users, like meeting rooms, no more cable. Just one cable, this one cable. In the ceiling, you don't see it. So it's Ethernet cable, PoE power over Ethernet. And on the table, nothing that your laptop, only your laptop and the small dangle like this that will connect your laptop. And then you have your connectivity, no need app, just plug and play. We can deliver a message with the LED. I'm going to show you how easy it is. So I'm going to tell this light, I want to deliver a specific message that I will decide the thing to deliver. I'm going to take a picture. I'm going to take a picture of you or maybe the cameraman. Okay, just the cameraman. Okay, I got it. I'm going to program this lamp, this one, to show you picture on my phone. Okay, just right here, I said, read the lamp. I said, ready? Now, I can have this app, okay, this page. And then what I'm going to put right under is going to pop up your picture. You want me to do it again? Okay, see the app right there? Okay, I'm going to slightly put it under the lamp and it pops up your picture. Cool. You plug on DC power and that's it. And here it's like it delivers one signal, which is a QR code, light QR code. We all know what is a QR code. Okay, you flash the QR code and then give you access to information on the cloud. This one is the same. It's a light. So it uses your front side camera. When you put under, it will deliver the message that you have decided. This one will deliver to you. Could be anything, a grocery store. You go to the grocery store, there's lights everywhere. Okay? How about I go, I see the letters, Coca Cola. Oh, send me a message. Oh, if you buy two, I gave you two for free. Only those who was able to read the light can get the promotion. The seniority, expertise and success of the speakers and attendees was evident. So many national and global companies you've heard about and so many others you will surely hear about in the future. There were meetings, keynotes, discussions and breakouts of every kind and nature on every subject of interest to the telecom industry. The conference also served as before as a platform for industry members to negotiate global telecom deals, big global telecom deals right here in Hawaii. This notion of insatiable demand is insatiable demand by global basis and indeed insatiable demand here in the Asian Pacific region. So by 2022 and all of this data comes from Cisco by 2022, 172 exabytes per month. That's a billion gigabytes is an exabytes or 172 billion gigabytes per month here in the Asian Pacific region. It's sort of mind boggling 13 billion connected devices by 2022 as well. So this kind of enormous scaling of networks, enormous scaling of capability, enormous scaling of information and data and how do we as a satellite operate to be relevant in that world and in that environment and it's something that kind of keeps us up at night in terms of how do we integrate and so this is the reason though that we can be fantastically relevant here and in other parts of the world which is despite all of that capability, despite all of that network, despite the terrestrial bill bank, despite the submarine cables that are coming into the region here, there's still almost half the world's population are not connected to the internet, don't have the same access to the world's marketplace, the world's university and school in terms of education networks, the world's social networks. The difference between being connected and not being connected today more than ever is the difference between having opportunity and not having opportunity and if we look here despite the fact that these numbers in percentage terms are growing and improving which is super positive the Asian Pacific region is the region that's the second worst connected on the planet after Africa and so there's much much to do and until seven million people on the planet are connected I think we will collectively feel like our work is not done and so what have we been doing up till now we've been working very very hard with the communities here in the Asian Pacific region in particularly the Pacific islands which are among the most difficult to connect French colonies year 118 I think it is different islands obviously some more populated than others but there what we need is a network of scale and a network of reach and so when we drop fiber or satellite connectivity into single locations you advance the population in that particular town or city but you leave behind a significant number of the population to either live remote from the capital city or and in particular when you're talking about islands which are then further afield so we've been working with OPT since 2007 and we've just engaged in another stage of that relationship where we'll be delivering even more bandwidth and capability onto the islands but also services that we will bundle and I'll talk a little bit about what that means from a satellite perspective our telecom in the Solomons uh Solomons for one of our first 03B customers uh and as as Tim mentioned I was the CEO of 03B 03B is now fully integrated within our broader portfolio of offerings at SES uh and our telecom on the Solomons was was one customer who they they were really suffering at the from the lack of high quality connectivity uh into Honiera uh we're now delivering more than a gigabit of connectivity uh into the Solomons and it's not just a pipe anymore this is services that surround it this is an education network that together with our telecom we've developed in terms of supporting it financing it uh and making a huge huge difference to the population you can see that the growth rate of the population in Africa is substantial they will be by let's say the IMF projecting that by um 2025 one of the largest continents will play the population will come from Africa right there's a growth rate that's exponential and it's going to surpass China and India