 Good morning everyone. Please take your seats. We'd like to get started. We're running a bit late because I think there's been a lot of transportation delays. I know folks had trouble coming in from New York. And this has been surfed by the way. Who has many talents? Okay well thanks. I just want to ask everyone to try to come to order as they say. I know folks will still be trickling in but we're gonna get get started in just a moment here. New America's president Anne-Marie Slaughter will be welcoming us. Good morning I'm Anne-Marie Slaughter and I'm the president and CEO of New America. We are excited to have this event. In fact I have to tell you that I normally this is normally my New York day but at Michael's request and because of my own commitment to this subject I stayed in DC. Of course now I realize I couldn't have gotten to New York because it's in a blizzard. But so this is you know the next three billion. How do we bring the next three billion people online? And all of you or many of you are part of that effort. One of the sort of core approaches is the Global Connect initiative from the joint venture between the State Department and the World Bank and we'll be hearing from them later today. Their goal is to have an additional 1.5 billion people online by 2020. That's a lot and 2020 is coming fast. And so international development banks generally are beginning to see this as part of their business. So we have the Global Connect initiative but we also have lots of companies on their own Facebook and Google and other big companies who have been addressing this issue more often in partnership but also on their own. And so what we'll today we'll hear from the State Department we'll hear from the Inter-American Development Bank we'll hear from representatives from a number of these companies. And we'll think about and this is critical how these efforts can operate in parallel not in conflict and actually in ways that we can build synergies. I mean this is a ginormous goal but one that is concrete enough that you can measure it and you can achieve it. So we've got a long day. I have to before I introduce our first speaker who will introduce our second speaker and plunge in. I do simply have to call out Vint Cerf who doesn't want to be called out. He doesn't need any introduction in this audience but we are thrilled that you are here. So it's then my pleasure to introduce Megan Smith who will get us launched. Megan is the third chief technology officer of the United States. She's not the former because she's still in way the technology officer of the United States. I Megan's been of course a leading Google engineer a member of the MIT board. She is a tech evangelist but what I think of her is I think of her as kind of a whirlwind who kind of goes around connecting different communities and leaving powerful forces of energy in her wake. So I'm going to introduce her that way. We at New America have a public public interest technology initiative that she's been helping with where we're thinking about how do we get technologists like her and across the board working on problems like this both domestic and international. This is also a specific project of our wireless futures initiative and Michael Calabrese is the director there. But what binds us all is the sense that we can connect people to the Internet and use technology to solve important public problems. And Megan Smith is exhibit A. Thank you. Hello. It's so great to be with you guys. I just just really quickly like who's here from industry. Just kind of raise your hand. Just shout out some names. Come on. Who's great. Okay. I heard lots of Google. What else we got. Very good. We're Google. Yeah. Couple more. Say it again. Awesome. Any other industry Microsoft. Equinix. Cool. Who's here from the government side. Like people who are in federal state local. Yeah. Or tribal. State. Any others. Say again. Do you. Cool. You say. Anybody from Ag. No. Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. And then other people who some kind of in sort of nonprofit think tanks that world. Yes. Just shout out a couple. Not hope. And it's our C. Cancels. Internet Society. We love you. Yeah. What. Wave. The one campaign. Internets. Okay. So people who are on your own like engineers who are here on your own people start ups other things. Academics. Yeah. Messing group. Cool. Most sustainable scale of a social enterprise is in the way. I love that. Yeah. Okay. So academics. Universities. Yeah. Yeah. What. Pennsylvania. And some Princeton. Yeah. So any what other sectors any other sectors I left out. Anybody. You know just. It's in the mix of all of us that we're going to figure this out. You know we talked about a lot when about these all hands on deck initiatives. And the ones when we really move fast are often when we face a grave challenge. And I just wanted to put up this slide. It's from our kids third grade classroom. And it's my favorite expression for children and for all of us in effort. There's joy. Right. Because when we do this work especially this is the most extraordinary service work. Because if you think about it we have 7 billion extraordinarily talented people. When we were in Afghanistan when one of the security guys said that every time they came into Kandahar this kid would run out of his house and lie on the roof. And he thought it's like what is this kid love airplanes what is his story. So one time they happened to be nearby that house and he just went by and saw the kid and he found out the kid was running out of his house to lie on top of the solar panel so it wouldn't break. So it's him and Malala and all these the kids on Rubbish Mountain who have in her book she talks about the kids on Rubbish Mountain have cell phones. Right. So how could they go to school while they're picking up trash and doing that. Right. They could do that because we have extraordinary things like Vi Hart one of the best math teachers in the world. Who teaches you the Fibonacci sequence using nature and fast talk and fun. She's like the daily show of math. You know. And it's so cool. And all of a sudden you know you're willing and you love science and tech and you start to do that. And maybe you start to invent things with things on Rubbish Mountain and you found companies and you do things straight out of there because the talent of the world will solve all the problems. So the way to fix all the problems is include everyone include everyone to fix everything. And there are a few bad actors and maybe have to figure out how to help them. And we might even invent things for the bad actors who have mental health and substance abuse issues and we won't fill our prisons with them which is not the best place for them to be. Right. Think through solutions. So that's I wanted to hit a couple examples really quickly with you guys of ways that we're doing that when we get massively cross functional. And you know after Pearl Harbor the US built the rebuild the Pacific Fleet. And if you go to the Marin Shipyards Museum which is a small little part of where the Army Corps of Engineers has the Bay Model in the South Toledo there's photos that speak to you. It's so cross functional. It's everyone from US Steel and and the other back to who show up with their powerhouse skills like the industry talent and the techies who are here are founders like Vint and others. The techies showed up and everybody showed up the operators everyone who knew things and everyone learned very quickly how to do this stuff and they built a ship in 33 days a naval ship seven bays in a row. So we can do anything when we decide to do it together and we're very inclusive. So we did this summary event called Frontiers and I just threw it up here because the opportunities to work on so many things we did personal medical local smart cities smart communities justice get everyone a job. Why don't we if we can make a car drive itself we can use the same AI data science to get everyone a job they love. So national and AI data science global climate change work interplanetary. One of my favorite moments of thinking about including talent was on stage when this woman from Blue Origin Geophysus is amazing. Space company like SpaceX and these things who are commercializing. She said you know we're in Seattle. My husband works at Boeing so I'm working on rockets. He's on planes and my son and daughter were talking and my son said to my daughter no girls work on rockets. Boys work on airplanes. Really. So you know how are we going to unlock all the talent the girls the boys every person every age and really be able to play on this stuff. Then Deli Lama wrote this New York Times article encourage you to read it. We were at the global the open government partnership meetings in Cape Town in Moe Ibrahim amazing pioneer in connectivity said you know the stuff that's going on with the elections. It was right after Brexit this feeling of not included in the economy is going to happen all over the planet in every election. Because people want to feel useful and included and if you boil down the elections that are going on there's a feeling of am I in the game I'm part of the South by Southwest crew I feel like I'm in this room I feel like the future's here whether I'm artist or a techie or whatever or I'm really nervous. And as we move into the automation future we did the work with President on AI it's going to get harder and so what we want is everyone to feel their creativity including the kids on Rubbish Mountain. And want to work on all those amazing things and belong and serve each other in the way that humans love to do. And so the state of sustainable development goals I hope this is the new high school curriculum that we just solve this the Angry Birds were doing a hackathon with us and they said you know what if you had billion dollar school and instead of biology and math and English and whatever and boring industrial classes you just come in and maybe the third graders problem for the year is clean water. And if you have to run a clean water together you have to learn some biology and some English and some history and some behavior right. So how do we think about it differently. One of the things that we did with the U.N. was we said you know instead of thinking how can we get more cross functional with the planet. You guys are about to launch the SDG so we said let's have a solution summit. And we said how about we just put up a web page and we say anybody on the planet happened to have any solutions and progress for the stuff we're about to say are our most important goals in such a brilliant comprehensive way that the United Nations led us to do the SDGs. How cool are they as a framing piece and the global connect initiative is in the middle of that right connect everyone. And so we just put up a page U.N. they said what do you got world. And in two weeks simple web form over eight hundred current things that are happening solutions in progress were submitted to have the opportunity to speak for three minutes in a fast lightning talk one hour after ratification they came from a hundred countries. Awesome. And I just want to share a couple. This is a team that's using drones to rapidly fire about this high seed pods into the ground and plant a billion trees a year. What a cool idea for reforestation. This is a guy who's using the block chain because he's the University of Michigan student he and his roommate he's from Ghana. And on his house it says this house is not for sale. And so he wants to use the block chain to use for real estate and know what houses are actually for sale so we don't sell houses out from under each other. This is the African prison projects and folks in Uganda are just teaching law the justice go just teaching law in prison because 90 percent of prisoners you've gone to have no representation. So people thousands of people are literally getting themselves out of prison. There was a woman who got herself off of death row from herself and changed the law. So all around people are doing great things. This is one of my favorite indigenous folks in the Amazon region. You guys know maker spaces. Do people know maker spaces. A couple of people. This imagine you were in your high school and you could take the art room the shop room the home back room. Maybe a little bit of lab throw all those tools together. And then instead of walking in and being told what to do people like what do you want to make today. And then you just make stuff and look at these kids they're running off the dock into a maker space. These are bio informed exceptional humans who know a lot about their environment in the Amazon. What would they make with 3D printers. What would they inform us in their inventions and how might they tell us. But I think one of the greatest gifts we can have for solving climate change is listening to the indigenous people. So this is happening all over the planet. And you can see one part of the world has fab labs. See all those dots across the world there in Afghanistan. They're everywhere. And this is Baltimore. These are kids in rec to tech rec center adds a tech center. Just like our ag centers can add a tech center. There's nano for the little kids mega for the big kids the big kids coach the little kids. It doesn't cost very much. And it's incredibly fun. And the rubbish amount of kids learn to be confident. Right. The kids in Baltimore learn to be confident everyone's parents can come in too. So having this kind of thinking about maybe the people who are the object of the problem are actually the best resource of solving it. And we think differently. And we can use all our libraries. We have all these spaces. What would Carnegie do today with maker spaces. Why don't we have those. We got the space. We got the distribution. We've got egg centers in every county. And that's around the world too. This is an example in justice. We have extraordinary problems of justice around the world especially in the United States. So we looked at the open data. And now we went from just a handful of cities that are opening their data Dallas LA. They can serve as a beacon of Hey just like the solution someone who already figured this out. A couple of the police jurisdictions started talking to them turned to 20. Now it's over a hundred jurisdictions who talk every two weeks and are opening use of force officer involved shooting all these data sets open data. Just like you got here with your maps today from thank you U.S. Geological Survey. And so now it's this group. This is a 10th grader grace. She's now in 11th or 12th grade teaching the chief of police his first line of code. So the high schoolers can get us out of this mess together with smart adults and we can work in cross functional ways if we include each other in the conversation like they did to rebuild the Pacific Fleet. Another problem we always talk about how we going to solve STEM and get kids to love step Arizona. They're electing chief science officer middle school and high school kids we elect presidents or treasures of class. These kids go evangelize them. One kid said you know when I was in ninth grade she's like the the robot team had no girls this too as if that wasn't like not normal right that's happening everywhere. So we just fixed it and they did. So how do you think of the object as the resource team. These are Syrian refugee kids. They are a robotics team. We were Skype calling with them yesterday from the makers conference. They said why you like robotics. Well I love being on a team in the teamwork. I love that you can be not arrogant and build things and still win. I love that computer science and coding because it's so cool and it's magical and it's a power that I now have and most of all when we get back to Syria we have a lot of stuff to fix. Right. So you wouldn't think of giving refugee kids robotics but it builds their confidence and they are our teammates then in solving their own problems. And it's something that the president and President Obama and now President Trump accelerating how to bring this stuff into our government. How do we have the techies the digital 44 and now the digital 45 the US digital service presidential innovation fellows mixed in with our most extraordinary policymakers. We called TQ like IQ EQ tech Q just add that into the seat because you don't necessarily need to know the stuff you just need a teammate who does we have a surgeon general. Let's have that for the other topics and we can fix these things. You know we we struggle with corruption. Now the incredible Department of Interior has a live extractive industry tools and you can go zip code and see what did the government of America sell today. And now other countries are just taking that open source piece and doing that you know college scorecard now this open data is out there in the world and it's showing up in search and other places the students can figure out what are they buying with their specific education. Techies in these conversations right together with our amazing policy colleagues it was one of the greatest things for me was to get to work with the government talent. It's extraordinary and I would have never thought of coming here. They just went and collected that. The last government thing I want to say is just that the open government partnership is a very real thing it's now over 70 countries. It has government. It has the amazing partners in civil society and as civic tech. And my favorite moments of government was being in the palace in Paris when Napoleon and the teams came up with the civil code that is the fundamental piece of many of our democracies with three hundred people in a hackathon from 70 countries writing the civil code code. And so now there is just like your app store in open space in the OGP toolbox where people are throwing all kinds of stuff to solve problems the Jakarta team the Mexico team etc. Mix them in. The last two things I just want to note is we have extraordinary stereotypes about who does what. And it's coming from all kinds of places but one of the areas that I wanted to highlight for you guys is the propaganda media that you that we all have felt because accidentally we did this. This is what we watch on television and screenplays. So this is 2000 screenplays. Men's lines and women's lines in the movies we watch. Men's lines in blue red for women. This is children's TV. So when children watch TV they learn that boys speak and blue girls don't speak. So I bring this up because our effort here in global connect is about all seven billion people even though we're setting milestones. Right. And that we want all seven billion men and women boys and girls everybody from everywhere. And we have to think of the people who are speaking the people who are not speaking as our teammates in this effort. And so I wanted to kind of point that out because think differently about who your colleague is. It is the kid who's in seventh grade they're trying to help. They're your teammate. Last thing is this is a very messy slide and one is gonna gonna go much deeper into global connect. But the thing that I wanted to emphasize here is Manu who's so amazing was sitting on an airplane with a State Department Baseball cap and I walked by him and I stopped as like State Department. Do you know anyone in state who wants to work on connectivity because I think it's one of the most important things we could do and one is like me. And so he and Suhas on our team and we got up to tricks and we went on this whole road show convincing people and people responded. And and so global connect really came out of that again all hands on deck effort. We went to the financing teammates. We said look a lot of the the ministries of five ministers of financing countries kind of think of the Internet as a luxury. They're like I got to get roads and water and this and then the Internet I'm going to get. And we're like how can we shortlist it and understand that it's going to lift the talent to do all these things that needs to happen in your country. And so we did that work together and that's why global connect meets when the financial meetings are happening in the spring in the fall. And so that's a big part of the development is the other is the countries themselves and capability and getting cross functional getting their techies and government people together in all the different ways and all our partners in commercial society. And then this last step the person who if you went to Amazon or Google or Verizon and he asked and he found the people who are building the backbone the negotiators and techies in the core of those companies and he said we need to build something from kind of Indianapolis to Missoula. They would know they'd say oh well the way you do that is there's a blah blah blah and it costs this much and it's like those teammates who are on the commercial side we really need their help in the room like a surgeon general on this stuff on our hardest stuff that's the longest lead. And we did a sprint around tribal connectivity 500 plus tribes that are just not online and they came up with a brilliant structure of like the backhaul that we would do and they came up with a nonprofit called an international tribal carrier that we might make to make that happen and then each of the tribes would do just like in the beginning of the internet when each of the universe got a pop and we figured out that the Eisenhower freeway or the trains and then people can figure out their own town and then you can kind of separate that out. So I'll end there and bring my incredible colleague Manu Bhagwat up and he's going to go for it. Thank you. I just want to thank Michael and New America and Ann Marie for hosting this really terrific event to really think and reflect about all that we were able to achieve these last 16, 17 months with the Global Connect effort and then also realized what a bright future this initiative has at the State Department and what that means for the world. The Global Connect Initiative is literally only 17 months old. We launched it when the sustainable development agenda was adopted in New York and you could tell that we were on fire. We were joined by Jim Kim of the World Bank, the president of Estonia, president of Tanzania, broadband commissioners that represented countries from all over the world, leading tech CEOs. Many of the people that I recognize in this room were with us then and remember kind of that launch event. And I think what was noteworthy is we're really calling attention to the fact that internet connectivity was such a key way of achieving the sustainable development goals, whether you're talking about poverty, health care, education, that there was a really linkage there. And actually the SDGs themselves call it explicitly for universal and affordable connectivity for least developed countries by 2020. So, I mean, that's a real call to action now. With this initiative, when we launched it, we saw and we recognized that there was already international metric out there, 1.5 billion people by 2020. All countries in the world had essentially agreed to it at a meeting of the International Telecom Union and that resolution was put forward by Korea. But organizations and UN bodies are not necessarily the best means of achieving these types of goals and you need to stakeholder-driven effort with connectivity experts with industry to mobilize action around actually achieving the metric. Let me just see if I can get my slides up. Oh, perfect. So what's striking to me is how much work we have to do. Today, over 60% of the world's population is offline. Many of you have heard that number, but just think about what it means in terms of how many Albert Einstein's are just not able to get access to information, to access to the internet. What cost does that have on the world that so many people don't have access to this amazing medium? And sadly, the people that are offline are predominantly female. Nearly all are in the developing world. In Africa, just one in five people use the internet. And across the world's least developed countries, just one in 10 online. The internet is absolutely the place where a small business can compete with a multinational corporation accessing consumers. It's a way that you can provide education benefits to people everywhere. But the only way this works is if everybody has access. If everybody can actually achieve the medium, otherwise, just think about what it means for inequality and what it actually means in terms of people's inability to rise up and compete globally and to scale. And you can see very clearly how much work we have to do in Africa in particular. I've always used this chart as we think about the effort because this is data that has been collected by the ITU from regulators. And what's striking to me is that if you look at this, the divide isn't necessarily closing in any meaningful way. I remember showing this to Vint, I think, 17 months ago when we first started. Because you can see that the developed countries, the adoption rate, will probably plateau at some point around 85, 90. But look, the divide between developed and developing is still pretty striking. And just think about countries that are in terrible pain, Afghanistan, least developed countries, and where they must be on this graph. Through the initiative, we've always tried to identify, here are some buckets, here are some reasons that countries are lagging. Their policies are critical in terms of really trying to bolster and increase access. And whether you're thinking about lack of funds for infrastructure, minimal technical expertise, corruption, political instabilities, all of these are real factors. And just to give you another sense, affordability, which is actually one of the biggest barriers, the high cost to the internet. In developed countries like the United States, entry level broadband connection roughly can be 2% to 3% of monthly income. That figures skyrockets to at least 10% in most developing countries and can actually reach over 100% of monthly income. So affordability is a tremendous barrier. So Megan has talked of the technical expertise angle. The Global Connect Initiative has always tried to help developing countries build their technical expertise in actually achieving broadband goals. Of course, every country has a broadband plan. Tunisia wants to connect all of their schools by next year. But to actually achieve that, they need help of engineers, connectivity experts, and a lot of them just don't have the rich luxury that we do in the United States of having all these expertise, all the US companies, all of this knowledge here. And so the Global Connect Initiative was always designed to try to help countries kind of really achieve and bolster their technical expertise. This initiative has achieved quite a great deal and it's really in partnership with some of the leaders in this room. We should be proud of the fact that we have successfully, I would say, mainstream the idea that internet connectivity is just as important as traditional infrastructure. That may not have been a new idea to people in this room. It was certainly a new idea to finance ministers. When we first invited them to the meetings, they said, you have the wrong in minister. You want the communications minister. This is not an issue that I have anything to do with, but no, that was the whole point. The