 Thank you very much for inviting me to share in this important event on the Qatar National Broadband Plan. We're here to discuss the choices Qatar should make as to its broadband ecosystem, and I thought I'd begin by noting how different this is from other policy debates, at least in the United States, where whatever the topic, both sides often express very passionately hypothetical and apocalyptic visions about what would happen if we walk a path different from the path they advocate. Such debates remind me of the comedic advice once offered at new college graduates. Mankind is facing a crossroad. One road leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other path leads to total extinction. I hope you will have the wisdom to choose wisely. But that's not the choice that we have when it comes to broadband, because by its nature, broadband should provide us all with a high level of optimism. As with every technological change, there are challenges, but broadband offers us an avenue to share in the most important resource on the planet. One that, as noted at the beginning of the Qatar plan, is our future because unlike natural resources, it cannot be exhausted, and that resource is knowledge. Which, however, is only valuable to the extent that it is exchanged effectively, otherwise it has precisely the same value as the oil that's fueled your growth that has the same value that that oil had 12 decades ago. And we're really here to celebrate the opportunity that the technology revolutions of the last two decades in computing, storage, and broadband have created in creating a platform for exchanging information in ways that can positively affect every part of the economy and everything that we do. Broadband is also different from a lot of other policy debates in that we don't have to debate a hypothetical end game. In fact, we know the end game. It is ubiquitous, constant internet access with abundant bandwidth, connecting all manner of devices, with the final connection being over some manner of spectrum, but with the traffic traveling most of the journey over a wired network. As we progress toward that end game, we will do all kinds of things over broadband that we currently do but in far less efficient ways. So the debate is not about the end game, it's about how to get there. So what I'd like to do today is talk about national broadband plans and how they map out a path for countries to reach that end game. How some plans do it more successfully than others. I also want to discuss one big question affecting how we reach that end game and then conclude with a few comments for Qatar as it moves forward in establishing its long-term goal as a leader in that critical, sustainable resource of information. So let's first look at national broadband plans. All national broadband plans rely on the same four foundation stones to build a thriving broadband ecosystem. Use spectrum more efficiently, drive fiber deeper into the networks, get everyone on the network in one or more places, and use the platform to deliver public goods more effectively. One could do a full speech on each one of these, but let's just summarize some of the lessons learned from a variety of plans. As to spectrum, each country has four basic challenges, balancing allocating a spectrum for both licensed and unlicensed uses, reallocating spectrum as uses in technology change, developing policies that accommodate the difference between urban areas that are potentially fiber-rich and spectrum poor, and rural areas which are the opposite, and harmonizing its spectrum plan with international plans to take advantage of global economies of scale and equipment. Spectrum is not more important than the other three foundation stones. It is, however, the most important to get right because it is harder to course correct. If initial efforts fail to drive fiber deeper, get everyone on, or use the platform well, you can adjust rapidly. But if you fail to allocate spectrum in ways that do not work well, the fact that you'll have embedded owners and users of that spectrum will make it more difficult to shift. As to fiber, the table stakes are to have a rational policy for sharing access to rights of way and other infrastructure that incents basic deployment. Longer term, the challenge is to find a way to incent deployment of networks that are not just responding to today's needs, but to anticipate tomorrow's that are future-proof and eliminate bandwidth as a constraint to innovation. The Qatar plan articulates the spectrum and fiber goals different than I have done. The plan suggests goals of two providers everywhere, household minimum speeds, and institutional minimum speeds. Now, I'm not saying those goals are wrong, but I'm pointing out that whether you achieve those three goals has very little to do with the goals themselves, and everything to do with how you allocate spectrum and create incentives to deploy fiber. As you correctly acknowledged, for example, competition is currently limited by the complex and time-consuming way government provides access to rights of way to existing infrastructure. The current incentive structure favors working with vertical integrated operators instead of wholesale providers that can bring new competitive dynamics to the market. Now, the plan addresses the issue I am most concerned about in Chapter 5, which focuses on efficient management resources. If you manage those resources well and encourage competition, you will drive deployment of faster, better, cheaper broadband and likely meet your goal. As to getting everybody on the network, this is actually quite complex involving not just price, though that remains an issue for many, but the interactions of price, relevancy, and social virology. Governments address this best by focusing on increasing the value of broadband by creating incentives to use the platform for those groups that are under adopters, and your plan wisely calls for that in policy action 3.3. And I might also note that your high literacy rate places you in a very good position for accomplishing this goal as literacy around the world is one of the biggest barriers to adoption. And as to using the platform to deliver public goods more effectively, the challenge is twofold. First, transitioning government activities that by their nature must serve all from the analog paper platform to a digital platform without leaving people behind. And second, rethinking how government actually delivered the services. And indeed, as you just heard from Dr. Aljabbar, the e-government is a very important initiative of this government and really all governments who do national broadband plans. Now, I admire your plans candor in acknowledging that the government's current Hukumi services are