 Welcome to the ITU studio at the Plenipotentiary Conference here in Bucharest, Romania, where I'm very pleased to be joining the studio today by Barry French, who is the Chief Marketing and Government Affairs Officer for InMarsat. Barry, welcome to the studio. Thank you. It's great to be here. Now, I'd like to start off by talking a little bit about the spirit of the conference. How do you feel the spirit of the conference is so far? Yeah, I actually think it's quite remarkable, and you have to start with saying thanks to the Romanian host, because it's really been extremely well done, even spectacular, and I think they deserve a lot of credit for doing great work. But also, you feel like there's a time when people are coming back together after having been apart for a long time, and there's remarkable energy. And I think that obviously the ITU and the communications world around it, there's lots of challenges to deal with and issues to solve, but a real positive spirit of intense engagement. And actually, it's going to sound a little corny, but kind of joy if people see each other again. It's really great to see. Now, there's been a number of ministerial statements, which have talked about satellite technology. Why is this so important in your opinion? You know, the reality is that we won't meet the objectives of connecting everybody in the world and everything in the world almost without satellites. It just won't happen. If you think about it, and I come from a background of terrestrial mobile communications, but there are places where terrestrial mobile or terrestrial connectivity of any kind doesn't work. It's not economic. There's places where it can't work. Think about in the middle of oceans or in fast-moving aircraft, and there's some places where satellites just are better. They're more resilient in very remote parts of the world, where maybe you have some terrestrial connectivity, but the resilience isn't great and satellites can do better. So, you know, there's a lot of talk here about 2.7 billion people still being unconnected, which is just crazy, right? And, you know, the GSMA and so on talk about a coverage gap. Well, from space, there is no coverage gap. And so there is a solution there to be had. And it's much easier nowadays to get satellites up there than it was ever before. It's very much a changed world, which has both good and bad. There's some risks that come along with that, for sure. But there's also much more available connectivity from space, and that is a net positive. Now, there are a number of inputs to PlanetPot on space sustainability. Let's perhaps discover a little bit about that and find out what the thoughts are. Well, think about this. I mean, 10 years ago, the number of satellites in space were in the hundreds, maybe five, 700, something like that. Today, roughly 5,000. 10 years from now, hundreds of thousands. Some have said even maybe as many as a million. And well, there's a lot of benefits to that in terms of increased connectivity and so on. There's some real risks as well. And right now, the approach to space seems to be a bit of a wild west. I mean, everyone's just running up and doing things. And the risk is that we do things that we regret later. And I think our view at Inmarsat is let's understand these issues a bit more before we break things and actually damage space as an asset for future generations. So the fact that it is being considered and under discussion here, we think is a very positive thing. I mean, I think most people would wonder how on earth all these satellites are all orbiting the earth and that there aren't more collisions, that there aren't more issues up there. Well, the risk of that happening is very, very real. I mean, if you look at respected publications like Nature, they're raising issues about the number of satellites, the amount of associated debris that really can cause issues. And our view is that's a real risk. And it just takes some time, not too much time, but to kind of think it through to make sure we get it right. So again, we don't break things for later. And we believe that the ITU has a really important role to play here. If you think about a global organization where telecom authorities and regulators come together to discuss things, the ITU seems the right place to actually help drive a global solution to this. So in my opinion, what would be the ideal situation there? So we actually think that there's kind of a threefold policy solution to some of the sustainability issues in space. Number one is the ITU having a broader mandate to cover space sustainability. That's number one. Number two, we think there needs to be what we call a coalition of the willing of some of the big space countries coming together to agree on some basic standards. How many satellites can you put in an orbital shell and so on? And then third and most immediate, most important, national regulators need to basically say to space companies, we won't grant you market access unless you sign up to strong sustainability principles. And if that doesn't happen, I think there's a real risk to what happens in space in the future. Because spectrum is strongly regulated. So we need to make sure that the same thing is happening above our head. Exactly. And it makes a great deal of sense. Because otherwise, it really is kind of a free for all. And that doesn't seem to be the best way to approach this from a public policy point of view. Now we talked about this conference, a planning potential conference. It's very important to ITU. It happens every four years. And it really ensures and looks at the future of the operations of the union. I just wanted to find out, in your opinion, how important is this for InMarsat? Oh, I think it's absolutely critical. I mean, and it's critical for any company in space or in any other kind of connectivity. Because the ITU is where this all comes together. And where big spectrum issues are worked through. And of course, that's worth a lot of money for business. But it's also worth a lot to societies in terms of how they benefit from connectivity over time. So it's huge. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to be here at the planning potential conference. Of course, here in the studio. And hopefully, we'll get to catch up with you at some stage in the very near future. That would be great. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you very much indeed.