 Welcome to the World Summit on the Information Society 2016 in Geneva, Switzerland. And I'm delighted to be joined by Ahmed Bidi Badi, founder of the data processing company of Iran. I understand you pioneered internet connectivity in Iran and that you're now very heavily involved in broadband connectivity. Yes, exactly. One of the main issue of right now in every country is to expand the broadband. So we are involved to building the infrastructure and bringing broadband to all cities, also through the rural area. Because this is actually a very important issue in order that you can bring e-services on the top of that. And about a year and a half ago we brought the 3G and 4G operator coming and the gross has been good. So we have about 15.5 million using mobile broadband and almost 8.5 million fixed broadband. So this number is going to be doubled in next two years. So you can see the gross will be very high. And right now the government also has the policy subcontracting private companies such as us and other company to lay down the optical fiber. Actually our company is involved in laying down the optical fiber which is needed for the broadband. So it's a mass explosion of broadband but of course Iran is a massive country. So there must be challenges in getting connectivity to some of the more rural areas. Yes. As you mentioned one of the challenges was the sanction. Now the sanction has been lifted out so life becoming a little bit easier. Many European companies are coming so that makes expansion of the broadband much faster and cheaper because before you have to do it through a third party so it makes it expensive and you need more budget. So this was one of the challenges. Second challenge is digital literacy which we are in country. Of course since we have over 50% of our population are young they're picking up very fast. But still by educating people they use in proper way the broadband especially social networking. You can't believe in Iran the social networking is growing very fast and everybody using. I don't know if you have they're using a telegram. Telegram is a Russian social networking. 80% of their user is in Iran. So many people use even in rural area to exchange idea to get there to share these things. Because of the broadband is expanding like other services like e-education, e-learning lots of e-learning platform is coming up. Even ourself we have developed a platform called Ribut for e-learning that all people can within the country access remotely and take a university course and other courses require. And that's the advantage in Iran because you've got such a highly educated population and young people that you have potentially got all of these ICT engineers and experts who are home grown. Exactly this is one of our advantage as far as the human resources is very good. We had about four and a half million you know graduates in every year you know. So all universities in different cities within the Iran and in the ICT also we have very good number of graduate students so that they help us to grow faster and do things in a better way. Startup is growing. As the broadband is growing from the last two years start up are growing new ideas growing young people understand that they can make good things with good idea even they can make good money if they are after the money. So is wondering that from the last two years many start up has grown and even foreign company have came recently they are investing and they are getting their share and they are paying a good amount of money to them because they have done great job. So this is one of the advantage we have in our country because they found Iranian has a good talent you know so they are using these human resources which you need for developing different e-services and application and mobile app. You know you can believe lots of mobile app is developing in Iran even it's been used outside of Iran but it's developing you know because of the human sources you have available in the country. So here at WISIS you can obviously exchange a lot of good practice from Iran. What have you actually learnt from other countries here about their success stories? Yes this is my six years actually coming to the WISIS and during these six years I have learned a lot of experiences sharing idea actually sharing our success story at the same time sharing other success stories that we have used and we try to even partner together to implement some of the idea they already implemented and they have been successful full story about it and we did. For example yesterday we have some idea with some African people about e-agriculture they have some solution which have been implemented and we are going to really partner together and to have a start up in our country to implement it in the e-agriculture which is one of the things is really needed especially for rural area farmer e-commerce is growing you know people are now because of the broadband and mobile penetration using you know online to buy you know the goods so before the last two years this facility was not available but as broadband is growing these e-services is coming. Ahmed Bidebadi founder of the data processing company of Iran thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for giving this opportunity to me and please do join us on the ITU YouTube channel where you can see many interviews with the experts here at the WISIS Forum 2016.