whole point was also to raise the political visibility of this, to heads of state. For them to realize, there's a reason that the 2016 World Bank issued a development report on digital dividends. It's because this topic now is a key issue for economic development and economic growth. We should be proud of the fact that the initiative that the State Department was able to secure over 40 countries to support connectivity principles that were things like digital literacy, the importance of local language and making the internet irrelevant to local communities, the importance of creating enabling environments for growth. And this was a US government announced effort with the World Bank and it was received with open arms from everybody in the world and it was really quite something to see that level of support. With respect to financing, I learned a lot as we moved forward with the effort. One of the things that is I think striking is that a lot of the infrastructure budgets of the banks, they only allocate 1% of their infrastructure budget to ICT. So, and the thinking there is that there's not a need from countries for ICT products, for connectivity, but I think what we've taught them and what they're seeing now is greater demand because you're stirring demand essentially by showing countries that the banks can offer certain services, that the banks can be huge assets in many ways and I'm proud that they're now receiving quite a lot more support. And the other interesting facet was working with IEEE throughout this effort which is, as a lawyer, I would say IEEE is almost the ABA for lawyers for computer electrical engineers and it's a global organization and they were key partners in having events during the bank fund meetings, it's a global group, but they were also able to kind of accelerate progress in capacity building and really try to help build more of that tech oriented connectivity core with still some work to be done there. The environment today, it's very hard to say that something is bipartisan. There's a lot of areas where you might step back and say, it's just so hard to see that politics is so divisive and it's hard to find areas of agreement. What's great about this effort is that since its conception, it's been working across the aisle and our biggest supporters are Republicans. Ed Royce, the chairman of the House Foreign Relations verbally endorsed the effort last year. We are excited to see the type of bipartisan support for international connectivity and partly that's, and thanks to many of you in this room, to be more even more specific, just a few weeks ago, the House of Representatives on a voice vote, not controversial at all, basically endorsed the metrics of the Global Connect effort, the 1.5 billion by 2020, the idea that there would be an increased focus from OPIC, USCID, and MCC that we want them to do more internet infrastructure projects. The idea that after enactment, there would be an annual reporting by President Trump of the administration on how things are going. This is quite striking that it was, you know, something that is so supportive and the Senate companion is Senator Markey who has also proposed his own version. But the level of interest here, the level of excitement should harden us all because this is an area where we can all put partisan differences aside and just focus on our common vision which is how do we improve international connectivity, what it means for investment, what it means for job creation. And it should make us realize that this is a real great area for a future cooperation and work. So, you know, the question is what should we be doing now? What should stakeholders do now? And how should we be thinking about our next steps? I think it's absolutely critical for us to seize the moment, encourage the US government, encourage all of our partners to continue making domestic and international connectivity a foreign policy and domestic policy priority. And I think what we'll find is a lot of receptivity. Whether it's realizing, you know, the educational benefits, the job benefits, the investment benefits, that applies both domestically here in the United States as well as abroad. And I think it's important that the Global Connect program proceed and it should proceed without significant alteration, whether it's thinking about the financing piece and how we work with the MDBs or thinking about the technical expertise. There are certain functions that were fulfilled with the initiative. And, you know, I think it's all, it's now on coming up on all stakeholders to think about how do we make sure there's no void going forward. One was, I think, a very effective clearinghouse effort where we essentially listed every single connectivity effort that was being done by governments, by industry, by NGOs. In April, when we had our event with Kerry and Kim and finance ministers, you literally had 65 efforts valued at over $20 billion. And so everybody in industry or in developing country could literally see what is being done out there. How do we support it? And it would also catalyze. But, you know, that was something that was not being done until we did it. The convener central hub concept. The U.S. government has amazing convening authority. And so does IEEE and so does the World Bank. But really trying to ensure that we are able to convene these key players, key partners, every single bank fund. April, October, April, October, IEEE is fully committed to hosting these events for the next year plus. We have an opportunity to be thinking strategically in April, which is just two months away, about how do we wanna frame the agenda, the discussions, and really maybe even pass the baton to new leaders, new players in thinking about caring for the effort. The annual report on progress, the State Department issued a report in January 19th that literally detailed all the different efforts, all of the different issues with financing partnerships, what they were doing to broaden support. These annual reports, I think, are really helpful to take stock, to measure progress, and perhaps they could even be improved upon as we move forward. And I think elevating the political visibility of the topic I think is really critical. One of the countries where we had the most success in actually delivering a real project was a country where the president was personally engaged herself in talking with the regulator and trying to open up the market, making it more competitive. But that was only really possible because of her, I think, her personal interest and also the company that was behind the effort was also showing a real high level of commitment. And then this connectivity core of experts. You know, it's so important for them to be leading this effort as we create these digital strategies for countries and helping them really think about their next steps. You know, I think I really wanted to say that give you some feedback that I've gotten as I close from key players and as we think about next steps. You know, there's one and a lot of many people that are going to be speaking there in the day have personal experience with Global Connect, what its benefits were, what they got out of it. But you know, I remember seeing Paul Garnett with Vint in San Francisco where Vint was able to basically using his own hat with the Global Connect effort bring together all the different companies that are doing access but not in a competitive way in a collaborative way where they were actually talking about, you know, what can we do with TV white space technology? What can we do with, you know, drones? What can we do with Undersea Fire Optic Cable? That was a really interesting event that we had together with Marion of Google. When we had the Spring Bank Fund, she talked very passionately about how the Global Connect platform was really useful because it was a way to, you know, interact with the technical community, with the industry folks, really develop partnerships that might not have been possible otherwise. When it was Kevin Martin of Facebook, he publicly said that he met a number of companies for the first time at one of our Global Connect stakeholders events which really yielded tangible results. And then my good friend Antonio from the Inter-American Development Bank who many of you know and has been a leader in providing connectivity work there talked quite passionately about how having a political supporters, political surrogate, talked to the president of the banks about how important connectivity was, really helped open up his own ICT portfolio in really meaningful ways. So I think we have a lot more work to do together. I'm really grateful for New America's continued interest and leadership in this space. And I'll be here with a lot of our other stakeholders and friends throughout the day. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Manu. And you know, just to clarify, I'm sure you've, you know, picked up that Manu left the State Department just a couple of weeks ago, January 20th roughly. And as it says in the, hopefully everybody picked up, there's a handout with bios. He's joining MasterCard as a vice president in their MasterCard Center for inclusive growth. There's still for folks in the back, there's still scattered seats around. So, you know, don't be shy to come up and just, you know, sit, sit anywhere. So at least 10 seats. And also this one, so we're starting this session on local approaches to advancing global connect and getting to at least this goal of 1.5 billion. Although, in titling this event, we're even more optimistic of trying to think about the next 3 billion because as you get deeper and deeper into the emerging markets, it gets harder and harder. So we want to think about the global approaches, which will be our second session after lunch. So I'm going to introduce the moderator. But one thing I want to mention so that you can all can be thinking about this during this session is at the end, where we normally ask the audience for questions of the panelists, if you can also think about it, and this was Megan Smith's idea, offers and asks. So I know many of you are directly involved in this world or could be, you have resources. So think about what you could, you know, and you don't have to sign in a dotted line today, but think about what you could offer to this effort, to any of these folks either who are speaking or others who are here, or if you are in this world then you have asks, you know, what would they be? Like what do you, you know, badly need to make things happen because we've heard stories about, sad stories about connectivity that just was right on the edge but didn't happen because something was missing a fiber connection or permission to do this or a change regulation. So Kim Hart will moderate. We have four presentations, five to 10 minutes, and then a panel discussion and your asks and offers at the end. Kim is, has a new position at a new publication. I think most, most of you know who she is, she's technology editor at Axios, which is, which is new and she came also very recently left the FCC where she was the press secretary to the chairman, Tom Wheeler. Kim. So I'll introduce our panelists today and then they'll each come up and give their presentations and once they've concluded that we'll come back on stage and have a discussion and hear from you guys as well. First we'll hear from Steve Song. He's a senior research associate of the Network Startup Research Center and then Vanu Bose, president and CEO of Vanu Inc. Christopher Yu, he's the founding director of One World Connected and also a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Dave Wright. He's the director of regulatory affairs and network standards at Ruckus Wireless. So I believe we'll start with Steve. So I'm from the Network Startup Resource Center, an organization that builds the capacity of engineers to build internet networks around the world. And my remarks this morning are going to be confined largely to sub-Saharan Africa which is my geographic area of expertise. Now if I were to tell you that mobile technologies have transformed the world particularly in the global south I'm sure some eyes would roll up in the audience, you know sort of tell me something new. But I think what's interesting about mobile technologies is how long it took for their impact to be recognized. The first mobile networks in sub-Saharan Africa were rolled out, I think the first was in South Africa in 1994 but it wasn't until more than 10 years later that the publications like The Economist began to recognize just that the social and economic transformative potential of this technology. And what I want to suggest to you this morning is that in fact there's another technology that is going to have a similar kind of tectonic impact on access and that is fiber optic infrastructure. Only eight years ago the first high capacity undersea cable found its way down the east coast of Africa, the CCOM cable, followed within a very short time by more than a dozen undersea cables with more than six new cables planned in the next couple of years. That investment has spurred a massive triggered investment in terrestrial infrastructure to the point where there is hardly a country on the continent that doesn't have a national terrestrial fiber backbone. And the impact of that is to put tremendous pressure on the end of that bridge. And it's unlocked potential for all kinds of new access approaches. Fiber to the home in urban centers but most importantly opening up wireless access. And that in turn has put tremendous pressure on regulators who control access to that wireless spectrum in order to take advantage of this massive potential. Fiber optic infrastructure is the deep water port of the internet. When you're on fiber you're only milliseconds away from the living beating heart of the internet. So this is new and somehow there's now we need to unlock this potential by unlocking wireless access. But unfortunately the traditional models for unlocking wireless spectrum aren't really working that well in the global south because spectrum auctions which may generate millions or billions of dollars in costs for operators. Those costs are borne by those operators and are ultimately passed on to consumers. And if we're talking about access of ARPUs of less than three dollars this actually may not be the best model. In addition, regulators are struggling because the pace of change of technology now is completely eclipsing their ability to regulate effectively. And the best illustration of this that I know of is the in 2006 an agreement among African countries to engage in the digital switchover the move from analog terrestrial broadcasting to digital terrestrial broadcasting a move that entirely made sense at the time in 2006 and they planned for 2015 for it to be complete. Well we're in 2017 now and less than half of the countries that committed to this transition have completed it. And that's not new. That's fairly normal. Spectrum, you know, re-farming and that sort of thing takes that sort of time. But what's interesting is the things that didn't exist in 2006. This device didn't exist in 2006. The smartphone streaming media in its current form didn't exist in 2006 tablets and in fact the interesting confluence of tablets phones and streaming media. So an entire industry of broadcast you know has come into a multimillion-dollar industry in the time of this process. So clearly we need to do something different. And I think what regulators need to do now is to diversify their approaches to access to decrease their risk and increase the opportunities for access to flourish. So embracing unlicensed spectrum, embracing dynamic spectrum such as TV wide spectrum technologies that can create massive upside potential with very, very low risk for regulators and indeed setting aside spectrum for rural access that can also make way for new technologies. So just talking about Wi-Fi for a minute. I mean, here's, this is an old chart. This is from 2012 and it was pretty cool then because it showed that over 80% of mobile data traffic actually travels over Wi-Fi networks not over mobile networks. Now you might be thinking, oh yes, but that's Europe, that's North America. This is not really relevant. Well, let me show you news from 2016 in South Saharan Africa. The Seychelles, an ISP is committed to making Seychelles a Wi-Fi nation. This is rock telecom in Kampala. Partnering with Google's project link, they're a fiber project there. They have rolled out in the last two years over 500 hotspots. They sell a coupon, it's called a rock spot. It's 1,000 shillings for 24 hours of unlimited access. 1,000 shillings is 27 cents. The government of Kenya is committed to rolling out Wi-Fi across its counties. The project to Sizwe in Shwani in South Africa has rolled out vast amounts of Wi-Fi infrastructure in both townships and urban centers alike. Similarly in Johannesburg, this is Bofinet in Botswana, that the fiber operator there that is committed to Wi-Fi rollouts domestically. Kenya libraries are offering free access to Wi-Fi. This is a new startup in Kenya that is covering the entirety of the township of Kibera with Wi-Fi access at similar kinds of prices. Not just governments and businesses, gas stations, city buses in Cape Town offering Wi-Fi. So, and the reason this is happening is because it can. This relatively permissionless technology, Wi-Fi combined with its extremely low cost, when you combine that with the vast capacity that you get from fiber optic infrastructures like Peter Bonner and chocolate, it's two great tastes that go together. But it's not limited to that. The same kind of innovations in manufacturing and technology is actually opening up innovation elsewhere. So the same kinds of technology are now enabling GSM based stations that cost tens of thousands of dollars instead of hundreds of thousands of dollars. And these are just a few of the companies and you'll hear more about that later. The challenge here is it's not unlicensed. They're working with licensed spectrum and this innovation that's happening here is thwarted by the fact that it's very, very hard for these companies to actually get started in countries where there's no access to spectrum. Happily, there is one sterling example here in Mexico where the regulator gave an experimental license to an NGO in Oaxaca who began to roll out low cost GSM based stations which so impressed the regulator that they created a 10 megahertz set aside of spectrum for rural access. And simple things like that can unlock potential for delivering rural access. But I've talked too much, I think, about technology that all of this technology is not really gonna go anywhere without the local capacity to build it. So alongside of enabling regulation, we also need massive investment in building the engineers of tomorrow in building that generation of people who are gonna grab hold of that technology whether it's white space, wifi, or low cost GSM and build out these networks because now we live in the world where it's within the power of entrepreneurs, of communities, municipalities to determine their own connectivity. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. Turns out to be a great lead-in to what I'm gonna talk about. I think everyone here has probably been to a conference or discussion about connecting the next billion, connecting the last billion, connecting 3 billion. So I'm gonna start by trying to answer the question of why they're still unconnected today. All right, which button's which here? There we go. So you can understand, and as Steve said, wireless has been the dominant way of connecting new people to the internet, but it's kind of hit its limit installed. And you can understand why by looking at the unit economics of how traditional cell sites are built. In a rural area, you generally have lower population density, so you've lower people per cell site. And their average revenue per month is much lower. In the areas we're working in, in Rwanda it's a dollar a month. But it gets even worse because these are typically off-grid areas. So a cell site has to run on diesel. And it's typical cell site's about four kilowatts. So you can spend $4,000 a month on diesel fuel while your smaller number of subscribers are spending a dollar a month and it just doesn't pencil. So it's a rational economic decision for the carriers not to build there. And the message, if one message you leave here today, I wanna emphasize that the problem is not capital, not CAPEX, it's OPEX. So if your revenue is less than your expenses, you don't make money. There's no ROI, it's infinite. Economic 101. Yeah, but look at how a lot of governments and philanthropic organizations try to help this problem. USF funds will say, I'm gonna build 300 cell sites in rural Zambia, one example I know about, and give them to the operators. And they say, you got a free network. No, thank you, but no thank you because the day I turn it on I start losing money. So the challenge that we've taken on is how do you flip that OPEX equation around so that these sites can make money? Then we can talk about what the ROI is on the capital. And we've achieved this by combining, whoa, is that about that? By combining technology and business model innovation in three ways. First was we had to get off diesel. It's expensive, it's also the highest theft item in sites which increases your security costs and it's an environmental disaster. In fact, there's a nice study done in rural Africa that showed you burn more diesel, bringing diesel to a rural African site than you do at the site. So the environmental impact is two X. So people have tried to build large solar fields, large battery fields to support cell sites, but at four kilowatts it's just not practical or cost effective. We took a different approach. We said we're gonna re-engineer everything at the cell site with the goal of minimizing power. Our entire cell site takes 90 watts of power. And at 90 watts, it's a light bulb. You can run off solar and battery. And you know what, at 90 watts you don't need a whole lot of battery to go 24 hours without sun. So the whole thing becomes much more cost effective. So we got rid of the big cost of diesel. Number two was the traditional model is every carrier builds their own network. Well if everyone has to build their own network and we're all nobody's gonna advertise it. So we created a wholesale model. Well we build and run a whole cellular network including a switch, but we have no subscribers. We strike deals with the carriers so when their subscribers come onto our network they play us a few pennies for every minute or megabyte they use. And the carriers have no cost in building or running that network. Now when I see created, we actually, so to strike an agreement with a carrier you have to be a GSMA carrier member. We didn't qualify. We didn't have subscribers. We didn't have spectrum. To their credit, we worked with GSMA. They created a new carrier class for wholesale so we could become members and strike agreements with carriers. Wholesale not only has the advantage of one network for multiple subscriber bases but you've eliminated all the retail costs of the business. We don't have stores, phones up to these, support so you can run a very, very streamlined business. Now the third piece is my favorite because I think it's a global demographic that's true of you. We've looked at it in the rural U.S. and Africa and India. In rural areas, people tend to live in small towns or villages or otherwise within a couple kilometers of some road. That's not a highway. It's not even a paved road where we're building in Rwanda. It's a dirt road, you might call it more of a path but everybody needs access. So we realized, wait, if we cover the roads in two kilometers on either side of the road, we're gonna cover all the places that people that work and commute and that's what you really care about. Then when I realized, wait a minute, we only want to go two miles, two kilometers from a cell site. I don't need a 300 foot tower with four kilowatts of power. I can do something that most of the people in the industry still think is crazy. I can cover rural with small cells. Carriers think of small cells as urban infill or in building and rural as big boomer cells and we flipped it around and said, no, I'm trying to cover these two kilometer radiuses so I can do it with small cells. I need less land, my tower is less reinforced because it's not as high. Nice thing about wireless, to double your distance, you have to square the energy. We win by the square root by shrinking it so we reduce power that way. It's a complete win. You combine these three things, solar, wholesale and small cell and our economics are 10x better and we are building a network now on Rwanda where the ARPU is $1 and we believe we can be profitable there. So one comment about the market and the people there. So if you look at this demographic of how many people own smartphones, how many have 2G phones, how many don't have a phone. The dominant in these areas is 2G phones and this is overall, I guarantee you all those smartphones are in the big cities. And so the people there have 2G phones. So we're all talking about building the information superhighway, whether it's Wi-Fi or 4G or some form of rating internet down from the sky. But what we're very focused on, we have to connect the devices that people have today. And their first experience with the internet is gonna be on a 2G cell phone. And if that's not good or useful, we may not step them up to the information superhighway or it'll be a harder path. So 2G networks are the on ramp to this information superhighway and we have to build that well and make it work for people to enable them to move up. Now, I know we're talking about global here. I wanna emphasize America's part of the globe. And thanks to Kim's former boss, we have some great statistics about rural America. There are 23 million people in rural America without broadband today. The second stat is the most disturbing. 47% of the nation's students lack the FCC broadband requirement. In case you can't do math this early in the morning, that's less than 100 kilobits per student. 