 Welcome to ITU telecom world 2013 here in Bangkok, Thailand. Great pleasure to have with me today Mike Wright who is the executive director of networks at Telstra in Australia. Mike, welcome. Thank you. The theme of this conference is embracing the digital world. I'm wondering what you see as the biggest opportunities for change in the industry brought about by the digital world. Well in the opening ceremony we actually heard about the social and economic benefits that can be brought about by ICT and in fact one of the things we're reminded of was not to forget connectivity and of course connectivity is the pipe that connects every application we talk about into the core of the network, enables the health services and enables mobile money. Now when we think about the change we need to make, the opportunity, it's about quickly moving to new technology and that technology in my mind is really 4G. We have to get away from the 2G world. Too often when I go around the world we still see connectivity on 2G. We need to think about how do we get new spectrum, how do we re-farm spectrum and how do we take the world into that new frontier that's going to be enabled by the high bandwidth services they want to use. Well they're great opportunities of course, but what are the challenges and perhaps the issues and problems we might face in getting to the 4G world? Well the big challenges and threats I think relate to maybe our own reluctance or reticence to to grab this new technology. We're very comfortable with 2G. Why? Well it's understandable. It's very cheap, cheap handsets, but they're not very efficient. They don't use spectrum well. So what we as operators and regulators need to do is to really embrace the new technology, build the scale, the very scale that 2G got that's going to drive the cost down and enable this new technology and drive it into parts of the world that today we probably couldn't even imagine they could go to. Well how is a company like Telstra in such a big country for example Australia, how are you going about that and how are you adopting and moving towards 4G comfortably? Well actually we've been big believers in Wallace Broadband for a long time. In fact I haven't used 2G technology for seven years in Australia. We rolled out HSPA plus very early to 99.3% of the population. That's 2.3 million square kilometres of Australians actually have 3G, they don't need 2G coverage. As a consequence we've seen huge growth in Wallace Broadband adoption. In fact we have very low penetration of 2G remaining and more recently we were one of the worlds first to adopt LTE 1800. Now we currently have over 20% of our base penetrated with 4G. 4G traffic is growing at 23% per month. 3G traffic is levelling off and indeed the growth in 4G traffic is funding the expansion of the 4G footprint and of course our customers see the benefits like they see the lower latency, they use the network and it enables so many more services and products. So it really is about using the technology and of course what comes with the technology is more efficiency. The cost of a bit goes down so we've got to get the balance and when we think about network rollouts we need to get away from just looking at the cheapest terminal but to looking at the whole ecosystem. What does it cost to carry bits as well as the cost of devices? If we can truly drive scale I think we can really truly drive LTE in many more parts of the world and really enable this digital future we're talking about here at the conference. And of course at this event are people seeking you out to ask what you're doing in Australia and what other benefits are you getting from coming to ITU Telecom World? A lot of people do ask us what we're doing in Australia and the benefits for me are twofold. One is to come and learn what's going on. In this industry things are moving so quickly if you blink you'll miss something. So it's very much about seeing what the next new thing is so you can take advantage of it and get the opportunity. But the other reason I come is to have influence. And more recently we've acquired New Spectrum what's called the APT 700 Spectrum Band. And I truly believe this is an enormous enabler of 4G for a large part of the world. Whether it's Asia Pacific alone or Latin America and indeed we believe parts of Europe may adopt parts of the band and if we can do that we can get global scale. So what I would like to do while I'm here as well is to tell that story to get people to understand the opportunity so that we can all get on board and really change the world. Well I think as a customer we're probably all hoping we can roam more easily as well on 4G in the future and that would be one way to do it on shore. It absolutely would be. Mike thank you for being with me today. Thank you for having me.