 We're here at ITU Telecom World 2016 in Bangkok and I'm very pleased to be joined in the studio today by Fatima Barras, who is chair of Anacom's board of directors. Fatima, great to see you in the studio today and thanks so much for joining us again. It's a great pleasure to be here and of course as usual I'm very pleased to talk to you about what's going on in Europe. Brilliant, now in fact Europe is my first question here, I wanted to ask you about the digital single market initiative. Perhaps we could talk about how Europe's digital single market initiative has brought down barriers to unlock digital opportunity. Right, so this digital single market strategy was launched by the European Commission last year and I think that the main objective of the European Commission is somehow to develop a strategy in such a way that Europe is able to take advantage of all the benefits of the digital of the digital world in order to boost the economic growth. And the central issue, at least from what concerns the regulators for electronic communications, is of course what is related to broadband connectivity. So I would say that what is central for the digital single market strategy is connectivity and this is probably the main concern of the European Commission right now is and is also the main concern for the European Member States. With this broadband connectivity you are able to connect the entire territory and to avoid the digital divide in Europe and this is central and is connected to what the Commission just did that is to launch new targets for the digital agenda for Europe and also to launch a new code for electronic communications which means that in the future we will have a new regulation for electronic communications that somehow will stay in place till 2025. How will the European Commission's new regulatory package meet the challenges of the future? Well that's a good point because as I told you broadband connectivity is central and when we talk about connectivity we talk about both fixed networks and 5G so mobile connectivity. And what is important from the Commission point of view is to ensure high-speed broadband access to everybody. The main challenge I would say is the balance between investment the investment you need in order to achieve this connectivity on one side and on the other side to keep the level of competition among operators that you have right now in Europe. Somehow the success of regulation in Europe was to ensure a high level of competition among operators. Some people say there are too many operators in Europe and we say well this is the success of regulation because we were able to break down the entry barriers and to allow new players to come into the market and because there is competition prices are quite affordable and there are incentives among operators to invest. The question is that on these more challenging areas how can we ensure that there will be incentives to invest on one side and on the other side there will be still competition. And I think that the main concern of the European Commission in this sense was to ensure this type of balance namely they put long a lot of emphasis on access access to networks and I would say that in this new approach the Commission is trying to get what they call a smart regulation. So not using the old remedies that was just identifying the operator with significant market power and imposing him the remedies of you must give access to your competitors but try to get a different type of regulation like starting by the deepest layer saying first you must you regulator you must ensure that operators give access to ducks and pools to civil infrastructure in order to reduce the cost of deployment new generation networks and also the Commission is looking at other issues like co-investment agreements commercial agreements and also to some types of symmetric regulation. And what are the key initiatives underway to accelerate the uptake of broadband and move towards digital societies and in fact I wanted to ask you how has Portugal in particular had such success in Fiverr to the home development? Well what has been interesting about Portugal it's somehow we are quite in advance in what relates the recent proposals of the European Commission because in fact we started by imposing access to ducks and pools exactly what the Commission is now advising regulators to do but we did it in 2006 so much in advance and with this type of regulation we were able to reduce the deployment costs and some estimates say that these costs can be about 80% of the total costs of deploying networks so by imposing these access to ducks to the ducks of the historical operators of the incumbent we were using a kind of symmetric a symmetric regulation but also there is a law in place that imposes also symmetric regulation which means that any infrastructure like utilities roads railroads that can host electronic communication networks are obliged to give access so given these there is a kind of level playing field for all operators because the conditions are almost identical anyone that wants to invest that wants to deploy networks they have access to ducks and the pools at at the same level so this was very important to given the right incentives for the for the operators to invest on the other side we had strong competition among the cable operator and also the incumbent operator and from this strong competition of course they they had the right incentives to invest and today we have three big networks one of cable and two of FTTA FTTH that compete against against each other which is quite quite extraordinary in Europe because infrastructure based competition is what the European Commission is looking for and is what we have in place right now we also have a force operator that is a cable operator of a small smaller scale but is also putting some competitive pressure on the market so I would say that the main the main factors for success in Portugal were essentially the civil infrastructure access regulation on one side and the strong competition on the other side so I think that this statement that says that competition drives investment is the reality in Portugal now you took part in the leadership summit yesterday here at ITU telecom world wanted to find out what were your key takeaways from that well I what was interesting is that we are all looking for the same we are all facing the same challenges let's say we are all looking for broadband connectivity we are all looking to avoid the digital divide we are all looking at the challenging areas that are essentially the rural areas just the scale of the problems is so different I mean comparing what we are facing in Europe or what I'm facing in Portugal what the Indian regulator is facing in India it's really amazing but what is really important is that our concerns are the same and we can learn from each other and I think this is the great thing and finally a little bit of promotion for ITU telecom world but just what why is it good to be here what makes it special first of all we are in this part of the world this year and of course we learn about many things of different markets that probably we don't have the chance to to meet the people or to learn about these markets every day so this is important on the other side Asia is in Asia things are happening so fast and so quickly that is also great to to see what's going on and again we are learning from each other and sharing our best practices and this is the best thing of putting all these people together thank you very much indeed that was my pleasure