47% of the students in the country. So our first network that we built was actually in rural Vermont in areas where there's no connectivity. And one success is, as you see, we have nine carriers using the network, both US and Canadians. So there's parts of nine subscriber bases amortizing that cost of that one network. The reason I wanna bring this up is, A, it's a problem, but I find this one much harder than our Africa work. There's not as much social... There are billion-dollar social impact funds trying to do stuff in Africa. Much, much less in the rural US. Same problem. And as Megan mentioned, we're having this divide between the needed and the not needed. That's only bigger unless we fix this problem. And we need to fix this problem to bring people together and improve people. So the reason I put this slide in, it was our first prototype network that validated all the concepts, but it's important and we have to focus on it as well. Couple data points for you. Now, I put them on telephone poles in Vermont. My total capital per pole installed, 12K. My monthly operational cost, because we use creative backhaul and low energy, is $135 a month. At 135 bucks a month, I ought to be able to make money. And anyone who's interested, I'm happy to talk to you more about these afterwards. Now, this is a really big effort. So we needed to build one of these in Africa to prove the model, because with our three aspects, which are totally different than networks are built, it was really hard to raise private capital. So we got someone to fund a network in Rwanda for the purpose of, I said, look, if I can prove the economics, we can expand across Africa and India and cover those billion people. We're very happy to say our network went live two weeks ago, our first carrier on board is Airtel. We are building, by the end of the year, we will finish 376 small cell sites in rural Rwanda, covering a million people who have no connectivity today, where the ARPU is a dollar. And we think, fingers crossed, that the network can be profitable, and then we can move up. And what we're doing is we're doing 2G and Wi-Fi, and the Wi-Fi is free with advertising. I consider the Wi-Fi an experiment. Based on our anecdotal knowledge, I don't think there's that many Wi-Fi devices there. So what we want to do there is learn what is it that gets people to start using it to deploying devices, to move up from the phone, or buy a phone that has GSM and Wi-Fi in it. It's a real learning opportunity. There's an opportunity, a great study, we got a million people with no connectivity today that we'll have it by the end of the year, we can figure out why. So in summary, we have a model which we think can be profitable down to community sizes of a few hundred people at $1 ARPU. That's a picture of our site in Rwanda. It's a three by five meter plot of land with a 10 meter pole. We are already, based on what we've done, starting to expand and examine other countries. Ghana, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Kenya, and we just incorporated an entity for this business in India. India's a different kind of animal. So as soon as we started doing this, the government handed us a list of 40,000 villages they know with no connectivity, not even phone line, with one to 2,000 people each. So that's a nice start of 40 to 80 million people. It's a completely different scale. Thank you. Well, thank you to everyone. Thank you to New America and Michael for being at this all possible. I'm here to talk to you about an initiative we're doing called One World Connected, which is something that I never get tired of talking about. First, I should acknowledge that in fact, what we are doing owes a great debt to the great work that Steve and Vanu and all the wonderful Dave and all the other people who are doing things in the world because we're actually coming into this at a slightly different place and I'm happy to share with you what we're doing. So the problem has been laid out pretty well. About half the world isn't three plus billion or not online. Adoption rates are slowing. Adoption rates are slowing in Asia and in Africa in particular where the need is the greatest. This is a problem. Governments, businesses, many of the non-profit organizations and technical community are doing a lot of great things. The problem is no one is collecting data about this system. No one's cataloging them to know what is going on. And the other problem is no one's actually collecting data to validate what's actually working. And there's a tendency, there's an interesting bias to the extent to which there is reported information. They tend to talk about success stories. No one is systematically cataloging all to find out what the failure stories are and to find out proportionally what's actually working. And so in fact, this is where we see a tremendous advantage for a need for people to fill a gap. And that's where One World Connected comes in. And in many ways, I'm a great, very dependent on the work that people doing this on the ground are doing. This is where a university-based research project can really do some good. We actually can synthesize across different projects. We're not doing the actual work, but we can actually use academic standards where appropriate we can sign confidentiality agreements. And I also have students, the work we're doing is extremely labor-intensive and as data collection always is, but the advantage is this is a fantastic learning opportunity for fairly young people who are very energized and very animated by the project. So what are we doing? We've embarked on a three-year research project to identify every innovative method to connect people to the internet that we can find. At this point, we've identified 600 case studies and one of the, we've asked about, we've been given open at the end of this talk to ask what we can do. One of the things we need is the help of the community to identify even more, sort of a two-edged sword from our standpoint, which is we're creating more work for ourselves, but this is the kind of work we're really eager to do. To emphasize that we are looking at both supply side and demand side case studies, I'll give you examples of both. What we've learned is yes, availability and cost are issues, but in Brazil, China, India, and actually US and the EU, we're discovering that the biggest issues are more about the relevance and the digital literacy issues. In other words, you could build great networks, you could make them cheap, but unless we solve the relevance and digital literacy issues, if you build it, they won't come. And in fact, what we're doing is then we're gonna actually try to synthesize these and to turn this massive, well, people have told me just the catalog itself is already proving extremely useful to people doing work. They can find out in Rwanda who's doing what and this becomes a major important step. The key for us is to actually develop a consistent set of metrics that can be applicable across all projects to talk about cost effectiveness. And part of it's just connectivity and cost, but part of it also is quality of connectivity. What kind of bandwidth will the technology support? And for us, the key question that both, Steve and Vaughn, we've already hinted at, sustainability and scalability are critical because there's a lot of efforts of being funded by USO funding, by corporate social responsibility funding. That's important, that's helpful, it's not gonna get us to three billion. And so we are actually looking for the underlying OPEX business models to try to find out what's gonna actually work and what's gonna scale. The kicker that we're really working on now and this is those who've heard this talk before is we are actually deep into the process of validating the data we're putting out. We've got a model survey instrument which we're now running by, people are dummying up. But the key for us is to turn it not just in connectivity for its own sake, but to turn it into outcome metrics in terms of health, in terms of education, in terms of economic growth. And this is where we're having to tie in with not just the communications ministers and the connectivity internet community. These are problems that have been facing the development community generally. And to try to understand what metrics we can get on healthcare. For example, the most prevalent metrics we have are maternal mortality and infant mortality. And we need these at the community level because we're really collecting data not at the national level, but at the project by project level. We have to validate how in fact the connection between those measures which we can see to make sure we're not the person looking for their keys under the light post because that's where the light is, but actually make sure we understand how they tie into things we care about and what the time scale for measurement to try to figure out all these things. And then the last step is to really engage this key stakeholders. Part of it's gonna be ministries who want to build this, but as Anne-Marie said at the beginning, we found that the international finance community, the development banks and other people have a tremendous need for information not just for what works, but they wanna know the marginal impact of an additional investment dollar because they have to calibrate across a lot of different needs to make the necessary trade-offs. So this is the big part of it. The best part of this to me, and this is what I really enjoy talking about, is let's give you a few examples. So one example of a demand side case study is Intel Shebo Connect. My apologies for the way it's displaying. This is an attempt to actual close the gender access gap through digital literacy training. They actually have deployed this not just in teaching centers, but also they have modules so you can do it by hand in your own devices to the extent to which that's possible. One of the things we're doing, we talk about digital literacy training. When you scratch on this, you find that digital literacy training comes in a lot of flavors. There's a lot of different aspects to find out which ones are actually working as helpful. What's fascinating to me is they're actually doing it not just as training, but they're creating tools so they can maintain networks after their training. And in terms of building this demand side, community building and capacity building, so that entrepreneurs can talk with other entrepreneurs after they've been trained to develop those kinds of connections. And what we found is that right now, this initiative is trained to 150,000 women. And in fact, there's a wonderful video online that I'm happy to share with you where a woman tells her personal story about how she's created in the local marketplace of an entrepreneurial business of hair braiding set up next to her mother's agricultural stand. And it's really been a lovely development that has yielded tremendous benefits already in country. There's a community that often doesn't get talked about. That's a refugee community. And in Europe, this is an acute problem. They have an enormous problem because you can't buy SIM cards if you don't have an address and refugees don't have addresses. And in fact, there's enormous problems that they're having getting these people on. Through public, through private donations, there's an initiative going on to attach people at rate limited basic connectivity, 50 kilobits per second to these refugee communities using open source technologies, hacked Raspberry Pi with open source information. And also they've put the cases together. They've actually put 3D printing and other aspects available publicly. So if people want to replicate it, it's all done on an open basis. What's fascinating is this has been tremendously successful in allowing this minimal community to really get online. There's actually a wonderful picture I saw where there's, which I wasn't prepared to get ahold of it. There were all these refugees, they were lying on the backs up against a hurricane fence which they couldn't get out of. And they're all huddled in one corner because it's where they could get access and they're all on devices. Because that's their connectivity to the world because their ability to communicate and their ability to move is so constrained. They're actually talking about expanding this to other countries and it's a wonderful, wonderful story. Another story we ran across is in Vanuatu. There's an island, we think of Vanuatu as a main island. There is some remote islands that are two days travel from the nearest healthcare and the nearest hospitals. And in fact, they have no connectivity whatsoever. A Peace Corps worker has been there three years, actually created from scratch, a community-based network to attach her island, committing most of the bandwidth to use, a telemedicine center for remote diagnosis so you actually find out when you need to travel two days to the relevant hospitals to make that possible. And in fact, if you wanna know how this really works, they are piggybacking on satellite connectivity that's normally allocated to the emperor of Japan who does not require all of that and they got permission to use it. Their biggest problem is when the emperor of Japan travels out of country, they lose the connectivity because they shut it down because it's not needed for its primary purpose, but it's a fascinating little story. And in fact, this has been wonderfully brought, the whole cost, 6,000 US, brought net healthcare real incomes, impacts to a small community. And that in fact, this is a good example where they were actually able to change policy to make it work, they needed to convince the regulator to turn part of their 900 megahertz on lightness in the spectrum and make it available for community networking. It's fascinating, when we spoke with this woman at the IGF, she actually remote dialed in, we were in contact with her. She frankly said after three years she was losing energy and she'd been laboring and by connecting to a community outside, she found it revitalizing and she found it inspiring and I was really humbled by that because I said it's not us who's inspiring you, it's the other way around. So there are, these are just a few of the examples we're giving, we've 30 up on our website already. There are, as Vanu said, we have US-based case studies, actually they're wonderful because we get better data, frankly, and often longitudinal data, but for the challenges that Steve and other people have identified, in the US the problem is not lack of technical expertise, it's not lack of capital, and not function capital markets, it's just, some of these areas just are hard to serve. We have another project in Europe, Scottish Highlands, very hard to serve, just very hyper-rural and these are fantastic opportunities to look at, I'm happy to talk to you more about them as we go. The ask, we have a mailing list that's through a dynamic coalition through the internet governance forum, we invite you to join it. We really would invite you to give us any data you have or identify more case studies, that is something we'd like to crowdsource and there is a crowdsource tool on the webpage. We really need to help developing the metrics in the sense that if you know people who have experience in the development communities working these up, we're in the process of working our way through them, but finding other people are really willing to partner with us, we have a lot of conversations, but few people identified to help really help it grow. Something I forgot to put on here, we're actually looking for more research staff, we're looking at hiring at least two more young sort of researchers who are gonna do pound their way through the case studies and the interviews to make it happen and we're looking for a communications person because we're gonna spin out blog posts about everything that we can find. And then lastly, there's a bunch of social media options for how to spread this around. This is really a venture that a lot of people supported. We're very grateful for Ramon's involvement, he mentions IEEE World Bank, World Economic Forum, people centered internet have been all fantastically supportive and we really would welcome any, this is the kind of thing that's really gonna take the contributions for all the people who are making it out on the ground and so we'd welcome any input you have. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you, Michael, for the invitation to participate. It's refreshing for me to be up here today talking with you about this topic. In my position, I often am talking about technology policy or spectrum policy in a little bit more of an abstract setting. So looking at how it's impacting people's lives around the world is really quite exhilarating for me. So glad to be here with you. Let's see, my slide is there. So I'm here today to talk to you about one organization, quite terrific organization actually that's tackling this challenge in South Africa. That organization is Project The Seasway and Project The Seasway has a mission of connecting people across South Africa to the internet specifically with a focus on providing that connectivity for the purposes of education and employment. And Ruckus's role in that is we're one of their key technology providers. We provide the Wi-Fi access network for Project The Seasway. So we're quite honored to partner with them in that way. And if you don't know, which I'm gonna be surprised if too many of you do know, The Seasway is a COSA word and it means tribe, people, or nation, which is really quite appropriate because what they're seeking to do is to build and then strengthen community via connectivity by bringing people online. So looking a little bit at just the situation in South Africa, I know we're looking to bring 1.5 or as a stretch goal, 3 billion people online. I think that's fabulous. About 35 million of those people are in South Africa. And I would say they've made great strides over the last couple of decades in terms of bringing basic rights for each citizen to a base level allocation for electricity and water. But the truth of the matter is that internet connectivity remains out of reach of most of these people. As I think Vanu and Steve both alluded to in their presentations and Vanu earlier, the economics of the traditional cellular industry just really don't meet the needs of these folks. So one calculation is that for about a gigabit cellular data plan, you'd be looking at 12 to 15% of the disposable income at the minimum wage, which is where a good portion of these people are operating. So I think somebody earlier said that in the developed world that's maybe two to 3% disposable. Here we're talking 12 to 15, which is just totally out of reach. As an aside, I don't have a slide on this, but as people have been talking, it occurs to me that one of the things, I know Steve mentioned this, is just the traditional licensed spectrum auction model is one of the reasons that the cellular economics, the traditional cellular economics don't necessarily work here. I think we should be looking at what the FCC has done with the Citizens Broadband Radio Service in the US. I know we've talked about TV white spaces. CVRS is another new spectrum regime that's obviously starting here, starting to be looked at by regulators and other geographies now as well. And CVRS opens up more cellular oriented spectrum. So in the US it'll be the 3.5 gigahertz band, but it's opening that up for opportunistic use, a little bit more akin to what we've done with Wi-Fi. I think the commissioners took a really progressive stance there and started to try to blur the distinctions between licensed and unlicensed spectrum. So white spaces certainly is gonna be very important in getting these people online. I think that the opportunistic use of cellular oriented spectrum may be another good way to do that. CVRS also supports the wholesale model that Vaanu was talking about. So a neutral host provider can build a network and then different mobile operators can sort of bring their subscribers onto that footprint. And the economics just become much more viable in the developing world. So that's sort of some of the reality in South Africa, 35 million people. I mentioned that Project Diseaseway has a real focus on education and employment. So I'm sure many of us have school-aged kids. I've got three. And the internet is just part and parcel of what they do. All the homework assignments are submitted that way. We get their grades that way. When I don't know how to help them with their homework, I Google it. I mean, it's just part of educating kids these days. So unfortunately, in South Africa, for many of the children, this is their reality of what the educational experience is like and it's sort of dialing the clock back, two or three decades, in my opinion. Many of us probably did walk to school. But lack of textbooks, certainly lack of access to online content. Just the ability to educate yourself online these days. I mean, this isn't just a K through 12 education issue. I mean, this is sort of a lifelong education issue in my mind. If I can't figure out how to do something around the house or on one of my cars, the first thing I do is go on YouTube and do a search and usually I can find somebody who's taken the time to record a video on how to do that. These people don't have that opportunity. So this is education for employment. Same thing. It's dialing the clock back a couple of decades. Imagine what it was like when you applied for your last job, if it was any time. Again, in the last couple of decades, it probably involved email communication, doing your research online, submitting your resume or CV that way, perhaps doing conference calls or teleconferences even for interviews. And what about just researching the organization that you're applying to? So all of that goes away if you don't have internet connectivity, which is where these folks are. So what's Project Deseaseway doing about this? They have a goal that every citizen should be within walking distance of free wifi. Steve mentioned them during his overview of some of the projects in Africa. And so they started in the city of Shuane, which is in the Gautong province. They've now taken the model to actually over eight provinces in South Africa. So it's expanding rapidly. They started in a 2013 timeframe. And in that three years, they've built out now over a thousand what they call free internet zones. And these are typically in conjunction with an educational institution or a community center. They'll put up a wifi access point and then the back all assets to it, typically fiber. They've got some infrastructure partners that they're working with. You're providing the fiber and the bandwidth on that. I think Steve made a very pertinent point about the fiber build out that has happened across Africa as those undersea cables have gone around the continent. And there is a good amount of fiber capacity that's available. So they've tapped into that with some of their partners. We're also working with like liquid telecom who's doing fiber throughout Kenya and a few other countries in Africa as well. So the model is that this is free internet. It started out at 250 megabyte limit per device per day. They've upped that now recently to 500 megabytes. And it's rate limited to 15 megabits downlink and then a megabit on the uplink. That 500 megabyte cap though is waived for what's considered local community generated content. So they have actually television programming that they're now distributing across the network. That's not counted against this rate cap. Nor is educational or other locally generated content. So the 500 is really more sort of general internet usage. The 2.6 million unique users. So again, in about three years time of that 35 million unconnected people in South Africa, they've been able to touch 2.6 million people. So I'm really encouraged by the progress that they have made. I won't worry about sessions, but then the other statistic that I think is worth noting is this 3.6 petabytes of traffic that has been carried over the network. So for those of you who did the conversion here, so that's 3.6 million gigabytes. Again, if a gigabyte cellular data plan is consuming roughly 12 to 15% of somebody's income at the minimum wage, think of the people who've been able to connect to this and get on the internet for the first time in many cases, who never would have had that opportunity without this. And Vanu, I'm gonna be very curious to see what you find in Rwanda with the Wi-Fi service that you're providing. I have a feeling people will come out of the woodwork, so to speak, with devices there. It'll be good. It does take a coalition, I think as Megan talked about earlier, with the World War II shipbuilding examples, when you had people rallying from all different sectors to make that happen and creating some amazing results, that's the same thing here. So at the heart of this, you've got Project of Seasway, which is a nonprofit, but then you've got close cooperation from government specifically at the municipal level, they're now also working at the regional and national levels, and then the infrastructure providers. So this wouldn't really work economically without some participation from Neotel and a couple of other bandwidth providers that they're working with. So it's really the confluence of those interests coming together that have made this happen. And they're looking at different models now, so Shwane was initially fully funded by the government for a three-year period. There's been a change of administration at the municipal level, and they're starting to look at ways of potentially adapting that going forward. So one thought is they'll continue to be the basic 500 megabyte allocation for every citizen, but if people want to go above that, they may do like an ad-sponsored model. I think somebody mentioned that earlier. So there may be some corporate sponsors who would then give the citizen a right to consume data above the cap, so see how that evolves. I appreciated Chris's point about, we need some ways to quantify what success means here and what those metrics ought to be. And I think that's really admirable work and I like forward to seeing some of that, not just to know what the successes are, but also where we are messing up and where we need to course correct. However, I also really enjoy the personal success stories that I see. So with the Seasway they have just a catalog of the lives that they have impacted and these are entrepreneurs, their students, their folks producing music and post ended up on YouTube and just people who are engaging in the online community, both in South Africa and in the global online community for the first time who wouldn't have been able to otherwise. So I find these really encouraging, it makes me feel good about what it is that we're doing here. So thank you, I would highly encourage you to go to the Project of Seasway website. There's a lot of information, some videos and again you can look through those testimonials. Thanks. I know we're running a little bit behind so we'll take 15 minutes or so to chat up here and then we'll open it up to questions as well as offers and suggestions from the audience. A couple of you, maybe all of you mentioned the success stories that you're trying to measure from this and Chris and Venu we were talking backstage about one of the problems that you're all running into is it's easy in some ways to measure the connectivity and the success you're having that way but it's harder to measure the impact that that connectivity is having on secondary effects such as healthcare, education, employment and it's been very hard for you to find best practices for that or people who have the expertise to be able to provide that kind of service for you as you guys are providing the technical backend and financial services. So what are some of the ways forward on that to help demonstrate the importance of these projects through their success? So I'm having to start. Sure. One of the most oddly enough, the most interesting focusing device has been the global commitment by countries to the Sustainable Development Goals that has activated countries at the highest levels of leadership to bring in other ministries that used to be thought of just as a communications ministry issue and that has brought in healthcare ministries who've been studying issues such as turning the real outcome metrics into usable information for a very long time and bringing them into the internet