The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> JOANNA KULESZA: I believe I've been granted the role of the moderator. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us for this session. It's hosted by ISOC. We have strong ISOC representation. Many thanks to the Internet Society for hosting this session and granting me the role of the moderator.
We have excellent speakers today who will explain why it is worthwhile to look at Low Earth Orbit satellites right now in the context of regulating broadband. And multistakeholderism and Internet governance.
So without further ado, I would start with the introductions of our speakers. Hand them the floor. Ask them a few scoping questions to let us understand why it is important to speak about Internet governance in the context of satellite. A hot topic that we should be debating now. Is this related to policy? And is there any work for the IGF to do?
And then hopefully we will open the floor to questions. We want to use this session as a start of a conversation. We feel that there is a deficit on conversations about the role that satellites play in global Internet connectivity. Since the IGF is there to make sure that the next billion connects as quickly as they can and that that is fair, equitable, and available to everyone. We will try to have that conversation today.
Thank you for joining us. I'm going to start with a brief introductions of our speakers. We will start with Dan York who is leading dedicated project on Low Earth Orbit satellites within the Internet Society. Dan is the Director for Online Content within ISOC. Well experienced in all Internet Society matters. Most recently focused on the dedicated project on Low Earth Orbit satellites. I don't want to reveal any surprises that you might have for us there. Dan, I'm going to stick to this very brief introduction and I'll let you share whatever you feel is appropriate at this point with our audience in due course.
I will start with the introductions of all of our speakers. Then I'm going to hand the floor to them to give us a technical introduction about LEOs. What they are. What they are not. And why we might wish to care.
Then I'm going to turn the floor over to Berna Akcali Gur discussing the regulatory aspects of LEOs. Berna and myself have been working on an Internet Society foundation project dedicated to the policy aspects of LEOs. This work complements the work that Dan's group has been engaged in. That's one of the reasons we thought it might be good to put our heads together and share with the IGF audience the work that has been done.
I am going to turn the floor over to Berna who is a professor with Queen Mary University in London working on trade law, working on cybersecurity, Internet governance, and Berna is going to give us a review of current European regulatory attempts as they stand with regards to Low Earth Orbit satellites.
Then I'm going to turn the floor over to Mr. Michuki Mwangi, second of our ISOC speakers here today on the agenda who is today acting in his role as the distinguished technologist formal Internet growth at Internet Society. Focused on making sure that the way that Internet access grows is equitable and is fair. Available to all.
We particularly appreciate Michuki taking the time to join us here today since the IGF is happening in Africa. Africa is the region where likely Low Earth Orbit satellites-based connectivity will be particularly important. We're very much looking forward to your intervention, Michuki, trying to understand what might be the policy areas with regards to ensuring connectivity through Low Earth Orbit satellites.
Then we'll turn the floor over to Professor Larry Press of California State University. Expert on LEOs with long track record of publications and public speaking engagements on Low Earth Orbit satellites. We asked Larry to speak about the North American perspective. Definitely the companies that offer this service commercially right now are based in North America. So we will try to see what they are up to and if there's anything for us as the IGF crowd to consider or be particularly aware of.
We were also hoping to be joined today by Wu Fei from China. Very recently, we were informed that he might not be able to join us. I will be keeping my eye out for Wu Fei. May be making his way to our virtual Zoom room. If that happens, I will be happy to give him the floor.
So that is our plan. I'm going to ask our speakers a very general question about what Low Earth Orbit satellites are for broadband connectivity. Why we should care. And whether we see recent activity that might make us care even more. What are the challenges, what are the things that we should consider? Is there room for the IGF to discuss further policy? And what can an average IGF participant expect with regards to Low Earth Orbit satellites and Internet connectivity?
With that lengthy introduction, I hand the floor over to Dan York to give us a technical intro. What are these things and why should we care, Dan? Please. The floor is yours. Thank you.
>> DAN YORK: Thank you very much, Joanna. Thank you, everyone, who's joining in from wherever you are in the world. All around. Coming in by Internet. And maybe some of you might even be coming in through a LEO system in some way.