still not used by a majority of the population. And as the plan says, the current reliance on paper for all sorts of administrative procedures by companies and individuals is inefficient, places an unnecessary strain on an already loaded public sector, and has a negative impact on the quality of life of citizens and residents. Clearly, you understand the challenge that government has to move away from the age of paper and rethink how it delivers what its people need. And this reminds me of what the great business sage Peter Drucker described when he wrote, the danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it is to react with yesterday's logic. And the biggest challenge for your e-government initiative and in delivering public goods over broadband is that time and time again, governments react to the opportunity with yesterday's logic. But while there is much that is common among all national broadband plans, they differ according to national characteristics. Countries start in different places, they have different levels of computer literacy, different market, regulatory, and legal structures. Each country starts with different competitive advantages and disadvantages in terms of how it can utilize broadband to create economic and social progress and lead in the 21st century information economy. Most analysts would focus on those differences, but my experience would suggest another difference is most critical. And that is the difference in the government institutions that are responsible for implementing the plan. The most important point I have to offer you today is this. The execution of the plan is more important than the plan. Good execution can correct for any errors in the plan. A great plan with lousy execution will ultimately fail. A plan like all public policy efforts boils down to three elements, aspiration, the strategy to achieve that aspiration, and the tactics which your plan refers to as action areas to execute. I might also know, I love the opening presentation. You all had much better graphics than we had in the national broadband plan and I probably should add a fourth element, which is really good graphics to that chart. But my real point is this, aspiration is easy, execution is hard. But sadly, and this is true around the world, most national broadband plans focus on the aspiration element. And I understand why these are political documents and most of the press coverage of the plan focuses on how the government frames the aspirations. And I might just confess here that we had a problem in the United States with policymakers who thought the only point of the plan was to articulate aspirations rather than figure out a path to achieve them. And so in our chapter two, which set out our aspirations, we added a reference at the very end to a scene from Shakespeare, in which one of the characters says, I can call the ghost from the vasty deep. And another responds, why so can I or any man? But if you call them, will they come? The point was a subtle hint that the policymakers should focus not on calling the ghost, but on getting the ghost to come. Alas, I think it was too subtle and as a result, the execution of the plan in the United States gets mixed marks. Because in the long run, the key variable is execution. The United States Army has a saying, amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. With broadband plans, amateurs talk strategy, rank amateurs, which are a lesser breed of amateurs talk aspirations, and professionals talk execution. And the countries that have done well like Korea have demonstrated a long term commitment to building a broadband based economy. They're constantly studying, reconsidering, course correcting and moving toward that goal. The single most important sentence in the US broadband plan was the opening sentence of the final chapter on implementation. This plan is in beta and always will be. So while there is much to admire in the Qatar plan, I hope you regard your plan as being in beta and as just as necessary. And I would note I think you wisely call for continuing reviews of your plan with one scheduled in 2016. So I began by saying that we all know the end game. But I think it's important to note we don't know the ultimate architecture by which we achieve that outcome. And here's what I mean. Today in most countries, most consumers pay for two forms of broadband. One over a fixed wire, such as fiber or cable. And a mobile one over a cellular network. Today there's limited competition between the wireless and wire line offerings, like the early days of mobile voice, where the mobile offering was complimentary. Almost no one cuts off their fixed service to rely solely on mobile. As your plan notes as fixed and mobile technologies do not offer equivalent service. Choice will be provided across both. You are right about today. But as everyone who will play here in the World Cup in 2022, already knows, you should focus not on where the ball is, you should focus on where it is going. And where it is going is that both fixed and mobile networks are improving in ways that will put them in greater competition. Wireless and its 4G and subsequent modes will provide speeds equivalent to or better than speeds provided to most wire line customers today. And at the same time, wired will increase the speeds beyond which wireless is ever able to achieve. And through small cells like Wi-Fi, will increasingly be able to offer mobile functionality. In a few years, there will be a marketplace battle between what we might think of as cellular plus compression versus big bandwidth plus small cells. Now as an investor, I would have one view about that battle. I won't talk about that today. But I would note that both sides actually benefit from huge savings and capital expenditures that small cells provide both cellular and wired carriers for mobile offerings. But from a policy perspective, government should not choose who wins. Rather, government should enable both models as well as others such as satellite. And there are many reasons why the government should not choose. It might choose wrong. The answer might be different for different parts of the country. There are many others. But the biggest reason is the government in the country really benefits from the battle. The more the private sector forces invest in improving their networks, the better in the long run the connectivity for all users in the country. And you will need both architectures. As your plan suggests, you like many countries will face spectrum shortfalls and urban areas by 2020. And if the World Cup is just the beginning of Qatar as a location for periodic large gatherings of people, all of whom will require robust mobile communications, you will need the kind of