connectivity debate and so what we're finding is that that focus the general quality issues, the education issues all these things down the line on the SDGs have activated communities that didn't think that they had any connection to broadband and they're now here now and they've been doing this for a long time and they do it better than we do frankly and we need to tap into that. And excuse me. Yeah. Interesting. I think there's a broad assumption that there's great data on connectivity. But it's not actually true. We have been doing some work recently supported by USA's Global Development Lab through FHI 360 looking at financing the last mile and looking at market assessments and actually finding out what coverage looks like turns out to be quite challenging because the data is all provided by the operators and the coverage maps they provide, well... Marketing. Let's just say they're aspirational. So for instance in Uganda the maps supplied by the operators to the GSMA indicate that there's greater than 97% 2G coverage. Now an independent study done by consultants contracted by the regulator there looking at tower coverage based on towers suggests 81% coverage and that amounts to a difference of nearly six million people. So validating that data becomes tremendously important and I would argue that not only do we need good evaluation data we actually need better raw data on connectivity because when we talk about connecting everyone then this data becomes absolutely critical. And all of your projects have a large component of wireless in the way of getting to people who are hard to reach who are very rural they're in small villages and towns that are not easily reached in a lot of cases other than a path or so. Wireless can get the service so far but does it fiber have to be a big component of getting that service to the point where wireless can then be provided to serve the last mile? And where is that fiber gonna come from? Where is that build out coming from which is really the big cat-back cost? Steve mentioned a lot of it is already there at least in the urban areas and outside of it a little bit. So I can give you the examples from our two networks. So in Rwanda they did a pretty good job of the urban areas and all the national highways have fiber alarm. So when we're in a remote area maybe I have to go 50 or 100 miles through a wireless microwave link to where I can get to fiber. But that's okay, that's a viable solution provided there aren't monopoly rents on the towers. Another example is in Vermont they had a broadband stimulus fiber build and it's tough to rain valleys and mountains but we can go wireless hops down the road until we hit a fiber point and that's much better connectivity and much more cost effective than any other way. So fiber doesn't have to be everywhere it has to be within viable reach of a wireless last mile hop or middle mile hop. And in fact they've actually the default backfill for a lot of this is satellite backhaul which is what you need to get the really remote areas to connect them on it's not optimal. But one of the funny things is people will say oh that doesn't work or in the US debate we have a huge problem where people will say wireless oh it's fixed line or nothing wireless doesn't count. This is where I think data helps a lot which is I wanna study that without a bias. Even within wireless people say it has to be cellular it can't be Wi-Fi. People will say community anchor institution connectivity through schools and libraries isn't meaningful. Our approach is really to take all of that without a preconception or a notion of which one's gonna be successful and let the data do the talking because we really need to validate it because for these community anchor institutions the alternative is not a 3G or 4G connection yet. Really the alternative is no connectivity whatsoever. And figuring out what's viable in these different environments wireless I think will prove itself out in an important way. But even where we see for example the Wi-Fi solutions there's a great opportunity for where commercial paid cellular works out well we don't have to spend the effort and the money well we should understand where that exists to and let the normal private providers fix that problem. Just to add one last piece on fiber there is a lot of fiber optic infrastructure. However the cost of that infrastructure to operators remains a critical barrier. And I think this relates to a point that Manu brought up earlier is the notion that fiber is infrastructure. It's not a toll road and you know and it shouldn't be treated as a toll road it should be treated the same way we treat investments in dams and roads and railways. We want as many people rolling over those that infrastructure because that's what creates social and economic development and looking at the investment strategies and how pricing happens on fiber networks is something that could really unlock things for operators and for. Let me add a concrete data point to what you just said. So in Rwanda as happens a lot of countries one company bought up most of the towers so they kind of have a monopoly and there's one fiber which is in a company that's 51% owned by SK and 49% by the government but it's a monopoly. So to connect our rural site I go microwave to a tower. I have to pay 450 bucks a month to put the radio on the tower and based on the tower there's fiber I pay $200 per month per megabit per second. Okay now remember my consumers are spending a dollar a month that's 650 right there. That's more than I pay for all my costs in Vermont. It's ridiculous and so it's not the availability of fiber it's the pricing's and the sort of de facto monopoly rents that's the problem. And Dave you talked about project disease way and premise on the idea that community hotspots are becoming a really effective way of making sure that connectivity gets to people where they are. How do you see that scaling over time and where do you see the commercial operators playing into that strategy? Okay well I definitely think that that's the model that has been most successful for a cease way is putting the hotspots usually in conjunction with either the educational institutions in the community or just in a sort of social gathering spot. And so that's the model they have proven out. They have in some spot, well I mean you can look at their daily statistics and they have over 100,000 people connect each day. Some of the hotspots they have concurrent users in the 300 to 400 range. So they're definitely seeing the usage where they put the coverage so far. And they definitely plan to replicate that in new areas that they're expanding into Eastern Cape and other areas. So yeah I think that's proven itself very well in terms of where they're putting the coverage today. For I wanna make sure I understood the commercial question. So are you asking where can commercial operators partner with them in providing that coverage? Is that something that you're looking at? Not at this point. I would say this is really a government led initiative through a cease way. And so there's been just some sensitivities to the commercial participation. Shwana is looking at perhaps a commercial sponsorship for people who want to go above the base level access but that's the only sort of corporate involvement that I'm aware of at this time. And I have one more question before opening it up to, oh sorry did you have one more thing? Well one thing they may look at is also sort of making it available as a wholesale service for operators, so for operator subscribers to utilize sort of in a wifi version of the model that Vaughn was describing with the GSM service. And that would just enable subsidization of the build out of the model. But that would still be the sort of free service for the citizens but subscriber use might be in parallel to that. And my last question before opening it up to the audience would be given the importance of unlicensed spectrum in all the projects or a lot of the projects that you guys are working on. What, I mean the FCC obviously has made a lot of progress in trying to free up more spectrum for unlicensed uses, including instead of auction that's concluding shortly. What would you ask the FCC in the U.S. and other regulators around the country or around the globe, what are you suggesting to them in terms of that issue and making sure that more spectrum is made available not just in the U.S. but everywhere in order to make those kinds of services more ubiquitous. We have a really good example in fact what I'm telling the other governments we're working with is they should emulate some of the things the U.S. has already put in place. So, and this is actually more on the licensed spectrum side because if we're running cellular we need to run on licensed spectrum. So in Vermont, we actually struck a secondary market steel would sprint, right? Because they're not using their spectrum in Vermont. So we have a lease from them of 20 megahertz of spectrum in these areas and we provide coverage for them. And it's a much better way. So the spectrum's there, it's unused now there can be some economic mechanism to get it utilized. And a lot of U.S. was really the leader in this and other countries are slowly following. That's a great thing to be able to do where you can lease, loan, lend, sell spectrum. So if you're unusing it you can unlock the potential and people can use it. However, I will say I really like the Eric, the model that Steve talked about in Mexico where they set aside spectrum for entrepreneurs because even though the spectrum's unused sometimes carriers are unwilling to part with it because it's a really valuable asset. And if it sits there on the books doing nothing it just appreciates. So there has to be an incentive to use it. The example in Rhizomatica it's not just they set aside for entrepreneurs they've actually given in Oaxaca they've given them a license. They're actually a licensed user of the community networking community and they have a paid Wi-Fi model so it's not just pure openness. The interesting question is we really talk about unlicensed and open access spectrum. We're having a problem in the U.S. other places of interference which is for example in the original 2.5 gigahertz band microwave ovens that are badly shielded actually lead into there and they don't behave well. But the other problem is if it's really open access you can do anything you want. Well Bluetooth is there, cell phone, you know the cordless phones are there and if they don't actually use the same collision control you actually have problems. And what you're seeing in the LTE unlicensed movement is that if it's really open you'll see licensed users who see a big swath of spectrum move it over. And actually I'm working with an engineering and economics professor who's jointly appointed with models to actually understand that there actually is some math you can do to talk about moving both licensed and licensed in proportion. That if you just throw unlicensed at it what you'll do is you'll move uses from licensed to unlicensed and in fact you can actually make the congestion worse. And so it's a very, it's a trickier thing than a lot of people think which is just throwing at it a lot of more unlicensed spectrum at it and that thinking through how to do it is really critical to making sure it works to achieve the goals that you want. Yeah, I would just, I'm glad you brought up sort of the unlicensed LTE topic because Wi-Fi traditionally operates in 2.4 and five gigahertz and in five gigahertz we now have other services that are coming into the band besides Wi-Fi and so some of the 3GPP initiatives to bring LTE or augment the sort of licensed capacity with the unlicensed spectrum capacity as well. So that'll be contending with Wi-Fi and five gigahertz. So I do feel it's important that regulators look at expanding the amount of spectrum that is available for unlicensed. I certainly agree we also need to look at cellular oriented spectrum and making that more accessible either through initiatives like in Oaxaca or again through what the US is doing with the CBRS program which would provide for an opportunity, it's a tiered model so you've got the incumbents and then there's a sort of licensed tier and then at the bottom is an opportunistic tier if it's not being utilized you can use it sort of like unlicensed. So I'm hoping other regulators will look at that model as well but again I think there is a concern five gigahertz is the future of Wi-Fi but other technologies are moving in there so we will need more spectrum made available for unlicensed in the future. Plus 5G over the top though. Over the top as well. One quick last point and that is I think the one thing we can guarantee is we're going to be surprised by technology and so we need regulatory frameworks that are better at coping with surprises so to move away from monolithic strategies for regulation to a more diversified approach that embraces different approaches to spectrum regulation and then FOIS is us to reinforce success. I agree. Once it can react to where the market you know succeeds. I think we'll open it up to the audience I think we have one question or comment right here. Okay and also when you before you speak can you please identify yourself and the organization that you're with. David Wilcox reach scale. So three data points. We don't have a single continentally scaled social enterprise after 30 years. We're not applying open innovation to countries. We're not actually looking whether how many of the most innovative models countries have and then creating an ability to import the models they don't have which will generally be the majority. And when we put electricity and wireless into most locations I tend to be reminded of the book called hope is not a strategy. So if we went to countries I'm curious do you find governments who've already selected a set of scaling enterprises that are already working in these countries on the actual end result be it connecting artisans to a million person network or connecting their healthcare or connecting education putting Wi-Fi into the 53,000 single teacher schools that the largest most scaled education organization the world runs in India. Do you find governments doing that and if you don't do you tell them they should be doing that and are you interested in having that kind of engagement with the scaling organizations that are actually able to deliver the results that the connectivity promises. Yeah I mean I don't see it as much in the government but everywhere we go you see lots of organizations trying to do many of the things that you talked about. And I guess it's a little self-serving but all of them say well our problem is we don't have connectivity. So my approach is let's partner. You know I was talking with an off-grid electric company that puts in solar panels on homes and then with mobile money you can buy six hours of power for your house. Well they can't build where there's no connectivity. I said look tell me where you'd like to build. I can build coverage. Now I have users there and you have a business there and we could leverage that across all those different sectors and I think there needs to be a coordinating function there so that we're not building here and they're trying to build there and we know where we're going. If we all go together I think you can really uplift your community very quickly. And actually Google Fiber has created a new paradigm about how to work with governments. Is they use a business strategy called gamification. They essentially said we're giving away a network. Who wants to make it easy for us? And it's spectacularly successful and it's a model that's now moved to the whole industry because cities used to think of this as a chance to get money, rents. And now they've changed it where they're saying this is, we're partners. We're building something that we're gonna work together that's not gonna show up that way. This shows up in Rhizomatica and Oaxaca. One of the requirements they have, they're trying to build out 2,500 villages. They look for broad based support from the local community. And those are the ones who get it first. And it really makes the community get organized and decide whether to do it. And in fact, once those success models get validated the laggards kinda get bumped along and say well what are you doing? The other beautiful thing about this is I actually think these initiatives work better at the municipal level. When you start talking about larger governments. In India, in the ministry, you have to get seven levels of approval. And that's default. And the reason it's so hard to root out is because you have to pay something to somebody at each level. And it makes it very, very difficult to do business. People are going around that and going to the local level just to get that activated. And to put a plug, actually what's interesting is Commissioner Pi in the US is launching something called the Broadband Employment Advisory Committee to look at even in the US what are the local obstacles in terms of rights of way, licensing and all of this? And is there something a government that wants to take some of that or brush out of the way can do? And the hope is we can create some models here about really unleashing the local potential because those are the people who really benefit from it. Most of the organizations I'm talking about have actually already either solved that problem with the government or for example the 53,000 school organization doesn't deal with the government at all. Most important decision they made never deal with the government. They're in 53,000 villages. Any other questions or comments or asks? Right over here. I'm Bob Hershey, I'm a consultant. What experience have you had of getting together meetings online of donors and users and communities and getting an economic consensus of what people want to do and getting the money together? Well there is a burgeoning community around this. This example is one of the IEEE who Manu rightly called out is doing semi-annual meetings where they're actually set up separate work streams. It's now mature to the point where they're actually looking for project leads on each of the work streams. The World Economic Forum is convening an aspect of these and the Internet Governance Forum also does. So we actually see them come together and we're trying not to reinvent the wheel. What we discover is the large scale meetings actually help in the beginning but in the end someone who's got the bandwidth and the interest has to pick up the rope and start towing it. And there's just no getting around it and what you'll find is that the top level talk has a certain convening function in the beginning and at the end once some work has been done to get people to leverage in but I find that it's being really pushed forward by a handful of people, not by large convening groups who are willing to step up to the plate and do what's necessary. Just to add to that. I think the dominant narrative from 2005 to 2015 say roughly has been mobile has solved this. Mobile has solved the problem. So from a development perspective it's largely been ignored because well it turned out the industry fixed the problem. And I think we're recognizing now the limitations of that and what we're seeing is more interest and awareness in actually going beyond and connecting everyone. As of course it becomes an increasingly big priority to be connected to them. I think we have time for maybe one more. There is one. Oh, there's one way back there. I thought I saw a hand. Oh, sorry Megan. Sure. Should I go ahead? Oh, thank you. Rajendra Singh from World Bank. You know we are working on various initiatives in different parts of the world. One question which we are facing this is related to optical fiber. There is a tremendous capacity in the system today because of technological developments, DWDM and this thing. So the issue is let's say from point A to point B if we have one single fiber which is capable of carrying the whole traffic of region and the country or should we build multiple optical fiber cables because the issue of competition, regulation on other hand the capacity in terms of technological development. What is the best decision? How we should take it forward because we are facing challenges on both sides. Thank you. So thank you for that very tricky question. So I think on the one hand we need to diversify ownership in these cables. I think the investment in these cables it tends to be limited to a few large players and I think some of the models that have been used for instance the World Bank's approach with the easy cable where they created the special purpose vehicle within that to allow smaller players to get on board. I think what holds back operators certainly what I've seen is that they're held to ransom by the backhaul costs and if they can go from becoming renters to landowners on that capacity I think that could be transformative. I'd like to say we only just need one cable because there's such huge capacity but what we've also seen is that diversity of investment in more than one cable has proven good for competition. So it's complicated and also there's the issue of redundancy that as we depend on fiber optic infrastructure we actually need redundancy. It's not enough just to have one cable. So I would say that the answer is context dependent. I mean there's no simple answer to that question. There are places where there's only enough volume to support a single cable and in fact some of the countries were studying the islands in the middle of the Pacific. There's not even enough capacity to support a single cable. They're looking at satellite and they're never getting fixed. And so there are other places where from the World Bank where you invest you invest in another cable you have to look at the underlying economics and see what it'll support. I can say on the regulatory side the biggest problem is people using licensing to stifle financially viable entry entry particularly on undersea landing cable landing points countries use that licensing capability in a vicious sort of way to protect incumbents. And if that's the case I can't see any reason for stopping a company that wants to make the investment from doing it on a regulatory side and I think that's a reform that we can do that would help. But whether you decide is the World Bank to invest in a particular cable or not separate from the regulatory aspect is something that you have to do the analysis and to see how the math works out. We suffer from lack of competition in fiber access and I'm just not confident that we can regulate our way out of that problem and that we actually need multiple competitors to help. The point you made about people what was the line people make networks what was at the very end of your slide? Many people, what was it? The internet is made of people. The internet is made of people. And so what was so great I mean how hopeful was everything you guys just said and the Vermont work, South Africa work just across the board getting in the data side and just focusing on the actual guts of the fiber and that. And so the point that in the question like using our network to share what's working and who's already got the solutions and then helping governments and it's exhausting to admire the problem and these poor governments, right? And like we can show up and say, have you seen this? Have you seen this? Have you seen this? It asks and offers, right? And then suddenly if you know that something actually worked like Chattanooga, high speed internet, what did they do? What did so and so do? It's a really interesting thing. So back to the point of the open sharing you know that we were talking about what can we use the internet itself to much more rapidly share with each other and have you know that. And so this we call it scout and scale and almost like you're a venture capitalist and you just venture catalyze ourselves and the one that's so striking to me as we all know the work that's happening in the controversy around DoDob, there's an internet solution that Microsoft now let's put into that with white spaces and getting a pop there. And so people in DoDob actually have internet connectivity in a way that no other refugee camps have and people are often stuck in a refugee camp for 12 years, you know, children grow up there. And so if DoDob did that and I reflected often, you know, Secretary Kerry talking about DoDob and how happy we are about it in this one aspect that was hopeful. Why is every refugee camp not scout and scale that's stolen that idea? And it's because we're not talking to each other at the hopeful way. So I want everyone in this room to really feel hopeful about what we could do if we actually spoke with each other. Use simple wiki to tell each other whatever we do. So thank you so much for everything you have already catalyzed. Thank you, Megan, and to Kim for moderating. So I have a challenge for all of you which is to get food and come back within 15 minutes. There is just outside of buffet of sandwiches and salads and things. But please just let's be back, you know, within 15 minutes, there's restrooms to the right as you come out to the right and then to the left against the back wall way back there. