 Welcome to the ITU studio engineer. I'm very pleased to be joined in the studio today by Mr. Danaraj Taku, who is the research director for the Web Foundation. Welcome to the studio. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Now, I'd like to start off by talking a little bit about some of the factors that impact on the affordability of ICT services. We're here at the World Telecommunication and ICT Indicators Symposium. Perhaps we could, you know, look at, focus it, focus in a little bit on the affordability of ICT services. Yeah, it's a good question. So affordability when we think about it and think about the cost of mobile broadband services across the world, across non-medical countries. Some of the key factors that influence this are the policy and regulatory environments. This is what we're very much concerned with. Things like the licensing type requirements, the level of competition in the markets, the level of taxation. All of these are very important and often in reality negatively impact on the affordability of services. For example, taxes might be too high or spectrum fees might be too high and so on. We focus on a lot of these factors, the policy issues, because these are the kinds of issues that governments can tweak and improve and ultimately improve affordability for most people. Now, we just heard last week 51.1% of the global population is now using the incident. We're now connected. What more can countries do in your opinion in terms of pricing of ICT services and products to bring more people online? Right. I would start with the policy issues, as I mentioned, going beyond reform and improving the policy environments and the markets environments. Governments can also invest directly in providing services for people, especially those that cannot afford current prices and current levels of services, especially low-income people, people that live in rural areas. Women are often less likely to be online than men. So there are specific targeted programs that governments can invest in and support these services. And they have mechanisms like universal service funds, which are often not effectively managed and used, but could be improved to provide services and address the needs of the next 50% that needs to come online. I mean, that figure is pretty much aggregated across the world. I mean, some countries are much lower than that, of course. Exactly. Some countries are higher. Do you think enough is being done? No, definitely not. In fact, what we have found is that the rates at which people are coming online is actually slowing down, and this is worrying, which then tells us that governments and industry and suicide, everyone needs to do a lot more to push people to get more online. As you said, in some regions, there's actually much lower. In Africa, on average, it's actually less than 25%. So this is very worrying. The bright side is that we know what kinds of interventions are required and that need to get more people online. Let's talk about trends. What would you say is the overall trend when it comes to pricing of ICT services? I would say prices have been going on in the last couple of years. The ITU data shows this. The data from the Alliance for Affordable Internet, which is an initiative of the Web Foundation, also shows this. The problem is the prices are not coming down fast enough to get more and more people online. If you look at trends using the Alliance for Affordable Internet's data across the world, across middle and income countries, we find that, on average, prices are around 5.5% of average monthly income. Using the affordability threshold of 2%, which has recently adapted by the broadband commission, this is still much higher than what can be deemed as affordable. So prices have been coming down, but they're still not at the level that we would like them to be to get people online. Finally, we've been hearing some very interesting conversations here at this symposium. What do you think would be the key takeaways from here? I think some of the major issues have been around getting better data, more frequent data, more accurate data from countries, to better understand who is not online, who is online, who is not online, and what kinds of interventions can be done or implemented to address these issues. The challenge is around getting better data. The ITU is working and has been working for some time with government partners to address that problem. Well, thank you very much for joining us in the studio, and we hopefully will catch up with you again, perhaps at the next symposium. Yes, thank you very much. Thank you.