capacity that only diverse networks can offer. Today we're focused on what Qatar can do to assure that within its borders it has the broadband infrastructure it needs to continue to enjoy economic and social progress. The part of the energy that drives that vision is the admirable desire of the country to be a leader on the international stage. So let me just offer a couple of quick thoughts on how you can play that role in relation to what I think of as two distinct broadband problems. One is that areas that are not connected, largely rural areas of developing countries, where the cost of both wired and wireless architectures make broadband unaffordable. The second is having the zones of big bandwidth widely distributed so more can be in reach of the kind of communications that only the best networks can provide. In my view, Qatar can play a role in both. As to the first, there are a number of private efforts from Google's Project Loone to Facebook's internet.org to many others. It's a great thing that many private sector companies recognize this need. But every time something like this happens, there are multiple experiments of great importance. The need for information, particularly in those areas lacking in technical expertise, grows. So just as your country gave birth to Al Jazeera, because you perceived an information gap, so it is that your country can play a role in assisting other countries, not by selling networks, but by assessing options and providing technical assistance and bringing broadband not just throughout your country, but throughout the world. You might think of it as a broadband Peace Corps or technical advisory or an information clearinghouse, because there are so many different ways of now achieving that goal. As to big bandwidth goals, big bandwidth zones, I noted with interest and admiration the recommendation and the plan that all education institutions and research institutions should be connected to the fiber network, and I've also noted with admiration your development of an education city congregating some of the world's great educational institutions in a concentrated space in your country. I think you can take this a step further and ask yourself what would happen if you were to link your resources at the highest level of bandwidth speeds to education research institutions around the world, but particularly in developing regions. After all, university communities have both the best economics and the most innovative cultures for big bandwidth. What if your country were to be the hub of a much larger community of education research institutions that interacted continually in ways that today we only see as science fiction, but it isn't really science fiction. For example, in the United States, the Smithsonian Institute, the Federal Collection of Museums and Research Institutions recently struck a deal with Internet 2, the largest research and education network to enable college students from around the country, not just college students, but particularly college students, to essentially visit and explore the museum collection, including in high definition three dimensional rendering of objects from their home areas. The deal also enables such things as live performances of musicians in multiple locations, but to the audience it appears as if they're on the same stage. Now there are an infinite number of ways we humans can collaborate if we remove the charity of distance. It's being invented in a variety of ways, and the project I spend most of my time with to these days is working with about three dozen research universities in the United States to accelerate the deployment of next generation networks for this purpose. While the details differ in the United States and what I'm proposing here, the logic for big bandwidth zones, zones with so much bandwidth that bandwidth is never a constraint innovation, applies to developing countries as well as developed ones, and you ought to think about how to take advantage of the educational vision that you've already created to expand it to what happens in a big bandwidth world. Well let me close with a story about that future that occurred a few months ago. Yes, a story from the future that occurred a few months ago when a representative of the Khan Academy, an organization that provides internet learning on various modules, was visiting an ANOVA school in Peru. These are schools which rely entirely on the utilization of Khan Academy materials. And while the students were working away on their tablets in the classroom, a teacher pointed to one student and said, that student's about to ask me a question about negative numbers. The Khan executive said, what? How did you know that? And the teacher pointed to her tablet, which reflected the progress that each student was making on their work. And when any student working in a subject area got a problem wrong three times, there was a red mark as there was for this student on the problem involving negative numbers. Now sure enough, seconds later, the student raised his hand and asked the predicted question. And critically, the teacher assisted that student with the precise aid that the student needed to move forward. That is the future. It is happening today in so many ways, simply because the platform that we're talking about today is much better than the platform that Gutenberg invented 500 years ago. And I could tell similar stories, and I'm sure you'll hear some, particularly from Richard Adler, who will be talking later about the future. I could tell similar stories about how broadband is creating a different future for delivering healthcare, public safety, job training, business services, and many other critical services. The problem is, it's just not in many places in the world today. As a science fiction writer, William Gibson wrote, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. And this is the challenge for Qatar, as it is for the United States, as it is for the entire world. It is not up to us to achieve perfect equitable distribution, but it is up to us, those of us in this room and in other rooms like this, to accelerate that future when all students can have that precise aid that they need to move forward. When all who are sick can have the precise assistance they need to become healthy. When all job seekers can have access to the precise training and information they need to find a job. And when all governments can have actionable intelligence to improve the environment for economic growth and social progress. Today, your country takes a big step forward, but is only the first step of a much larger journey. Again, thank you very much for inviting me here, and good luck, and I very much look forward to the rest of the presentations today. Thank you.