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. Okay, we are starting up again. So please find your seat. If you didn't get a sandwich yet, there's still plenty out there. So we want to start back up right away because we were already behind time due to the short weather delay at the beginning. Oh, yeah. What does it think? Cause we can't, yeah, it would be too noisy. Okay, we're going to start up again. So please come in before we close the doors. Do we have, make sure Jack Spillsbury is close by since he's first up. I hope you all enjoyed the morning session. Like the morning at the end of the second and final session, we'll try to do the same thing. I didn't hear a whole lot of offers and asks from people but do keep that in mind because it would be great to, or even to hear about if you're doing a specific thing to advance global connectivity. We'd love to add that on. So is, trying to think if Jack, is Jack in place here? All right, good. All right, so we're going to start while you're finishing your food. As Megan and Manu said at the very beginning, the Global Connect Initiative is a joint venture between the US State Department, the World Bank and other development banks and that's part of what's made it so powerful. So in order to just give a little more background on Global Connect Initiative from the perspective of first the State Department and then the Inter-American Development Bank, we have Jack Spillsbury first and then Antonio Garcia-Zabalas. So let me introduce Jack Spillsbury first who in his current position at state is Senior Coordinator for the Global Connect Initiative right now and he's been a career long diplomat at the State Department, he's been involved in a lot of areas and as I mentioned earlier, there's a bio handout so we're not gonna, we'll save time by not going too deep into it. So Jack? Great to be here and thank you, Michael. I really find it exciting to be here with so many thought leaders and doers on the whole issues surrounding expanding access. So, and knowing time is limited, I should point out first that I, while I used to run the part of the State Department the Handel's Communication Policy, I was a Foreign Service Officer and I was recently recruited back after I retired in 2015. So I literally as Manu has moved on and congratulation Manu on the new position, I'm basically moving in behind as the Senior Coordinator have a team, some of my team is represented here. Anyway, as Manu and Megan have already so well outlined the launch and some of the milestone events like the high level meeting, but making a concept and broadening what Michael was just saying in the introduction is really in concept, the GCI is a collaborative effort. The U.S. Department of State has taken on the leadership role but it really is about working with all of the resources within the U.S. government, all of the agencies that deal with development assistance, finance, commerce or policies which might affect our ability to catalyze this work overseas. So, and I think I was going to use again the expression, the basic premise that Internet is as essential to economic development as any of the other and I think you saw all those other forms on the slides but areas where perhaps USAID and others were traditionally even back in the 60s when we were building a lot of things but we believe in today's world if you're not connected to the Internet, if a country is not connected to the Internet, they're really, they're very much left behind. There's so many opportunities that are lost and starting with the generation that in other countries has grown up with this stuff and been fluent which they are missing. So we already know that economic growth and broadband access go hand in hand. So that is a basic proposition and according to a World Bank study, this has been off quoted I think but I think it bears repeating, a 10% increase in broadband penetration in developing countries correlates with a 1.3% increase in GDP. So I think that's a remarkable multiplier and potential for return on investment. So there are areas where the economics is driving this. I think the description of that seminal event with Africa is suddenly about four years ago having cables literally encircle it rather than just have one or two cables going into the wealthiest countries, for example, South Africa. So there are places where economics actually has been working to drive this but there's also places where that's harder and where you really need partnership in many cases. That's where we would like to come in. So we tackle the goal essentially by bringing together all those resources that I mentioned and catalyze and align their efforts first within the U.S. government. So there's that conversation. We have an official steering group that coordinates our efforts but there's a second conversation outside of the government which is us working with U.S. stakeholders and then of course partner governments, stakeholders in those countries as well. So it's quite broad and it's a big objective that we have taken on. Obviously we've been working for a while now and I think, thank you Manu and Megan for pointing out a few of those results. But since I'm short I thought I might try to focus again on some of those specifics including areas where we or partners or others are working in. For example, projects that were involved in range or the U.S. government is involved in range from infrastructure technology projects. Excuse me, I think I'm starting to go too fast. They range from infrastructure technology projects to capacity building and training of various sorts particularly to build support and promote pro-market regulatory practices that will create a healthy environment for this work to go forward for investments to come in. We are partnering with a diverse range of governments. To name a few, as diverse three of the ones we have more intensively partnered with are Liberia, India and Argentina. And in some cases we also have mounted regional efforts when we have seen an opportunity and felt that we would cover more ground by doing that. So we have a recent partnership that we have launched through the ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asia Nations. And that actually is a body that has become over time a strong economic force and an organization that actually has its own structure and its own projects and priorities. So anyway, while representing different levels of development these countries have all committed their support to GCI and especially to the basic connectivity principles. And I also wanted to point out that just in late January we, the State Department, released the first report of the U.S. Government Interagency GCI Steering Group. And that would be on share.america.gov slash global connect one word. Also there you will find information about some of the projects as well as the key GCI documents such as the connectivity principles. I recommend the report if you want to get a sense of the breadth of activity and which of the agencies, and as I pointed out, a number of those agencies raised the hand earlier, TDA, obviously USAID is a major partner, but also others more in the commercial area like OPIC. And working with the international financial institutions and development banks, of course we're working very closely with the U.S. Treasury. And we even work with DOD, another one of our close partners where we've had some really successful projects with them. Anyway, with India we've been using an ICT working group that we had created for years back to push discussion on how to enable a legal regulatory and policy environment that would drive connectivity. And for those who have worked with India, you know that this is a challenging, ongoing conversation. And we have thus worked with FCC, with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, with the U.S. telecommunication industry, and with the Indian government and business community. We organized recently the 2016 Global Connect Initiative Workshop, which was focused on identifying best practices in communications regulation, as well as network security, which is a major issue. For really all of these countries, certainly for India it's a major issue. Now in Liberia, a very different case, U.S. aid is really leading those efforts and they're partnering with the Liberian government and the private sector to expand the infrastructure in Monerovia and throughout the country. And this includes, in the public-private element, it includes co-investments, for example, with a local telecommunications provider that will connect peri-urban areas, those are areas surrounding cities, as well as rural health and education facilities. So it's a really promising project. And if we think back to the experience with Ebola, you realize perhaps how much worse that was because communications did not exist. And thus, the ability to share information and coordinate response was really lacking. So again, that's a really exciting area and we will continue to work closely with Liberia. With Argentina, that's interesting and not necessarily the first country you think of as developing. It was one of the richest countries in the world a century ago, but they have a new government and the new government takes a very different approach, believing in markets and wanting to streamline and reform outdated regulations, notably its underlying telecommunications law and regulations. So in response, we have established a new bilateral digital economy working group with Argentina and we are in process of developing a U.S.-Argentina Global Connect Initiative Work Plan. And for instance, as an initial step, the FCC, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission provided training to staff from the Argentinian Ministry of Communications as well as Anacom, which is its regulator. And those workshops included market-based regulation but also spectrum management and even the use our experience with public advisory groups and our experience with getting input and taking an approach that draws on the people who really understand the implications of different policy decisions with these technologies. So I think it was already mentioned that more broadly we have been working closely with all of the IDBs. We co-hosted the high-level event with the World Bank and likewise with ADB we certainly consider them a very strong partner. For example, they are also working alongside, well, in parallel in Argentina in a very significant way and we've enjoyed and I think benefited greatly from coordinating with them as well as other groups. For example, the World Economic Forum is heavily involved in the same issues with regard to Argentina and has an active program actually in Africa as well as some other areas as well. And finally, I think I mentioned we had announced a new U.S. ASEAN digital economy series which is a flagship initiative in our overall bilateral relationship with this increasingly important grouping of countries. And the work plan there which we've developed will support the ASEAN countries tackling barriers to digital economy using public-private dialogues, capacity-building workshops and basic training as well as commitment to do some people-to-people exchanges in areas like digital entrepreneurship and digital inclusion. So that's an ongoing activity which will only get richer in the months ahead. In fact, we have a big event coming up at the beginning of the spring there in Argentina. I also didn't mention that we had already mounted a large regional workshop hosted in Bangkok and that was for over 30 government specialists, government engineers and policy managers, really on spectrum management. Again, the spectrum was very clear very early in our discussion this morning how critical a rational policy towards spectrum and how harmful it is if spectrum cannot be made rationally available. So those are a few examples. Now, there are many more in the GCI Steering Group report so I commend that to you. But my main message is that we look forward to further engagement with stakeholders around the world to catalyze action and to do this work which is so important in bridging the digital divide. So thank you. All right, thanks, Jack. And next up is, as I said, the Global Connect Initiative has been a joint venture, U.S. State Department Development Banks. So next is Antonio Garcia-Zabales, who is the Lead Specialist for Telecommunications in the Competitiveness and Innovation Division at the Inter-American Development Bank. Thank you very much, Michael. I would like to start by saying first of all, thank you. Big thank you for having me here. Thank you to New America. But a special thank you to my friend, Manuel, because 17 months ago when the Global Connect Initiative started, the IDV was almost doing very little things in terms of ICD and connectivity. 17 months after, we have around 40 projects in the region, covering areas associated to public policy, estate regulation, infrastructure deployment, capacity building, so I think that we got it. So it is time for us to continue moving the wheel. And I'm also glad because now, nowadays, in many MDVs, not only the IDV, we are starting to talk about very important issues and are very important because those are the issues of the 21st century. So we are talking about the Ford Industrial Revolution, we are talking about digital economy, we are talking about digital jobs, things that for all of us are very, you know, it's like the day to day. But unfortunately, for development banks, you know, having a portfolio of around $12 billion in the case of the IDV and around $40 billion in the case of the World Bank, the amount of money that has been dedicated to ICT project was meaningless, one percent or even less. So I think that we have, you know, a great opportunity to really make a huge change. At the end of the day, the MDVs are working for the development and we have several speakers in the morning talking about the sustainable development goals and we are taking very serious those things. So out of the 19 SDGs, 12 has a direct or indirect relationship with ICT and technology. Again, my friend Greg has been one of the visionaries on this particular topic and he's bringing like a different, you know, conception on how to make the people, the public institutions really connected and this is type of the things that the MDVs are very much interested because at the end of the day, ICT is a mean to get one important word, sustainability. We cannot invest in projects, we cannot just support the countries, keeping in mind that that money at the end of the day are not going to be in one way or another reverting to the society as a whole and we had some bad experiences, for instance, a lot of patrols per child where in particular countries, you know, all the market was full of tablets but unfortunately those tablets were not very much connected and even worse, they were connected just for one year and after that year, you know, the tables are, I mean, the tablets are useless but the government and the country and the citizens at the end of the day are continuing paying the loans and the interest associated to the loan. So this is a huge responsibility for all the governments but all the stakeholders that are on this magnificent event. So we have heard a lot of impact of ICT and connectivity on macroeconomic variables like the GDP, like the productivity, like trade but the true thing is that we had to come up with something real and that's why actions like, projects like Google, like Microsoft with the white spaces or even just startup companies that are happening in Colombia, they are making a huge difference to change the mindset of the governments because in all those countries that we have been mentioning throughout the sessions, or at least in those where I am working, I can tell you that there is a common denominator which is the involvement at the highest political level and when I'm saying the highest political level I'm talking about the president of the country. So for instance, Jack was saying about the project in Argentina. In Argentina we are going to provide connectivity to the northern part of the country under a plan that is called Plan Belgrano but this is something that somehow has been supported by the president of the country and Greg is very much well aware of that and it is not just about connectivity, it is how we use that connectivity to connect schools, to connect hospitals, to connect public institutions to really make the digital divide and the social divide somehow bridge because one thing that we cannot have, I mean that cannot happen is that we continue supporting those areas which are urban areas which are connected and those rural areas which are still having a lack of connectivity remains unconnected and I'm saying this because again in most of the occasion those projects that we are defining or that we are financing somehow are addressed, you know, urban areas or maybe a whole country without targeting those rural locations where the technology is going to make a whole difference. So another examples are for instance the case of Peru. I think that Peru was involved in a major transformation of the telecom sector since 2015. First they deploy backbone network just to improve the connectivity across the country and then they have been involved in 21 regional projects that basically intends to connect the different regions of the country with that backbone in such a way that urban but also rural areas are improving the connectivity and the bank is being a high supporter of those initiatives. I know that we are very much short of time so I would like just to send a couple of strong messages just to conclude. First one as I mentioned it is not just about connecting it's about making really the people use that connectivity and it's about changing the mindset of the people starting from the government. But at the end of the day we had to think about the demand side and when it's about the demand side there are two key challenges that not only in the IDV but also with my colleagues from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank when we have been discussing about that we realize that the assistance of local content and the digital literacy is going to be key aspects for really making the society adopt those technologies. The IDV is fully committed with that we are partnering with many of the companies that are involved in here we are having a specific pilot project we are going to start new pilot projects like for instance one in Colombia with Microsoft using TV white spaces and joining forces with La Baza this Italian coffee maker just to see how we can use technology to improve productivity. At the end of the day we are talking about that changing the life of people and the infrastructure has to be like the catalyzer has to be the engine for such a change and for that it is a responsibility of the society it's a responsibility of the governments but it's also a responsibility of all the different stakeholders. Thank you very much for having me here. Thank you Antonio and so now we'll go to our next and concluding session which is about global strategies global approaches to this connectivity challenge particularly with respect to the lower income and rural areas and our moderator for this session is Cecilia Kang who is I know well known to most of you she's a national technology correspondent for the New York Times so Cecilia maybe you can just go on at a time but you can just introduce them. Should I do them all at once? Yeah sure. Thank you Michael for this next presentation and panel discussion each of our participants will have a presentation we are joined by Marion Croke who is the Vice President of Access Strategy and Emerging Markets at Google Greg Weiler who is the founder and executive chairman at OneWeb Bob Pepper the head of global connectivity and policy and planning at Facebook and Paul Garnett the director of affordable access initiatives at Microsoft so they will each come one by one and give a presentation then we'll chat afterwards. I'd like to thank Michael for inviting me to the forum and I'm very very excited to be here to tell you about some of the key initiatives that Google has underway in the emerging markets and before I get started somehow maybe you can help me find the okay I mean I can talk about the slides so that's fine but I'd like to have them okay Greg you look great yeah I could probably talk through yours so before I get started though I wanted to share with you our perspectives on the emerging markets and I have a chart once we can get it projected that shows that there's been an amazing amount almost exponential growth in the amount of connectivity that is within these markets and that's measured by mobile subscribers so I think it's factual and during that same period of time where you see this exponential growth you see it flattening within the domestic markets so there's 7 billion people now which is 95% of the world's population that lives within range of a cellular network and 2 thirds of the people on the planet live within range of a broadband network which means that they support or they have the ability to have access to speeds of 3G and above as we visit the emerging markets what we also see is this rapid deployment of LTE networks that's within India Cambodia, Vietnam in South America, Latin America and even within small parts of Africa so we see a lot of progress and if you look at the people that actually live in these countries you see very vibrant cultures first of all most of them are very young 45% of them are below the age of 25 and they're becoming increasingly urbanized in India for example 90% of the population growth is predicted to be within cities and that's within the next few years when you look at city dwellers compared to rural communities 3 times as many people that live in the cities use smartphones as do in rural areas so smartphone penetration in these markets is predicted to grow by 60% in the next two years that's a very important data point because as you saw what happened here domestically when people start using smartphones it dries the demand and the usage of broadband networks are my slides there? thank you, perfect yes exactly and then finally people in these markets although you see a vast amount of poverty so I don't want to paint this rosy picture there is an increasing amount of disposable income so 80% of the people that are mobile subscribers use prepaid plans and they're very savvy much more so than we are about how to use mobile networks they have multiple sims so they can move very easily among operators as a function of whichever voice and data plans are most economically viable at any moment in time I fumble with trying to do that and they can do it within a snap so it's a very very large set of changes that have happened within the last two years and we see these changes happening even more aggressively in the next couple of years despite this and as we heard a lot about this morning we see oops we're going backwards we see that there is still a huge disparity between the coverage that is available to people and the number of people that are actually using the internet over half of the world's population have never used the internet and that's particularly true in the countries that are in red and yellow on this chart so 75% of the people in Africa are offline and the people in Asia and in the Pacific do not have access to the internet and are not using it so it's still a huge problem that we're trying to solve and Google is really working hard to address these problems and even though within each of these regions there are very unique reasons there's this huge gap in coverage versus usage there's a lot of commonality across the emerging markets that produce these factors people have low spec phones so that means they have very limited storage and memory power sources tend to be unstable so using phones can be difficult because of the battery life networks tend to be very congested unreliable and bandwidth constrained and data plans as I said can be very expensive and then finally if you look at the content that is available on the internet it can be highly irrelevant to local populations so just looking at say Wikipedia as an example 150th the content to English speakers on Wikipedia is available in Hindi despite the fact that Hindi is the fourth most spoken language in the world so within Google let me see if I get this right no so within Google as I said we're doing a tremendous amount of work to address these problems you'll see dramatic improvements in the amount of localization for example that we're supporting both in respect to language as well as content so across our products including search YouTube and especially Android maps translate you'll see a lot of new language support and these charts are probably a bit out of date in that we are supporting new languages almost on a weekly basis so these are just from a few weeks ago but you'll see more languages growing out each and every week we are also working very hard to adapt our products to accommodate the limitations of the networks that we're encountering in the emerging markets so again you'll see offline versions of the most popular applications within these markets including play and YouTube and maps as well as search translate is also being developed for an offline version so when people don't have network reliability or connectivity you can still get the information that you need from the internet through these offline variations of these applications and then finally in a related effort we're trying to be very sensitive to the concerns that people have about using their data and the expensive data plans within these markets and also to compensate for the slow networks that exist within these markets we're doing a tremendous amount of work to optimize the compression technologies that we're using in our services so that they consume a lot less bandwidth than they normally have and you'll see across the array of products and applications that we support what we call light versions of these applications in parallel with the work that we're doing on adapting to the existing network conditions within these markets we believe that it's very important to actually improve the networks so we are focused on creating more affordable and abundant access in terms of underlying network infrastructure across the emerging markets and we have been doing this for quite a few years and we have many models that I'm going to talk about in respect to both business as well as technology in serving these markets but the one thing that we have found and that we are going to be increasingly emphasized is the need to work in partnerships in order to rapidly expand the work that we're doing and to have a broader reach and to accelerate the pace at which we're going so I welcome any partnership opportunities within this room and we do have many partners sitting with us today and we are open to inviting more of you to join us in this journey we also believe very strongly that we have to have a very strong advocacy with governments in respect to policy and regulatory fronts and we're doing that also in a much more aggressive way than we have in the past so let me just give you a few examples of the work that we're doing and the models that we're using to create these new networks across both domestic as well as global regions we're providing wifi and we're doing so in New York we're doing so in retail enterprises like Starbucks we're working in India as well as Uganda but I'm going to focus on India in particular to just give you a flavor of the types of work that we're doing we've started working with the Indian railways and rail tell as well as the government of India to build the world-class wifi networks across train stations within India and we're doing this in a very successful way and we're working towards creating financial sustainability in the work that we're doing we started this in less than a year ago and we've already made significant progress in doing so as I said we're working very closely in collaboration with the Indian railways system and as they were building their railways you know if you know much about India it's a huge country and these railways traverse the entire country there are over 4000 stations within India and when the railways were building their train tracks they had the foresight to lay fiber along the tracks and the fiber is highly resilient it's a very well designed fiber network so we're using that fiber as back sorry as backhaul and Google is deploying and managing and operating wifi networks within these stations so that users who are waiting on these platforms can get very high capacity bandwidth that's equivalent to being able to watch high definition videos download information about their upcoming destinations and what we're finding is that people just hang out at these stations in order to use the wifi that's available if you look at the if this chart we have a commitment to build out over 400 stations and we're really doing it at a very accelerated pace we've already built 112 wifi networks or hotspots in these stations and when I say building these networks I mean within each station according to the density of the people that use the actual station and in India most of the population travels through these stations it can mean that there are dozens and dozens of APs within one station so that's