 Our digital future is upon us. Every day, more and more people around the world are tapping into the power of the Internet, joining their voices to the global community through information and communications technologies like computers, mobile phones, and social media. Yet the transformative power of broadband and ICTs is only just being realized. At the annual Broadband Commission, held today ahead of the United Nations General Debate, world leaders, UN officials, and titans of the ICT industry reflected on the state of broadband worldwide and how to ensure its application for economic and social development. In just four years, we have gone from seeing ICTs as more or less useful gadgets to seeing them as a powerful platform for social and economic progress. When the Commission started its work, for example, there were fewer than 65 countries with the National Broadband Commission, a broadband plan, and today we have over 140 in the world. The new communication channels for citizens to engage in debate and set priorities and be empowered through ICTs are becoming very, very evident. When the MDGs were launched, there was no iPhone, there was no iPad. Broadband is a means of transformation to achieve the sustainable development goals and gender equality. Today, we will also look beyond the present and reflect on how a broadband future should look like by 2020 and, most importantly, how to get there and what this Commission can do to lead us there. Back in the 19th century, it was railroads and steam ships that sort of connected the world by connecting societies, we ended up with better trade, we ended up with exposure to other cultures, we ended up with new ways to educate our societies even back then. So today, it's broadband that takes the place of the railroads and the steam ships. It might seem unusual to debate how the internet, social media, and smartphones are having a transformative impact on people's lives. The economic benefits of ICTs and broadband are fairly obvious. What the Commission hopes to put forward are the enormous social benefits that come with it, too. We need to look at the social issues in terms of health, education, poverty alleviation, water management, agriculture, any single area of development, economic, and social. Greater ICT use is very beneficial in health. For example, you can empower patients themselves to take more responsibility for the management of their own disease and this is what we do for non-communicable diseases, for example. Or you can empower community health workers who are not necessarily skilled but who are very engaged in health work and who need coaching from more trained professionals. The Broadband Commission is quite unique. Titans of the private sector sit side by side with world leaders and top UN officials. Its members believe that the benefits of broadband access are shared by the ICT industry and the development community alike. It's crucial to be in partnership with different stakeholders of different disciplines because by our own we cannot do everything, of course. Well, really it's a combination of government and private and emphasis really on the private sector which has got to do the research and the innovation, the technical innovation to find new and less expensive ways to connect parts of the world to innovate on business models but it has to also involve the financing institutions, the development banks, other private sector investment and government doing the right thing in terms of policies that stimulate the investment and that sort of stimulate the innovation potential and the return. By creating private public partnerships which I'm sure that you are talking about here a lot that stimulate investment in infrastructure we can unleash the potential of communication technology for development. A digital revolution is at hand and it will emerge from the nexus of partnership and innovation between stakeholders both public and private. The question here is how we trigger this transformational power of ICTs for the developing countries and to reach the enriched and to build on the potential of this infrastructure and ICTs for social inclusion and social cause. For SouthSouth News, Brendan Pastor, New York.