 Welcome to the World Radio Communication Conference 2023, WRC 23, now in its last week in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, where I'm pleased to be joined in the studio. I'm Martha Suarez, who is the President of the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance. Martha, welcome to the studio. Thank you very much. It's my pleasure to be here. Now, perhaps you could start off by telling me a little bit about the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance. Great name, but what does it represent? So DSA is a global organization. We advocate for best practices in terms of spectrum management, and we support spectrum sharing, dynamic spectrum access, because we think that those are important tools to increase connectivity and affordability. Okay, let's talk about this conference here, the World Radio Communication Conference. It's a major date in the ITU's calendar. Why is it important to you to be here? Well, DSA represents different stakeholders from the high tech sectors. Among our members, we have the high tech companies, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, also companies such as Cisco, HPE, Broadcom. And for all our members, connectivity broadband access is important, and we support better access through Wi-Fi. So we are advocating for that opportunity for Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7, the new generations of Wi-Fi to continue growing and providing the service that users are needing and also new applications, such as augmented and virtual reality or many new environments. So that's important for us because we all give, we all assume that Wi-Fi is there. We use it all the time, it's kind of omnipresent, but sometimes people forget that it also needs a spectrum. Now I was going to come to that because the World Radio Communication Conference is all about spectrum allocation. What spectrum areas are of interest to your organization and how do they impact the future allocation of spectrum around the world? Well, Wi-Fi is a technology that operates normally under license exam mode. So every country has their own rules and we are currently using the frequency bands of 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz. However, the next generation of Wi-Fi, I mean the current generation of Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 are using the 6 gigahertz band. And that is one of the most controversial issues in their discussion here. That band is already used for fixed service, for fixed satellite service, and is allocated to the mobile service and the agent item 1.2 is discussing a possible IMT identification for that band. We would like to see a note change, meaning that we protect the incumbents, we still give the possibility for technologies such as Wi-Fi to grow, and then administrations have the most flexibility to do basically any deployment they want in the 6 gigahertz band. Okay, now everybody knows of course, I don't think there'll be anybody who would be disagreeing with you that Wi-Fi is very important for connectivity, perhaps you could really expand on that for us. Yes, absolutely. For example, we are here, we are attending the conference, I think more than 3,000 participants, and everyone is connected to Wi-Fi. And we have a combination, we can have mobile when we are outdoors, but we need very good Wi-Fi indoors. And it's not only to the normal traffic we are facing now, like not only to send emails and video and photos, but also there are new applications coming and they will need larger channels, more capacity, more bandwidth, and what we call lower latency. So all that needs additional capacity and that's why we are targeting this band, not only for the current needs, but we also think it's a long term vision. So there are many administrations that already open the 6 gigahertz band for license exempt or unlicensed access. And since then we are seeing an impressive growth of devices. We had a booth here and we were showing the participants that there are more than 2,000 devices using Wi-Fi 6E. And when we say 2,000 it means, for example, one device is the Samsung S23. So there could be millions of them, but when we say one, it's a family of devices. So well, it's a reality, it's something that everyone uses. And we expect that regulators here will give the conditions for that future of Wi-Fi. Okay, well, let's hope that you get what you want. And that we obviously get good Wi-Fi connectivity, because I think as I say, everybody is extremely happy when they have good Wi-Fi connectivity, very upset when they don't. And I can definitely see the advantages of that. Now, in terms of the key pointers to efficient utilization at Spectrum, how can it foster innovation and connectivity for all, do you think? Well, first there are countries that are very advanced. They have targets or connectivity plans for fiber deployment. And that's the case, for example, in Europe, the Digital Decade Policy Program says that by 2030, every European household will have access for one gigabit per second. Countries here, like we are in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar are countries that have great fiber penetration. So in those countries, you could have a great fiber connection, but if you don't have Wi-Fi, there will be a bottleneck. So that's clearly an application that is important. And also if you are going through the green transition, it's much more efficient to provide indoor connectivity using an indoor technology, such as Wi-Fi, so combining fiber and Wi-Fi, instead of trying to provide indoor connectivity with outdoor networks. So because you have attenuation of the walls. But that's not only important for developed economies, it's also important for countries in development. We have the case, for example, of Brazil, where internet service providers are going to every corner of the country and they are providing wireless access using unlicensed spectrum. So basically what they do is a type of connection for last mile connectivity. It's more affordable. They are local providers, so it's creating also an important effect on the economy. And it's a way to increase that access. In that case, that's an outdoor application. So we think that everyone has something to obtain once you have access to the technology and once you have access to, for example, I was mentioning before ARVR. Many countries are using that opportunity to develop content. So there are new applications for education, for training, for industry. E-Health as well. E-Health, exactly. For example, doctors can be trained using virtual reality instead of practicing with real patients. And all that is based on that ecosystem of unlicensed access because those headsets meet chipsets that are cheaper, massive, like those provided by Wi-Fi, and also very low latency and very high throughput. So at the end, what the technology is providing is a range of options and applications and we think that's a very exciting future. So that's why we are also here trying to make sure that spectrum is there for the growth of Wi-Fi. For now and for the future. Exactly. Well, thank you so much for giving us this wonderful interview and these great insights into the world of Wi-Fi and the DSA, the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance, of which you are the president of. And we look forward to catching up with you again at another ITU conference or at some stage in the very near future, at least. Yeah, that would be great. Thank you so much. Thank you. And if you've enjoyed this interview, then do check out our other interviews on our YouTube channel as well as our podcasts on our podcast channels. And for further information, visit our website at www.itu.int. Thanks for tuning in.