what I mean by hotspots so we've built out over 112 stations we have a little over or less than 300 to go 6 million active users on a monthly basis use these wifi networks and the thing that I think is most just very very inspiring to us is that at least 15,000 new users to the internet are using per day are using this network and that includes a lot of high school students that come to the station to complete their homework and that's very inspiring makes you want to get up in the morning and go to work so we're continuing to build that out and as I said we're doing it in partnership with the governments and with the actual operators the ISPs that are within India today last December in India we announced that we are going to take this initiative build out to other venues within India and then also productize it and build it within other countries as well now in order to use a service like this you need very good backhaul and fortunately within India we had that in other countries we may not and we'll do different variations turning to that if you look at Africa we found that there was a lack of very good fiber network within the metropolitan areas of some of the countries and it's not because it didn't exist it was because there was a stranglehold on it so what we built were wholesale metro fiber hubs that were accessible to any operator any ISP any M&O that wanted to use it and M&Os and ISPs then use that metro fiber backbone or metro fiber hub to offer retail services to their clients and they do so in an affordable way and they can avoid the cat-backs and the operational cost of building their own networks and having to operate their own networks and we have found this to be a very a to put it in diplomatic terms a very important way to get around some of the monopolistic practices that we have found in these countries we are working through a separate entity under the name of C-squared to operate these networks in Africa and we'll be increasingly working with partners many other partners to build out across the continent and to expand our reach within Africa to build these metro fiber hubs so you'll see more information about this in the coming months as we expand these opportunities one country that I think is extremely important that we're going into next is Liberia because they are in desperate need of other communications network finally what I'll talk about is Project Moon I think many of you have heard about it it is extremely exciting project it's being built in X which is a sister company of Google and serves as an innovation lab for all of alphabet X is really a network of balloons that travel at about 20 kilometers within the stratosphere which is a little above the weather and they're designed to provide connectivity to very remote rural areas across the globe they work very closely when I say they Project Moon is working very closely with local telcos in these communities to test out whether or not these high altitude balloons can provide the connectivity to very hard to reach terrestrial areas across the planet and they've had tremendous success in doing so since they first started testing Moon I believe it was in 2013 in New Zealand they've flown over 16 million miles with these balloons and they have discovered a way to connect balloons that are over 100 kilometers apart through lasers so that they have communication between the balloons and most importantly they have really been successful in being able to beam down LTE level connectivity to handsets that are on the ground so people in these very hard to reach less densely populated areas on the globe now have connectivity through these balloons now I don't kid you Moon is a moonshot it's a technology experiment but it is succeeding and so they're working very aggressively across the globe and within other countries right now they're focused in Latin America and doing a lot of experiments there and a lot of trials there but they are having tremendous success so let's wait about five years and maybe we'll solve one of the biggest problems in the world which is how to reach these very low density rural areas so in closing I just would like to say that it's very clear from the work that we've been doing there's no magical solution one solution either in respect to technology or business that you can use to solve all of the earth's problems in terms of connectivity so Google is applying a lot of different models a lot of different technology solutions across the world to reach these different geographical terrains and we are doing so in a way that really requires us to partner with all of you we have no competitors in this space it's a huge problem as you know and so we welcome your partnership in pursuing how to resolve this issue finally and we hope to do so by 2020 thank you thank you that was a great presentation and fun to watch I think you I'm not sure how to get back to my presentation just forward okay one way or the other thank you oh hey it all worked but I think what Marian ended with is where I want to pick up and start which is our mission is enable affordable access for everyone but it's not really my mission or our mission at one web it's our mission everybody's mission everybody in this room is part of the same mission and often I get the question about competition and they're like well you know LTE and telecom operators and I talk to governments all over the world and they're like well we have this plan to run fiber here and to connect that village and run fiber there even in very developed countries that have typically even developed countries except for like Singapore has 10 to 20 percent of their population without good quality access in the US over 50 percent of the population doesn't have access to broadband so we've got a really big serious problem about getting broadband everywhere and I always hear that I'm like go just go invest in fiber go run one web is just the internet catch all we will just take the last couple of percent that you haven't gotten done if you haven't finished it we'll figure out how to get the last people on and one thing that I've realized from doing this a little bit of my background I ran went to Africa and started running fiber and connecting schools I did that after I sold my first company in my 20s this is a younger version of me and ran fiber had actually 3200 people at one time trenching and it's really hard it's like really hard because you got this little point six two millimeter strand you're trying to get it to every house within miles or kilometers around you doesn't happen very easily so as hard as you try to get fiber everywhere it's basically impossible I mean it's almost impossible like if we devoted all of Earth's resources to getting fiber to every school in the world we could probably do it but we wouldn't do anything else for the next 10 years and all of our money would be sunk in it so it's theoretically possible it is a big journey to run fiber into rural places and frankly what I've learned from it from running fiber in some very very difficult territories this is just a Mount Karasimbi and Lake Kivu this is a hotspot between Rwanda and the DRC and Uganda right in that sort of area I learned that it's just I mean it's hard and it's probably not the most economic thing to do so I also just a little bit about history also built the first 3G network in Africa and so I started having towers with generators but then you have to run gas to all of them and it becomes hard to make sure the gas shows up it's in there so I we went to solar powered systems this is early 2000s and they used really local teams so they connected their own homes it was a labor of love and a lot of fun but what happened I realized is that I had built out this network that had really high speed internally but couldn't get to the global internet because the nearest fiber drop was 5000 kilometers away so I started to run fiber down the east coast and that really didn't of Africa that didn't really work out to all too many political countries and ministers and everything it's just too much to run through many many countries so I said well why don't we bring the satellites closer to the earth and I was too stupid to know that it was really hard so I decided I designed a system I acquired the spectrum rights and we designed a system and designed it to raise a billion dollars in 2008 which was great until 2009 came along Google was one of the early investors and that was great and Larry really helped to spur it along and built 12 of these called O3B networks which O3B named it was stood for the other 3 billion and so I'd go around the world and I'd try to explain to people hey I need a billion dollars because I need to bring internet to people who don't have any money you know and back then a billion dollars was a lot of money to raise but fortunately through a lot of really incredible investors and an enormous amount of luck built 12 of these and they're up and running today and they're all around the world and over 50% of the Pacific Islands are running on them but the world's fastest satellites they do over 2 gigabit per second on a single beam at 130 millisecond latency and that was the key to bring that latency down we built about 10 of these big earth stations or grounds gateway teleports around the world to support it but around 2012 I really started thinking hey you know this is great for telecom head ends but we still have this huge problem we still have over 50% of the world without access so how are we going to get right to the home how are we going to get right to the school and it was really sort of you know something I started to think a lot about and I went out and at first I said you know I think it's possible what if we could connect every school of the world and give them at least 50 megabits per second have a solar powered self-installed terminal have it Wi-Fi and LTE so that if you show up with a phone or a digital handset it just works right so and the girl the high school girl who installs it gets paid a little bit of revenue for providing the infrastructure and maintaining it for the school because all the people around there are getting access so we really started to focus on LTE and Wi-Fi technologies but also on how to design a satellite system to accomplish this so the place where you always start if you want to build a satellite system just building satellite systems 101 is you go to the ITU they're the god of satellites everything above 100 kilometers they are the spectrum gurus it turned out that there was a nice chunk of spectrum available that nobody was using because it had to operate in a special way it had to operate without interfering with the geosatellites so we had to design a system that wouldn't interfere with the geosatellites and which we did which unlocked this very large chunk of spectrum three and a half gigahertz of globally harmonized spectrum which we could then use to provide services around the world that spectrum was set aside specifically for the mission of connecting rural areas when the ITU went through that in the year 2000 it was about rural connectivity and so we were very pleased that we could manage to unlock the value of that spectrum and make it available but also that it was right on target for the mission of the ITU and so we've been very active with them and around the world governments about how do we connect all their schools one of our missions two primary missions our primary mission number one is we're going to connect every school of the world by 2022 so I hope everybody in this room connects all of them so then we're done with no work but in case you miss one we're going to get out there and we're going to connect every school that's our mission and our plan and I'll show you how we're doing that the second one and many of you may know we went out and I initially funded this myself and then we raised first round about $500 million and then just recently we announced I was going to raise a second round of $500 million and a third round of $500 million every year but this round we ended up raising $1.2 billion so it really gave us now we've raised over $1.7 billion plus our debt we're now fully funded or very well funded because we need less than that but we have a plan that's very methodically thought through with our spectrum as the cornerstone to provide services on a global basis and to solve this problem so we bumped up our plan from connecting every school in 2022 to bridging the digital divide by 2027 that means everybody in the world who wants access will be able to acquire it at a GDP adjusted affordable rate so it will be cheap in some areas and not so cheap in other areas but competitive with the local GDP environments and that's a big tall order and I'll show you some of the stuff that we're doing to get there so we have our satellites that we've designed our satellites are very far along in fact our production satellites are launching in March of next year about one year away we're launching 10 of them and then right after that we start a campaign where we'll be launching every 21 days so our rockets are actually in production now our summer built, the frigates and the pieces and components the third stages of stuff are stacking up as we speak not fast but slowly, like one a month or one every two weeks or something but the pieces are underway but the key thing about this system is we brought it down to 1200 kilometers and a geostatellite at 36,000 kilometers so far away that the latency is very high you click and you wait and any dynamic GML and video conferencing that just really bogs down doesn't work very well so if you wanted to be part of a classroom experience where you're working long distance remotely of your classroom it doesn't really work because when you ask a question they're on to the next question so if you want to bring these kids in so that the kid in a Mexican school can have the best math teacher in the world and participate with everybody else you need to have low latency so they can speak live like we're speaking now virtual reality, latency is really important and this will happen, we will have kids sitting in classrooms but they won't be in the classroom they'll all think they're in the same classroom but they'll be wearing the VR and VR is coming and it's going to be really big but it's extremely demanding on networks O3B we brought the satellites down to 8,000 kilometers so it's 130 milliseconds big improvement in connectivity very, very from most applications that's really good enough the ITU standard is 150 milliseconds for audio conferencing so it was fine for voice but there are some applications where we brought it down to 30 milliseconds which are really important so we brought this system one web is down to 1200 kilometers 30 milliseconds is about the average in the US for sort of fiber and cable modems we wanted to be equivalent in capacity and performance to a cable modem so here's the number one reason why you have to be that low latency if you want to do cellular backhaul and you want to be able to hand off between one tower to the next and you guys might say well that's I don't know what you're talking about but ignore the technical details as you drive down the highway and you're on tower A and you're driving by tower B at some point it hands you over and you can't do that when you're talking to the computer in the background it takes so long to tell the computer in the background so 30 milliseconds we meet all the LTE standards so our backhaul on a cell tower is completely transparent to the LTE network so you can have backhaul from one web backhaul from fiber and then backhaul from a cable modem and as you drive by you have to hand over tower tower tower and so it's really easy for cellular operators to bring connectivity globally an example is a backhaul integrated small cell so let's take the US it's called country anybody been to Vermont? it's not so great, the connectivity you drive up 95, you go to the top of the hill there's coverage, you're at the bottom of the hill there's no coverage, you're at the top of the hill there's coverage and you go like that for miles on end and so this you could stick a terminal anywhere you want and instantly it will be part of the network and it will connect and hand over and fill in all the little dark spots around the world and they're everywhere, even in DC but a small cell will allow, including if you put in lighting on it for a lot of emerging markets to have actual coverage as well as lighting and other safety features so that's going, this is a very exciting thing and we'll be demonstrating some of this in Mobile World Congress I should say one of our larger shareholders is Qualcomm and so they're building the chipsets for our user terminals and they've done a lot of work in making sure our small cells are integrated with LTE so that it's all going to work seamlessly so another aspect of what we're doing is you can drop a terminal on a barn now you put it on your barn or on your home and you've got your, you run the wire inside and you can play Xbox and all the gaming features and everything because the latency is low enough but also it provides five bars of cell coverage so now your cell phone system works and it's better, it uses less battery power because it's not transmitting at full power to get to the macro cell so your cell phone lasts longer when you get in your car and you drive away it hands over from the one on your roof to the macro cell so now we're enabling people to have full on LTE high speed connectivity anywhere in the world and be able to mesh in with the global phone networks and we actually have a lot of telecom operators as investors and so we'll be deploying around the world really as part of the telecom operators our terminals will be very small and very inexpensive and will allow very high speeds eventually we'll get to a gigabit per second initially we're targeting 200 megabits per second Coca-Cola is another investor, they've been fantastic they have 39 million points of distribution like where have you gone and not been able to get a coke right so those rural areas we've done a lot of testing on the need for having more things for the person to sell and we've done some they've done some work where they've put wifi hotspots and allowed them to sell along with Coca-Cola and it's been fantastic for generating revenue for their small entrepreneur the tests originally were in South Africa in very rural areas we've done a lot of work with schools because we're trying to that's really the main focus was to get some connectivity that would work on the self-installed capacity for schools and I'll just take a little side jaunt here just recently separately from one web and I invite everybody to participate in this I funded but we're going to welcome everybody to participate a nonprofit called Project Connect and the mission of Project Connect will be totally neutral it's to map every school in the emerging markets so you know we're there and also have a metric of connectivity at every school meaning either a little dongle that's inserted at the school that's inserted in the router so that it will ping back to our knock and you'll be able to see really you'll be able to look at any country say Mexico or Argentina and you'll see all the schools that are don't have connectivity do have connectivity by color code and will allow the government and globally to say what's the minimum bar for connectivity because a big problem I noticed in these schools is the government says oh we have 30,000 schools connected you go to the school and they have 128 kilobits per second on some geolink you know like it's not connected right so you need to set a minimum bar maybe 10 megabits maybe 20 megabits per second but what we're learning is that you can extract a lot of data from this you get truth because the connectivity is there the router is pinging back to you or it's not so you know whether it's there you know about how much power that school has because it's either working or not because of power you can see when there is power when there isn't power and you can also see how much capacity they really have and what the latency is so this is actually one hard truthful metric that we're developing now for all the schools around the world as a knock and a lot of these markets they really don't have the ability to understand how much capacity their schools have how it's being utilized so I invite anyone to participate and help or we need all the help we can get for it over a project connected so that's a fun thing that's dear to my heart because getting everybody connected to something we should all participate in and we need a metric an observable metric to know that we did accomplish that task together back to a little bit about this mission just something that you might find fun for first responders it's another area that's important so we can put a terminal on a truck and they'll be very small of these things and it listens to the AT&T tower of Verizon whatever the tower is and when the signal strength goes down it actually turns on so you don't drop a call so if the cell towers go away you still have coverage globally and we're finding a lot of interest from first responders on that capability and there's a lot of other technology that goes into this like if a fire trucks come together with police cars and maybe there's a disaster and the cell towers are gone as they come together they create a network every millisecond it determines a new network so it's really cool for them to be able to have continuous coverage even in times of disaster and this works in Papua New Guinea and Palau as well as it does in Pennsylvania so it's really a global thing for everyone and we're getting a lot of positive interest in this this technology a lot of it's from us and some of it's from Qualcomm and sort of merging together to create these infrastructure opportunities Airbus is a big investor of ours and we're very involved with aviation but that's sort of off topic but we'll be doing trains as well which is on topic you're doing the train stations there are 23 million people a day in trains in India and getting connectivity in the train is really really hard so that's another aspect of the way our service works and oil and gas is so we bought our rockets we bought them a couple years ago it takes a long time to build this many rockets they're getting ready and on station we have three launch pad sites for us because things can go wrong and we're going to be launching relatively quickly we want the Soyuz it's the most reliable and boring rocket out there you don't even hear about it like no one talks about it it doesn't get a lot of press because they launch between 20 and 50 a year they launch two in one day and it didn't even make the news because it's like an Uber working so what but I don't want to lose sleep so that's why we work that way we have a new factory we're building in a NASA property down in Cape Canaveral this facility will build three satellites per day we have another one in Toulouse France which will be running in one line we'll be running two lines over here we start production next year we've got every piece of the satellite now end-to-end validation of the throughput end-to-end validation of the handover capability we've got testing and testing and testing that's been done on all the components and we're moving into volume production right now so we're really close we feel very confident but paranoid because anything that goes wrong can be a big problem so you have to really be dealing with every small detail we have a great group of investors and there's some that aren't even on here the different groups that aren't listed here but these are some of the ones that are well-known and they each have their own expertise that they've been contributing as well as a lot of support generally but from Intel, Staten Hughes on the satellite side, some of the largest satellite operators and Bardi Sanil sits on our board he was the founder of Bardi Airtel third or fourth largest cell phone company Masa from SoftBank has been fantastic so we've got a lot of momentum Airbus has been really great Tom Enders, the CEO of the group is on our board and really enthusiastically supporting us we've got a long way to go this is super hard but we are methodically and boringly dealing with each aspect we've got our user terminals all sorted out and how they work and these are going to blow your mind I think we hand out like hotcakes, they're so cheap and then we've got our gateways and our satellites are in process and our rockets are going well so everything is chunking along and that's the good news but something could break at any second so we have to constantly be worried but coming back to the mission how do we enable connectivity for everyone we need to build a network where people can deploy their own things and so we want to empower communities to build their own networks make it simple enough to install your own internet we don't have to go there they can FedEx a terminal, put it on the roof of a school or a home, something and anybody around that school can share that terminal with open access as well as operators can use it as well as of course the home and the person who purchased it so that's a bit about one web and what we're doing thank you so I'm Robert Pepper from Facebook it's great, Marianne and Greg, we've met before I don't know whether we have or we've been on panels together but I think we could probably be interchangeable in the presentations because each of us are working with teams that are completely the satellite pieces absolutely critical to fill in sort of the gaps but Marianne your presentation and I we could probably have switched off because what we see is one size doesn't fit all it's not about a particular technology so the magic part of this is which is forward, which is backwards this is like forward, okay, we made it so part of this is really I've actually titled my part of this is identifying and filling the gaps to me that's really crucial satellite and I'll talk about that absolutely a critical part of that because I knew Greg was here, I'm not going to talk about satellite I'm going to talk about some of the other things and Marianne, you talked about these as well, so the Facebook mission is essentially to have everybody connected give everybody the power to share make the world a more open and connected place we all know earlier the economic benefits, the social benefits you know did incredible work with Megan and folks on the Global Connect initiative and congratulations on your new gig, that's great but part of making this work is aligning incentives we have to get people together and it's not about competitors, it's not either or, the answer is yes, it's all of the above we're figuring out where the different parts fit and there's going to be a whole different wide range of models so we try to focus on aligning incentives and benefits for all right we're not a telecom operator, we want to enable them we're not a vendor, although we have engineers inventing really cool things the approach we take is open sourcing, making all of it available to anybody trying to identify and fill those gaps so we all know there's 3 billion people connected but there's 4 billion people plus that are not connected but what I try to think about