So I was asked to just talk about kind of what are LEOs. Where do they fit in this? I'm going to start with the basic premise with the Internet Society, we certainly think the Internet is for everyone everywhere. And, you know, we have this question of how do we connect the unconnected. For us, that's the question, what can Low Earth Orbit satellites, or LEOs do? We've seen plenty of press around this. And the interest really comes in a lot when we look at we've had satellite Internet access for decades. From what are called geosynchronous or geostationary satellites. They provide connectivity. They work. It's great in that regard. It has long latency for the reason that they're so far out. They're 36,000 kilometers away from the Earth and often at a higher cost.
LEOs have become quite interesting because of the fact they can provide a low‑latency high‑speed connection. We have calls such as this come in over Zoom. We can be involved with gaming. Virtual worlds. E‑sports. Any of these things are live streaming or others that we can't do.
A LEO satellite is a lot closer to the Earth so it has less latency. It's not as fast as a fiber connection. But I'll talk about speed in a moment.
One note, since we're here in a policy space, when you look at policy documents you'll often hear the traditional satellites, geostationary, referred to as GSO satellites. Geosynchronous orbits. That kind of thing. You'll see other documents talk about NGSO or non‑GSO which refers to satellites in Low Earth Orbit but those in a medium Earth orbit. Let's take a quick look at that.
Generally, the definition of Low Earth Orbit is from the Earth up to about 2,000 kilometers away from the surface of the planet. Now, most of the satellites that we have in these LEO constellations generally are around 400 to 500 kilometers away from the Earth. Some are out at 700. There's some in 300. There's a wide range of different areas. It's a crowded space. That's where the International Space Station is. That's where other space stations is. It's a lot of that activity happening there.
At the far end of this picture, in the red way out there, that's the geosynchronous orbit which is 36,000 kilometers. It's a long way. So when we talk about latency which is a word you'll hear a lot, the lag time, the delay, it takes about 600 milliseconds for a packet to get out to the GEO satellites and get back. A long time. It's not something you can do necessarily in real-time communication like this.
In the Low Earth Orbit, we're typically looking more at 40 or 50 milliseconds. A lot faster for a connection. Not as quick as cable or a fiber connection which might be down to 5 to 10 milliseconds. It's fast enough for the kind of connection that we're doing.
What happens with LEOs, where we get into some of these conversations, is you can't just put a couple of satellites up. Geosynchronous, you can have them out at the edge of the ‑‑ that 36,000‑kilometer range and kind of orbit in time with the planet. And so you can just point your dish there. And you get that kind of connection.
With LEOs, they're in what are called constellations. They're in shells of many hundreds to thousands, tens of thousands, even one proposal for hundreds of thousands of satellites that are orbiting the Earth that are doing this. They're moving fast. They're in a different kind of form like that.
These is what we're looking at. What we're talking about today. Part of the example that we see is, part of the interest is why is this coming now? We've had advances in rocket technology where we're able to go and reuse rockets. Reuse systems. We can launch a whole lot faster. We can mass produce satellites in ways that we just couldn't do in the past.
We're seeing many, many examples. I'm not going to get into them here. But we've seen people in remote areas. We've seen communities. Libraries. Community networks. Islands. Disaster response. We're seeing a lot of the usage in Ukraine right now with their devastated infrastructure. Mobile systems. So many different ways that people are looking at using this.
To briefly touch on kind of the things we need to think about and the policy piece. The different parts of the system. You have the constellation. That's the most obvious one. The other piece is what's called in the industry the user terminal. The ground terminal. It's the antenna. Right? It's the thing that you get, you purchase from the company. You put at your house or your business or whatever. And that is connecting up to the satellites.
Now, these satellites, these antennas are different from what you might have had in a traditional if you look at a dish that you might have used for TV or something. Those had a kind of a dish form. You would point them at a satellite. It's kind of how they were set there. These are called electronically steerable. They do their own identification of the satellites. They look more like pizza boxes or small flat boxes in some form. Those are the kinds of things that are there.
The third part of the equation is the ground station. These are the gateways, the sets of antennas that connect these constellations to the rest of the Internet. To look at it graphically, this is what you see. You see a user terminal. Somebody's thing going and connecting up to one of these satellites. And connecting down to a ground station which connects out to the rest of the Internet. These pieces have to be there for this to work.
Now, what's interesting is because these satellites move so quickly, your initial request for a web page or for whatever might go off of one satellite and the response might come back on a different one. This is how this all works. This constellation of these different things moving on.