and it's going to have the youngest population globally right so typically between 18 and 24 years that is where the largest growth rate is going to come from when you have such a young population and the tremendous expansion of urbanization these youngsters here they want to spend money right so that's where that that trillion spike of spend is going to come from it's from this youngest population that's urbanizing in Africa so you have as we move through this you also see the fertility rate is coming up compared to a very slow and aging rest of the world population we saw the the size of Africa we saw where there is potential in the growth of Africa we know why now we know that's because of the young population urbanization that the youngsters would like to spend money right and this is also very attractive for foreign direct investment if you look over the past two years from 2018 and 2017 the US remains the largest foreign direct investor in in Africa by far. Nevertheless, projection coming up for 2018 was 3.4% growth FDI so slowly slowly the continent of Africa is making a comeback to a positive growth rate. The size of Africa remains very very challenging you don't have infrastructures that when we have in North America or in Europe so large population is still unconnected and set like we said remains dominant and productive technology for connectivity however recently there are about 400 million internet users which is the second largest population of internet users globally which is which is massive right and you see the mobile penetration this is growing at an exponential exponential rate. When PTC was founded 41 years ago satellites throughout Asia Pacific were basis for connectivity since then developments in cable have resulted in a shift of data traffic to cable and cable is now critical infrastructure pivotal in the transformation of a global data economy that relies on the internet. Now we live in a time of disruption where innovative technology digitization and the laws of accelerating growth are continually redefining every industry especially telecom AI cyber security the internet of things 5G and the cloud are the keys actually to our future. These discussions were timely in the global context right here in Hawaii PTC 19 showed yet again the magnet that Hawaii can be for telecom and business leaders from around the world they come to talk they come to listen and they come to do business. PTC 19 didn't miss very much the multiple sessions went on every day in mind-boggling depth and detail it was world-class and entrepreneurs delight and an engineer's dream in the technology to connect the mobile devices that make our world go around the enthusiasm was palpable and ubiquitous but we should always remember that at its core PTC is a Hawaii centric phenomenon it was founded here and it has had its conference and headquarters here for all these years PTC belongs to Hawaii and makes Hawaii a global gathering place for telecom this helps us in so many ways it's obvious how valuable PTC is for our hospitality industry for local business and for Hawaii's struggling reputation as a place to do international business for a better future Hawaii needs more high-tech conferences like PTC it is clearly in Hawaii's interest to support PTC and global conferences just like this yes we want to be a hub in Asia-Pacific we want to be a tech telecom and business destination for all the world to see and PTC can show us how check it out at ptc.org and now let's take a look at our think tech calendar of events going forward there's so much happening in Hawaii sometimes things happen under the radar and we don't hear much about them but think tech will take you there remember you can watch think tech on spectrum oc 16 several times every week to stay current on what's happening in government industry academia and communities around the islands and the world think tech broadcasts daily talk shows live on the internet from 10 a.m to 5 p.m on weekdays then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends if you missed a show or if you want to replay or share our shows they're all archived on demand on thinktech hawaii.com and youtube the audio is on thinktech hawaii.com slash audio and we post podcasts of all our shows on iTunes visit thinktech hawaii.com for our weekly calendar and live stream and youtube links or sign up on our email list and get the daily docket of our upcoming shows think tech has a high tech green screen studio at pioneer plaza if you want to join our live audience so participate in our shows write the shows at thinktechawaii.com give us a thumbs up on youtube or send us a tweet at thinktech hi we'd like to know how you feel about the issues and events that affect our lives together in these islands and in this country we want to stay in touch with you and we'd like you to stay in touch with us let's think together you can call into our talk shows live while you're watching any of our shows you can call into 808-374-2014 and pose a question make a comment or participate in the discussion we'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of think tech but first we want to thank our underwriters okay alise that wraps up this week's edition of think tech remember you can watch think tech on spectrum oc16 several times every week can't get enough of it just like alise does for additional times check out oc16.tv for lots more think tech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on think tech visit thinktech hawaii.com be a guest or a host a producer or an intern and help us reach and have an impact on hawaii thanks so much for being part of our think tech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech energy diversification and global awareness in hawaii you can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important think tech episode i'm jay fidel and i'm alise anderson aloha everyone