this in a slightly different way which is moving from scarcity to abundance because there are people who actually are connected but they're only sort of connected they're actually under connected and this is some of the 2G issues is that enough, no it's not high latency, no it's not enough so you want to go 36,000 miles down to 1200 kilometers how do you get that latency down so I think we need to be addressing thinking about it slightly differently, this abundance question how do we really step up to not only more people more people connected at faster speeds but I tend to think of these multiple dimensions of abundance it's more people it's more devices it's more coverage, more diverse devices, more applications and better quality and much more capacity so it's not just it's not binary, it's not am I connected or not think about the dial-up days we were all thrilled with just getting on with text, in fact they'll talk about what we're doing, just getting people on with a text-based service but once you're on, you want to move up you want faster, you want more you want video so it's really this abundance question and we need to think about that as we think about and try to identify where are the gaps and how do we fill them so the way we've analyzed it in a very methodical way very similar, Marian you could have given this presentation so what are the connectivity barriers connectivity is about getting people connected so there's availability there's affordability and then there's awareness, relevance so focusing on the availability you actually had two different artists did the same slide it's really remarkable as I was watching you, I said I'll know what you'll say next year, you can fill in for me we can pick up for one another high density, medium density and low density areas and we can look at different solutions satellites are terrific at the low density as well as some other things I'm not going to talk about satellites because I knew Greg was here he did some great stuff with O3D one web, it's all really very cool stuff I'm going to focus a little bit more on the medium density and even the high density areas where there's not the kind of connectivity that we need so the unmanned vehicles, I'm going to talk about FSO is free space optics using lasers to connect things millimeter wave and then terrestrial so we are identifying we have an incredible team of engineers and they tease them that they're turning science fiction into reality and so we have projects with these engineers in our connectivity labs looking at dense urban areas, how do you actually bring fiber like connectivity in high population areas like the high density areas in Mumbai or any large city where it's unlikely that there's going to be fiber soon we have projects looking at the medium density I'm going to talk about Akila the unmanned vehicles and then low density where there's really limited or no connectivity and then it's satellites, especially the low earth orbiting and again, thank you Greg because that makes it easier for me TerraGraph, TerraGraph is a project focusing on high density areas, how do I get fiber like connectivity as backhaul not to necessarily the end user but as one of the biggest barriers to high quality abundant internet connectivity is backhaul a lot of talk goes into last mile access but even in the US when the FCC had its broadband report in the analysis the UN Broadband Commission work a lot of the work we know that one of the biggest barriers is backhaul and middle mile we can have cell towers we can have 2G but how do you upgrade to 3G even if you put the antennas on the towers and you have the power and the other things if you can't get backhaul on the earlier panel there was a question about fiber Greg points out trenching is like really hard so TerraGraph is designed to solve the urban bandwidth challenge in high density population areas, large urban areas especially in the developing world and it's using very small nodes I remember when I was at the FCC we opened up the 60 gigahertz band called the Oxygen Absorption Band Oxygen Absorption Band because oxygen molecules absorb the energy at that frequency therefore the signal only goes a very short distance people say but you want long distance not if you want a lot of reuse so in theory you could reuse reuse and reuse with very small cell that was a while ago we opened it up the problem was in order to do that you needed very high processing speeds at very low energy at a low cost that didn't that was not actually possible until very recently with the chipsets that have come down in price and energy consumption and we're not the only ones working on this there are other companies working on small cell as well but what we have looked at and the way we're looking at this is to have networks that are going to use very small cells software driven with computer power to bounce off of buildings team forming to enable fiber like backhaul connectivity middle mile connectivity for backhaul to anybody it could be to mobile operators it could be to community wifi but not necessarily to the end user device so that's one of our solutions Aquila this is very similar to loons but instead of balloons what we're doing is designing a constellation designing unmanned vehicles to fly at 20 kilometers with a flight radius of about 2 to 3 kilometers solar powered the first one we had the first flight test last June was supposed to fly for 30 minutes it flew 490 we're now taking terabits of data from that and we're building the next one so the idea is these things have a wingspan of 737 they only weigh about 440 kilos we have people working on new material science solar energy and we're also it's not just flight test but we also have payload testing so in parallel we're testing payloads we're building and testing the flight platforms and building and developing the optical links and so the way this is going to work is and what you can see here is that there will be a ground station this is in a city but it also could be a fiber landing station on the coast from an undersea cable it would then beam up by using radio to one of the Aquilas and then there will be hundreds or even hundreds of them that are going to be meshed together with laser beams and when they get over a village they will beam down gigabit Ethernet as backhaul and it's not being designed to go directly to end users so it's not going to be sort of at this point an LTE a big LTE antenna so it's slightly different but it's going to bring a backhaul to mobile operators towers or community wifi access points and the idea is not to be an operator but rather to make this technology available to anybody including operators to be able to get the backhaul that they need to solve this backhaul middle mile problem because without fiber like connectivity right and satellite is going to be doing a big chunk of this where there's fiber that's great and by the way one of the nice things about balloons or satellites or Aquila is that if it creates enough demand in a particular area so that there's a business case for pulling the fiber guess what things that fly around can move right and then you can repurpose them someplace else that's one of the really nice things about things that fly around right it's not the traditional sunk cost network here you're not going to say oh I'm going to pull this up and dig it up and move it someplace else that doesn't work so those projects were really focused on maximizing finding the gaps in availability and infrastructure and filling it affordability when we talk about affordability we tend to look at or focus on universal service subsidies or end users bringing the cost down at the user consumer citizen and that's very very important but we're also looking at it from the flip side how do we reduce the cost of the technology so that the operators can reduce their operating costs and therefore lower the prices so that's a really important part of the affordability equation so we created with a number of other companies something called our TIP or telecommunications infrastructure project which is engineering focused these are just some of the members within the TIP the TIP group you can see it includes vendors like Nokia and Juniper it includes a lot of the major mobile operators around the world it includes Intel and other chip silicon companies and the idea is to dramatically dramatically change the cost structure of these networks and bring those costs down and we developed this based upon our open compute model which was designed to dramatically reduce the costs of computing and if you can do that you reduce the costs in this case of the network and if you reduce the costs of the network both in CAPEX and OPEX then you have the ability to reduce the costs and the prices to the end user so we need to think about cost reduction in multiple ways and as Ivano nodding what Ivano has done and Greg I don't know if you were here for Ivano's discussion about Vermont Ivano talked about Vermont as well trying to change the cost curve on the network side in rural areas and then finally awareness so we do know that there are a lot of people who could subscribe who can afford to be on but they don't see a reason to connect and so this is clearly part of the demand side conversation and some of this is awareness so we developed this project you probably have heard of it's called Free Basics if you think about it as sort of a skinny version of internet access effectively text think going back some of us are old enough to remember early days of internet I was here earlier in the morning but then introduction so we developed the project called Free Basics and as it launches as people get on we have partners again it's again it's about partnering and it's about creating an ecosystem it's creating an environment working together so we have over 60 Free Basics projects around the world it's non-exclusive so we have over 78 it's about 78 to 80 mobile operators that are partners it's open non-exclusive and any content provider that meets the sort of skinny technical requirements which are transparent and published can be part of the Free Basics platform and it's essentially a skinny version a text based version of the internet again think back to dial up days and what we're finding is that when people get introduced just like we did when we first got on we want more we want higher quality and what we're seeing is that as people become aware of the internet have experience using it as an introduction it becomes an on ramp and a significant number of people convert from this skinny service which is free by the way no money changes hands Facebook does not pay the operators the operators do not pay Facebook there's no money changing hands for this some people don't understand that but what we see is that people actually say you know I want it and I'm willing to pay for it and people actually convert into paid subscriptions because they want the pictures they want the video they want the images they want to be able to download faster and that's part of this it's creating the awareness it's an introduction to the internet and then beyond that there are other variables when it comes to readiness local content in local language this is what we've worked on together in the past so those are just some of the things that we try to identify and diagnose the gaps and have very specific projects very specific projects designed to fill those gaps so that we actually can get moved from 3 billion to 7 billion people connected in which they are seeing real value to being online thank you very much alright here we go I'm going to sit down behind my head it'll be quicker when we all actually get up on the stage so my name is Paul Garnado from Microsoft I run something called the Affordable Access Initiative so first of all let me just begin by explaining to you a little bit about Microsoft and why we're so interested in this whole space and then I'll talk a little bit about the Affordable Access Initiative and some of the work we're doing there so from a Microsoft perspective behind me is a picture of Sachin Adel our CEO in Kenya at a project location and our mission statement which is to empower every person every organization on the planet to achieve more which is a very big technology company kind of statement our original mission statement was sort of almost sort of before the internet which was basically to basically the idea was a computer on every desk and in every home Microsoft's really been a company focused on productivity for people for yours and we're now shifting to the cloud era where basically services and applications will be delivered from the cloud they will not necessarily be on someone's desktop so ideas around connectivity become all the more important for us so when we look at the issues of affordable access where we've talked a lot about this today 53% of the world's people are not online we literally can't serve these customers that they're not online there's no connectivity there's no cloud and then you talked about this issue of well even for those people who are connected the three billion who are online today maybe bandwidth is too expensive for them and they're rationing it they're effectively, even though they're technically online statistically effectively they're not so as a company we're very motivated to see if we can figure out ways to change all that the area that I work on is affordable access but we're doing a lot more than just the small area that I'm in so we talked earlier about things like data centers and submarine cable landing and landing spots and things like edge nodes and networks and caching these are all other areas that we're involved in we're making big investments there but then there's this issue of okay great we've got submarine cables ringing Africa and crossing the globe we've got data centers that are going in in various parts of the world governments have made huge investments in fiber infrastructure to get the backbones into networks into countries but then we're left with no last mile or a set of technologies that may not necessarily work for the populations that we're talking about so we're very much focused on partnering up with different types of companies through the affordable access initiative to figure out new innovations in technology or business models that can help more people get online and we've talked a lot about internet access today but power is another area that we've also touched upon and basically in Sub-Saharan Africa for example we have 1.2 billion people around the world who don't have electricity where they live and a lot of those people are in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia and then about 2.5 billion people in the world don't have reliable electricity so you can't deliver broadband access if you're not tackling these other issues other areas that we're looking at are payments so of course MasterCard is your new employer is very interested in this space most people in the world don't have credit cards and bank accounts so we have to figure out other ways for them to be able to pay for services and they don't consume services in the same way but most of the world is not on subscription and post-paid they're on prepaid and small chunks of consumption I was just at a board meeting last week with one of our partners in Kenya and one of the things that we're seeing is the smaller the increment the more revenue you get so even though it actually would make sense from a per gigabyte consume perspective for someone to be buying the bigger prepaid package of data including a 50 shilling 300 megabyte package because that's the thing that they can afford on a daily basis they buy in very small increments so it's really trying to tackle all of these issues so in terms of what I do here's the map of the world and the dots and all the countries in which we have projects today with different types of partners we're heavily in Africa I have been lucky enough to work with a lot of interesting entrepreneurs in Africa it's an amazing place to get projects going in as Greg mentioned earlier it's a toolkit approach so we're not religious about this it's not necessarily one thing or the other so we're just looking for we're looking at the cost economics of delivering data to customers and figuring out what's the cheapest thing for the market and what we want to be able to deliver satellites certainly is a piece of that equation generally what I'm seeing is terrestrial is still king if you can get to fiber that's still what you want to do in order to deliver access and we're doing a lot with unlicensed technologies like wifi, tv white spaces millimeter wave technology we're very interested in doing more on 3.5 gigahertz so so yeah really just try it out the other thing is that the projects we have today are fairly small scale either seed projects or at scale more of them are at seed than at scale and it's a lot of it's working with little entrepreneurs in countries around the world figuring this out with them at the bottom of the slide I have a sort of boxes on focus on the education vertical to get focused on because whenever we talk to governments around the world the thing they care the most about is education and getting kids connected so these are just examples of some of the impacts we're having and I think often times when we're having a conversation like this in a place like Washington DC we're very kind of remote from the impact and one of the great things is actually getting on the ground get your shoes dirty and go into these rural areas and meet people and see what kind of impact you can actually have and it's amazing so so on the seeds side there's a program that we launched last year our affordable access initiative grant fund which is very focused on partnering up with companies that are kind of in the seed to series A stage and they're trying to bridge that gap and one of the biggest issues especially in emerging markets is access to capital and being able to sort of prove out your great idea so we launched a program last year focused on affordable access we were able to give grants to 12 companies in 11 countries on five continents so great geographic diversity, diversity in terms of solutions so anything from hardware to connectivity to applications and with a particular focus on three verticals education agriculture and health which are really especially in emerging markets really key important verticals in those markets we just closed the window on this year's grant program the response was incredible we had about 450 companies get on the tool and start the application about 220 completed I think the quality of the application is based on what I'm seeing is even better than last year and now we have the hard task of going through all those applications and figuring out who's going to be who we're going to be fortunate enough to work with on projects so I feel like especially given we're in Washington DC and we're near policy makers, I feel kind of a little bit like I have to talk about TV white space because this is an area that we've been we've done quite a lot with as a company over the last 15 years at Microsoft some of our researchers were involved in this technology early on as they were looking at cognitive radio systems and software defined radios in this whole emerging area which now we're seeing in other bands as well, not just TV white spaces and oftentimes I get sent a blog or two that's been written by some DC lobbyist who really doesn't know what they're talking about and it's always a little bit of like you've told me my baby's ugly so I have to kind of defend myself a bit so one of the things I just want to say around TV white spaces because we've done a lot with it it works really well, it's great for rural deployments basically leveraging the propagation characteristics of UHF and actually we're going to see VHF radios soon it's a technology that's already cheap even not at scale so if you look at it compared to something like LTE on a cost per gigabyte delivered basis it's already cheaper basically under any scenario and it's also something that is we can take advantage of existing regulatory harmonization we already have globally because we already have broadcast bands and we operate on a secondary basis and then the other thing is it doesn't cause any harm to anyone and all the projects that I've been involved in anywhere on the planet whether I'm in an urban environment or a rural environment, no broadcasters have ever been interfered with we never had a single complaint from anyone that anything bad happened so don't worry about that so it's all good and we're going to be doing more with the technology over time and that sort of gets me to the ecosystem piece which is something I work quite a bit on and we are doing a lot to sort of get that ecosystem going from a technology perspective so the pricing will come down over the next 24 months so I'm going to quickly just very quickly touch on a few different projects in part because I just want to kind of talk a little bit about different scenarios and we talk a lot about emerging markets of course we do have emerging America in a way and there are people in the US who don't have broadband access or it's not affordable for them 24 million Americans don't have access to broadband and the number of course is much higher from a subscription perspective so one project that we're doing right now which is kind of a proof-of-concept project is in southern Virginia where we're leveraging fiber that's already going to schools and using TV white space technology to extend connectivity from schools to kids at home so these are communities in southern Virginia that are lower income on average more rural on average so therefore less connected so approximately 50% of the households in these two counties we're focusing on initially don't have broadband access so we've got fiber going to these schools that have been delivered to these locations by a great company called Mental Atlantic Broadband Communities this is fiber connectivity that has been subsidized by the E-Rate program part of the Universal Service program from the US and we're using TV white space to essentially illuminate coverage in these two counties and just by virtue of basically getting connected to the fiber at the schools we're able to illuminate coverage across both of those counties so we can have connectivity pretty much everywhere and the reason I highlight that in this context is because whereas in emerging markets often the issue is going to be about getting connectivity to a school in the US more often than not I know there are a lot of schools in the US that don't have good connectivity today which is shameful but this scenario in the US more likely is going to be how are we going to get connectivity to someone where they live so you've got these anchor institutions that have connectivity how do we avoid the scenario of the kid having to go to the library to do his or her homework or look for a Wi-Fi access point or go to McDonald's or something like that and really kind of help to close the homework gap so that project is in deployment right now and we should see some good impacts and then the next thing I'm going to quickly talk about one is in northern Namibia in a very very rural location and off-grid location very low population density and we're partnering up with Millennium Channels Corporation and a company called My Digital Bridge to bring broadband access to schools there and here I just wanted just to talk about this project because of just again the propagation characteristics of TV White Spaces so you can do networks over very very large geographic areas using this technology and get connectivity to places that otherwise wouldn't get it and you know maybe these would be places you'd otherwise do a satellite if not for something like TV White Spaces and then the other one I just want to mention is Jamaica this is another project around rural access and part of the reason I want to highlight this is because of this right here which is basically TV White Spaces so you can see in a place like Jamaica the two red channels are basically the only two occupied channels in the UHS in Jamaica so you have basically channels 17 and 21 that's in Kingston so that's the capital of the country so that's the most urban place in Jamaica two TV channels occupied this is spectrum abundance if you're ever going to see it and it's a great sort of scenario for the TV White Spaces access and we see this often in emerging markets whether you're in an urban area or in a rural area this is not like the New York City media market where most channels will be filled with broadcasts these are places where you have a couple channels that are filled with broadcasts and the rest of it's just green, empty so in other places in the Caribbean so when it's talking about emerging markets or rural America these are technologies that we should absolutely be looking at taking advantage of and with that I guess we're all going to get up here and answer a couple questions panel should come up I of course realize we're running over but for some of you maybe weren't here at the beginning we started a little late because of weather so we'll have a quick panel discussion on the journey alright thank you so much for showing us a lot of different stuff that's going on by each of your companies when will these projects do you think when will they meet and reach larger audiences larger populations in developing countries lots of activities going on all of your companies have been doing this for years maybe Facebook a little earlier more recent when do you think that these projects will reach the audiences that you hope to reach the larger audience we'll start with you Marion so I think the project that we're doing in India is a demonstration of being able to reach hundreds of millions of people in a very short period of time Project Loon of course is more of an experiment it's a moonshot that will take maybe five to seven years the project that we're doing in Africa especially since we're doing it in partnership with others I think that will have a much more rapid expansion and be able to capture again a significant number of people that are now offline how about on your satellite project Greg so we are on our timeline we launched next year our first satellites and 2019 we're going to turn on service so you'll start to see tens of thousands and then in 2020 hundreds of thousands and millions of people moving up to eventually probably a billion people online in 2025 so as we continue to launch we don't have a test there's too much energy too much infrastructure you're building it's all or nothing you're putting it up there on immediately so they'll just put the terminal on and they turn on and you're good to go so 2022 you want to reach every school you're saying 2022 you want to have every school in the world and you're telling your investors what are you telling your investors in terms of reach after you light it up well you saw some of the so the way satellite works is there's this sort of ten billion dollar market of today that exists and it's basically your customers all have three things in common desperate they're willing to pay too much and they'll accept really junky bandwidth so that's a ten billion dollar market you're on a plane you