One of the interesting aspects that's happening with LEOs and why there's a lot of interest is what if you're not near a ground station? What if you're in Antarctica or the northern polar regions or out in the middle of the jungle in some area of our world? What if there's no ground station near you? One of the advances we've seen is something called inter‑satellite lasers. You get into lasers in space and other conversation topics around this. This is the idea that your request could go to one satellite which might send it to another satellite, to another satellite, to some number until it gets to a ground station.
The Internet Society a couple weeks ago published an article that you can get if you go to internetsociety.org/leos. There's a lot more information in there I don't want to take time here to discuss. I just point you to that. Internetsociety.org/leos. See our paper and read our information.
I will touch on some of the concerns and questions that we raised. Affordability. Capacity. Can these systems support all of the different things that we want to connect to them? What kind of competition happens in here? On the policy level, there's a whole lot of questions around spectrum allocation. You know, interference of systems with each other. Allocation of orbits. The approval process. Something people may not understand is that to bring one of these ‑‑ to turn a system on in a given country, it has to be approved by the regulators in that country. So the vendors of these systems have to go around to every single country and get the approval in that kind of area.
There's a range of technology questions, standards. All of those things. There's a lot that we can't answer yet. There's things around, you know, are all of these systems sustainable? Will they truly work? What are the environmental impact of all of these things? What's the impact on astronomy? There's many questions which I know other colleagues here will be talking about as we get there. So I want to leave you with that and just say we're excited about this conversation. I think LEOs, you know, have a considerable potential to help us connect the rest of the world. But we really need to be asking these questions. Talk about how do we do it in a way that is inclusive and really brings this to everyone.
I will turn it back to you.
>> JOANNA KULESZA: Thank you very much, Dan. To answer these questions, that's why we have a lawyer in the room. I'm going to swiftly turn the room over to Berna who might have all the regulatory answers. She can say this is nothing new, we has 5G, had undersea cables, we regulated the open sea. We have a treaty for outer space. Now, is it that simple? And with that, I turn the floor over to Berna for the regulatory background with an emphasis on Europe. Europe prides itself on being a regulatory superpower. Have we got it all figured out? Berna, is that an easy question to answer? Thank you for being here. The floor is yours.
>> BERNA AKCALI GUR: Thank you. May I have help with the PowerPoint, though? I couldn't share on my screen.
>> JOANNA KULESZA: I'll try to assist.
>> We can no longer hear you.
>> BERNA AKCALI GUR: Can you hear me now? You can't hear me?
>> I do hear you.
>> BERNA AKCALI GUR: Okay. Shall I start? Okay. So can we move to the second slide, please? Okay. Thank you so much. Sorry. ‑‑ okay.
So, well, I was just thinking it's so nice to follow someone who has already explained how LEOs work because usually when we talk about the subject, you first have to explain in length how what they are and how they work. And, you know, once we get to the legal side, you know, there's not much time left.
>> We can't hear you.
>> BERNA AKCALI GUR: Oh.
>> We can only read the chat or read the text.
>> BERNA AKCALI GUR: Joanna, are you hearing you?
>> We can hear you in the Zoom room. But I understand that there's no audio on the ground. There are two things we can do. We can keep trying. Or we could try and switch to the next speaker and kindly ask Berna to see if you ‑‑
>> On site we can't hear you.
>> DAN YORK: I'm not sure, on site, are you able to hear anyone?
>> JOANNA KULESZA: Can you hear me on site? Now we're back. There was a glitch, I understand, with connectivity. Berna, would you kindly try and again.
>> BERNA AKCALI GUR: I was saying I'm glad to be part of (?) Someone who has already explained the technical background for this new technology. Well, and then the fantastic job.
So, but, you know, as legal scholars, the questions we are asked and the questions we think about are more along the lines of our states and private companies allowed to deploy as many satellites as they like. Who's controlling all this. Which authority is responsible. And is there any regulation? Is there any international coordination?
So in the first part of my presentation, I'll provide a brief, given the time limit, answers to these questions. And in the second part, I'll provide an overview of the response in the EU to the emergence of these new mega constellations.
So can we move on to the third page, please? Okay. Maybe I can. Okay.
So the private enterprises undertaking these projects such as SpaceX or One Web are subject to domestic laws and regulation in all phases of their creation. Most licensing and authorization procedures happen at the pre‑launch phase. And rules and regulations about the in‑orbit phase are primarily an expansion of the oversight and control responsibility of the states.