pay twenty dollars for two hours you wouldn't pay twenty dollars every two hours at your home and you know it's got high latency and it sort of works in some things your VPN doesn't work things like that that you're on an oil rig you're desperate you have money so that's a ten billion dollar market that we'll go into for sure but then there's a whole another market the three infinite markets which is cellular backhaul direct to consumer and connected car which will be serving as well so you'll see us initially a lot of the ten billion dollar market that's out there today we'll be picking up and you've seen announcements from different players like go-go and the like that will be using our capacity and Intel sat a lot of partnerships with them and Hughes but then you'll see a migration or very quickly you'll see a lot of residential municipality school custom center police station places like that and Robert you're saying that not one project is a solution for all there's a lot of different ideas that will work for different scenarios but you'd like to touch a lot of numbers of people big numbers of people so what is your thinking about look at the different gaps that are being filled so over the next so we already a project that I did not talk about was something called express wifi similar to the project that we heard about in South Africa but we're working we're already implementing that in trials in countries ranging from South Asia to India to Africa it's already connecting tens of thousands of people who were never connected we think that's going to move very quickly to hundreds of thousands and then to millions but that's sort of for sort of medium a medium density outside of cities and how do you get that kind of connectivity so again very specific types of solutions for very specific kinds of gaps like moon akila is longer term several years but it's similar to satellite once you actually have it and it's there and you turn it on then it's going to scale very quickly especially as a backhaul technology because there are lots of network operators out there that are there but they can't get the broadband because they don't have the backhaul so any of the backhaul technologies you're talking about that we're talking about up here as you connect an access point that then opens up all of the existing customers so it's almost flipping a switch and it's hundreds of thousands or millions at that point for any of these backhaul technologies so it's all of the above and so it's not waiting it's already happening and then once you get to that sort of tipping point instead of like this it's just going to go vertical and paul do you have a sense of when when you'll reach large populations a target that you can tell satya and others so it really depends on there are all kinds of disruptions happening so I think we're talking about something like submarine cable land submarine cables and data centers and edge nodes having an impact on the cost of bandwidth that's already happening and all of our companies are involved in this and these are multi-billion dollar investments so that's happening today when we're talking about some of these last mile access technologies like plastics specifically like TV white spaces we validated for ourselves that the technology works well we validated for ourselves from a commercial perspective it's something that is a good input into a network really right now the challenge is driving down the cost curve in terms of the cost of the technology so once you get down that cost curve where you basically have the price of wifi then it's going to take off and I think it's probably 24 months away so we'll see the first A6 this year built on silicon TV white space radios not standards based but cheap and we'll make deployments much easier and then next year we'll see why one more point I think if we did have an initiative where we were all working together I think the answer to your question would be a lot faster and that that makes me wonder you are all competitors in some ways you cooperate in other ways as well you have proprietary projects can there be cooperation what would that look like I think at this level at this base level we all share the same passion to become that competition and figure out a way to jointly form forces and where would you see that on the technological development on the dealings with regulators and Bob you spent much of your career dealing with regulators so a good example of that was at WRC 15 Facebook and Google partnered together to propose and actually the US and other governments were great something called high altitude platform spectrum and so we cooperated on that recognizing that we're developing different solutions to solve the same problem but we both need to have access to that spectrum and do it in a way that will not interfere with satellite and that's moving forward so you cooperate on that and again we're very agnostic about this if somebody has a better solution that can do it great right so if we develop the technology and we're open sourcing it giving it away to others to be able to use and operate and to create you know consortiums that might want to fly constellations of the Achilles that's terrific so I think and you already are beginning to see those kinds of cooperative arrangements building out this ecosystem you have some of the internet companies up here working in partnership with traditional telecos on backhaul networks to connect data centers in places where there are no backhaul networks so we're already seeing that my experience it certainly happens in the policy space I think we're largely aligned on a variety of different issues but I think at the end of the day when it comes to talking to regulators or going to the ITU there's a lot of commonality in terms of what we're saying and likewise I think in the technology standardization space I think we see a lot of alignment there as well when it comes to collaborations on pilots or deployments or you know you start to sort of get more into the commercial space and I think there are opportunities for collaboration even there but you know at the end of the day we are competitors and you know when we get into that the conversation gets a little more difficult and there will be situations where we do things that are in competition with each other just the nature of the market and that leads me to ask you Greg do you think this is your business this is everything this is the whole this is the price connectivity for these other guys this is a project that's important really long range thinking to just the thriving of the internet and thinking about your business's long term but it's not what's making most of your revenue so how do you I guess the question is would you be able to partner but also for the other companies up here how does how do your companies think of the returns on these projects and the value of them so maybe I'll start with you Greg and then I'll ask you guys so we are and are totally open to partnering with everyone here I think the reason they're doing their thing and the reason we're doing our thing is because there's a problem now I think magically we all wish the problem went away we could solve it I think all three of their businesses would be better if the pipes from their headquarters and you know was open 100% free flowing data to every human in the world right there all their businesses would grow dramatically and they would be working on other things they're doing it because there's a problem I've sort of done this because of an internal like clock inside me that has this mission and so pulled together a lot of resources spent a lot of time in every single aspect of what they're doing like my knees and mud trenching and I think we have a technical solution I know we do that will meet some portion of the need there'll be other things we're not going to beat up fiber better than fiber but the market so large there's room for many different technologies and topologies I don't see this competition like I said before it's not competition someone wants to run fiber good have at it because there's just no way we'll just take the last pieces on the end we'll solve all those problems so we'll work with them and how can we work them in many different ways for instance at all of our gateways putting their content at the gateways making sure it's available for consumers on the other side it helps all their business and we're spending the money to make the pipe so we're really open to working with everybody in a positive way even people who theoretically are competitors want to run fiber again we just say go please it's good for us too I think what you heard from all of us are a range of different activities we're involved in anything from things that are kind of more short term to longer term but I can tell you that there are deals we can't do in emerging markets because of lack of connectivity so if we're having a conversation with government around getting kids laptops and two-thirds of the schools don't even have internet access it's almost like what's the point so these are issues that have to get solved and they are deal blockers today and so there is an urgency for all of us to try to address these very practical issues of course we are all involved in longer term projects and we have Microsoft's a massive research organization and there are plenty of folks working on some very cool issues there but that's not the place where I play I play more in the kind of get deals done today and business development partnership type stuff around access and I sort of touched on this in the earlier question how do you as three Microsoft, Google and Facebook Google and Facebook publicly traded companies think about value and the return on these projects for Google as you know the main mission is to provide universal access to information so if we don't have an underlying network infrastructure that can do that well then we have no business so what we've done is to deploy and help stimulate the growth of these networks at little or no cost to the actual consumer and what we hope to do is at one point reach a sustainable business model and just cover our costs for the underlying network infrastructure and not actually create a profit on that they're not seen as profit generators but at some point they've got to make up a sustainable the business model requires connectivity without robust connectivity if you're providing applications and content of the stack and there's no connectivity you don't have a business so it's we don't make these technologies to sell them we're not vendors we don't make these technologies to sell as a service God bless Greg that he's doing that if he's really successful and the costs come way down then we don't need to do what we do because you're going to be doing a lot of that connectivity activity so the business it's a different business Microsoft is not a vendor either you're doing these things because you have to for the rest of the business but there's also another part of this that actually all four of the companies there is a genuine passion within the companies to connect the unconnected the either the founders or in the case of Microsoft your current CEO this actually is top of mind as a passion and it's part of doing well by doing good because it creates this virtuous cycle if everybody is connected that's the right thing to be doing in terms of social economic benefits growing the global economy etc but also it's good for business these are not mutually exclusive I'm just going to say in my case I kind of slice it in three different ways one is very transactional so is there a deal that's in front of us right now that where connectivity is it needs to be an element of the deal that we have to solve the middle is more kind of business development partnership type stuff where we have a longer horizon maybe a three-year horizon or something like that but we are still looking for profitability both for ourselves and our partners we need this to be sustainable and then there is longer term stuff like just proof of concept or something more in the CSR space where we are going to make nothing off it anytime soon but we think there is some potential in the future for this potentially to turn to something that is commercial but there is discipline around all of this it's not like we are just doing this for the heck of it just because we care about it all of us care about it but we also all happen to work for for profit companies it's good for business because I've got Qualcomm and Airbus and Intelsat and Hughes and these extremely technically savvy companies with their CEO and chairman on our board right so before they invest and get involved with us they are digging through every aspect starting with spectrum that's number one and then they dig through the rest of it to make sure it's all working and so we've had that as well as a business model on the other side to raise this amount of money that we've raised it requires a very strong business model but I think at the end of it we can have a step function change in the cost of bandwidth and the quality that's accessible to the other three billion so that's the other side of the horizon over the horizon that we are looking at and all of our investors are looking at speaking of spectrum Greg do you have the spectrum that you think you'll need and you start there and maybe more specifically the FCC in July had a frontier order where it opened up a large band of spectrum satellite spectrum for sharing with wireless providers for 5G yes will you and others that are trying to do what you're doing like SpaceX will you be able to share that bandwidth well so there's a bit of a we live in this, as you said we're in DC and you're far from like the world the whole world tends to be looking at us right now for some reason I don't know why but that's true the FCC is US there's these other countries many if you spin the globe right the US is like some small percentage of the total world so the FCC is actually managing the spectrum aspects for a small percentage of the total world falls the ITU the FCC for some historical reasons doesn't fall the ITU in some things so it's the only country in the world that does that so we have the priority rights and others have secondary rights beyond us and the like but we have the spectrum we need on a global basis and then the FCC in that what you're talking about there what they did was they took a 28 gigahertz and they said that we want to use that for 5G and that has no negative effect on us has zero impact on us because we cooperate very easily with that so that is not an issue the FCC largely falls the ITU but you know it's the US and they have their own rules Maria I want to talk about something specific to Google too Google station which is your free wifi the Indian rail stations in India that you explain a little bit it's been pretty popular is there enough and a lot of that was due to the fact that as you explained fiber was laid along the tracks and so you do have the backhaul necessary for that project to expand to other parts of India let alone the rest of the globe you do need that kind of infrastructure what's the picture like for you for that kind of backhaul to make that project grow so we're looking at other countries to see where the fiber exists and we have heat maps to help us determine that where they don't exist we have another initiative that's underway called the digital highway which is a preclude almost to a prelude to actually laying g-fiber and it's looking at and it's looking at ways to stimulate the growth of fiber networks in these other regions and we just got back from a trip a fact-finding trip in Southeast Asia where we looked at Myanmar and Vietnam and Cambodia and we'll be going across the emerging markets looking at other countries where there isn't enough fiber and enough backhaul and trying to have a plan in place so that two or three years from now it will be there and we can bring g-station to those countries and Robert you talked about the success of free basics currently in many countries dozens a little bit further out there and more on a trial basis is Akilah experimental but very exciting can you talk a little bit about bringing those to the US is that a possibility to serve the 34 million who aren't connected anything anything right is possible and we're constantly looking at lots of places for these things I think the if you look at some of the questions in the US they're really important how do you provide connectivity again not under connected but fully connected in rural America what about Montana, Wyoming places that are very low density technologies as they evolve they prove in that's also possible but that's not where we're initially looking but there are large portions of the US that are under connected and you were talking a little bit Paul about your Virginia pilot in southern Virginia on the White Spice basis trial and you're saying that two counties right now are blanketed from the fiber nodes at the schools to the homes can you tell us a little bit about what you found and how that project could be expanded what are some of the maybe the hiccups or some of the successes I mean first of all any time you're deploying a new technology there's always going to be hiccups in terms of delays and when radio show up and stability issues and all that kind of stuff I think the good news there is that well that's now been ironed out and the macro cell network has been deployed and now we're doing the in-home installations with our partner we had basically we focused on one school first as our guinea pig and had about 60 households on that network I mean they love it of course they do they haven't had internet access before and now they can be online and their kids can do their homework so all of that goodness and then the question for us is the cost economics of it and is this something that can be replicable across the US and potentially in other markets as well and that picture is becoming clear especially as we are able to deploy cheaper consumer devices but the thing that's interesting about it is already I mean even as we're deploying it the Commonwealth of Virginia has been very interested in the project and other state heads of education are watching and we're even going to do a project in Taiwan where they have a similar problem a similar kind of developed market scenario with a certain percentage of kids who don't have internet access at home hyper-connected society but facing some similar challenges so we're going to do a pilot project there with some partners so I think the goal is that proof of concept, let's see if this works and then let's try to see if we can essentially copy and paste this and the other thing I would say on the US is this was something that we started focusing more on about a year and a half ago I had enough frequent flyer miles in Africa and decided okay, let's see if I can take some of what we've learned in emerging markets and apply it to the US and so I think over the course of this year you'll see Microsoft announce at least a dozen similar projects around the US It's about a business, the technology is proofing in, it's really about a business case at this point in the business model can you bring your cost down, can you get the volumes up does it make sense as a business case and that's really I think what you're beginning to see pulse projects are further along than some of ours but that's ultimately where we're going, I mean Greg's already made the big bet I mean you're making it a business case you're doing it the point you really are, like up to your eyeballs so moment of truth but that's what it ultimately is about because is it scalable and replicable and if it is, and then what happens is you can really drive those costs down the cost curve then it becomes the sweet spot for deployment in very low income developing parts of the world because you've already gone down that cost curve we have time for some questions and there's a microphone, if you can please identify yourself by name and organization I appreciate it right there I'm not sure I expect an answer to this question but it seems like each of you has a different set of capabilities and a different set of technologies and you're all looking for ways to show that that technology will create huge impact in very distressed, poor inadequate resource areas is there some pre-competitive way that we could find the best scale opportunities in the areas of solving those problems and bring them to you and have you say that's one where if we leverage that with our technology it would just explode a set of impact in India, in Uganda in Kenya, in Tanzania and then if it works, when we go to the next project we already have a set of in essence enterprises that are sustainable on the ground that can move with the technology and there are some that will have huge connectivity improvements if they don't do it with you they'll get a 10x if they do it with you they'll get a 100x there will be others that knowing that they have access to that particular technology will design their solution to optimize for that such that they get the 100x instead of the 10x by just getting ahead of time and knowing the group in India that runs 53,000 single teacher schools, which of your technologies would be optimal for those schools and the next 50,000 they're going to create in the next 10 years is there a way to pre-competitively get together and put you guys together with those people I think Google would welcome that we're doing that internally but definitely if we could collaborate with others to do that that would help us tremendously because we're trying to move as aggressively as possible and if someone could lay that landscape for us it would be with us that would be wonderful we would welcome it It's fine with us as well I would want to say though although each of us has our own projects that we're working on it's not as if as if I ever do a network it's just TV white spaces even a so-called TV white space network is going to have a whole variety of technologies that are inputs into it or even satellite as backhaul we have a particular background in this technology because we help to develop it but you guys have particular backgrounds and other technologies and I think it's a toolkit approach at the end of the day to build a new America so first two connected questions first question is as you build this connectivity how do you ensure that you're not creating unforeseen problems of cyber security issues which we have seen in the developed world and don't want to see replicated with new connectivity second question is given that you're building new technology to build this connectivity what options are there to jump ahead and use that to create security that maybe is absent from the legacy internet that we're currently working with Robert or Marion so Google is typically not acting as an ISP in any of the ventures that I talked about so what we do is we provide the ISP all the tools that we have in terms of security to help them but we ourselves are not taking responsibility for that since it's typically left up to the ISP we've got security like a lot of us I mean from the control of our satellites to the control of the terminals to locking terminals to ground stations to even some proactive things about security about looking at apps smartphones will be what how a smartphone is acting whether it could be violated or not and some of those things that Qualcomm is doing that we're building and embedding in our system but security is a broad topic like it goes from A to Z and probably beyond so I can't address it all but it's definitely a hot topic for us one of the advantages of building technologies today is we know what again when I talked earlier about identifying and filling gaps you know so early internet technology was not designed with a lot of security in mind we know that so just as we're designing new networks and new technologies today it's one of the things that you design in from the beginning so it's a different approach it's not bolted on later in the beginning unlike them we have we're really not limited to any individual country because we're not trust-filled or lower so really really lower so we have we deal with countries individually with their own security issues and how to make sure their users talk to or are secure within their own country networks that's another level of security and challenges but we're all over it I have an offer and I have so much to ask my name is Joe Krause I'm with the One Campaign we're an advocacy and campaigning organization with seven plus million members around the world and we come at this from the development perspective we're aim is to end extreme poverty in Africa so we've worked with some of the groups in this room on connectivity already but since we are an advocacy organization we're working with governments trying to change regulations, change policies to actually help improve connectivity for instance right now we're pushing the G20 to include in their compacts for Africa as part of the Marshall Plan which is hosting this year's summit has put out trying to get them to include commitment to helping connect all classrooms in Africa in the next three to five years what can we as an advocacy organization work with your organizations to help convince policy makers to make the regulatory changes that are necessary we're not experts on this issue so what advice would you have to us in terms of when we go to governments what should we be asking for what should we be pushing for in terms of policy and then also we play I think a pretty unique role in the NGO space of bringing together lots of unusual suspects two years ago we helped launch sustainable development data bringing together private sector of civil society lots of governments I think when we launched we had over 60 and now it's several hundred so offering our services to partner with anyone who's interested in trying to advance our combined goals so the short answer is we actually I think you may know already partnering very closely with one and working with you on all those issues particularly on trying to close the gender gap in terms of access and use of the internet so yeah for those of you who don't know one's activities in this area it's actually it's great and it's easy to work with you so thank you thank you so much everyone well I just came yesterday from India thanks to Manu I was invited here so I have installed about 70,000 street lights in India 15 states of India and I see the Google in all the train stations and it's amazing to see how kids come over there and they study there and there are more kids in the station than passengers so it's a great feeling to see that and I also installed about 100,000 home lighting systems in 15 states in India where there's no lexity and I have at least said that you have to have the lexity to have the connectivity and I am so happy to be here to see all you guys and I would love to help in getting your dream together so we can discuss later how I can help you thank you thank you everyone for coming you take our guests please thanks to Celia our moderator thank you all for those of you who were able to hang in totally from these folks just before you all leave I think Manu wanted to make one quick request