One example for this is the in‑orbit tracking for purposes of traffic management to avoid collisions. The end of life are regulated. In most cases, more than one governmental agency is involved in regulating various aspects of the operation of satellite services.
But, of course, this all depends on which jurisdiction they're operating in.
Can we move to the fourth, please? Please. Okay.
So now, you know, they say that all these constellations have obtained all necessary licenses and authorizations. And they are in orbit. And they have global coverage. Can they provide services anywhere they like? The answer is yes and no. The provision of satellite services in a particular country is subject to that country's laws and regulations. These are called landing rights. And countries decide for themselves the determines of these landing rights.
For example, LEO broadband operators need to set up ground stations and at least every 1,000 kilometers I think at the current stage of the technology. And they will need authorization to set up these ground stations. They will also need to obtain license to use the frequency spectrum. And if they are providing their services direct to consumers, they will also probably need to get a service provider license.
So what's more, the importation of the user terminals. Also likely to be subject to import and export regulations. So it's not a straightforward matter. For example, Russia and China have already declared that they will not allow the provision of broadband by foreign service providers based on national security grounds.
So at some point, there will probably be some sort of harmonization. Probably more on the regional level. But we'll see what the future brings. But if we want the LEO satellite constellations to fulfill their promise to bridge the digital divide, these regulatory barriers need to be considered one by one and need to be discussed by all the regular stakeholders at all domestic levels.
So can we move on to the fifth slide, please? Thank you. So there are all these rules and regulations imposed by national authorities. But do states have complete freedom for their regulatory practices? Do they have to comply with any international treaty when exercising their regulatory authority? And, yes, the answer to that question is, yes, they do. And obligations under outer space law and international regulation are most relevant.
So I'll try to ‑‑ okay. Thank you. So I'll start with outer space law. This branch of law governs all activities relating to outer space. Freedom of access. Freedom of use of freedom of exploration. And state responsible. They are the core principles underlying these treaties.
The deployment of satellites over the years by an increasing number of states have been based on the understanding that orbits are free for use. And commercial enterprises designed the principle for the World Bank constellation projects.
For example, state is space. Outer space. It has been recognized as a province of all mankind. So no sovereignty claims may be made. And states cannot prevent or restrict other's peaceful space activities. States are responsible for spate activities. It's their responsibility to make sure all their activities are conducted in accordance with international law. So they have a strong incentive to supervise.
States do have an obligation over the space object. They're responsible to license and register the space activities and the objects. And registration to conducted by national registries, but this information is reported through the registry maintained by the UN. And these registries provide transparency, which act as a confidence‑building measure among nations and also necessary to prevent space collisions. In fact, it was the original purpose of the requirement.
The state responsibilities extend to liability. Libel to damage to other states, their citizens and property. Damage can occur on the ground, in air, in space, this is where insurance comes into play.
With respect to the high number of satellites planned, there's an exponential increase in this. So the nations and GEO satellite companies should be mindful of these responsibilities associated with the state.
There's a recent example in the U.S., FCC recently wanted to require (?) of LEOs within five years. The previous recommendation was 25 years. With this move, the U.S. aims to increase its efforts to decrease the orbits, the risk of collisions and the likelihood of space communication failures.
If we move on to the next slide, I'll also agree to talk about the International Telecommunications Regulations. So these are of utmost importance to LEO satellites. Now, as Dan mentioned, satellites communicate with the Earth through radiowaves. This is how their services reach the Earth. So for an interference‑free service, they need assigned radio frequency spectrum which is a limited natural resource. They would also need to preserve the orbital plane which is another limited natural resource. The ITU has long been tasked with the coordination of orbital space and also the spectrum among nations.
So when LEO broadband companies apply, these regulators ensure that their rules and regulations comply with the rules and regulations of the ITU.
And the states, not the companies, are responsible to do the necessary filing and registration procedures. And these registrations provide international recognition of the frequencies and orbital positions used or intended to be used when recorded in the Master Register.
This registration is important because it also gives a right to claim, a claim of protection, from harmful interference. So over the years, compliance with these regulations have been high. The success is most likely due to physical necessity of a global coordination procedure for unobstructed views. More than the nations' altruistic view, complying with their international obligations.
Well, the ITU doesn't stop there. Its role is to also ensure that these resources are used rationally, efficiently, and economically. So that all nations have equitable access to both the orbits and the frequency spectrum.
Now, until recently, these regulations regarding small satellites deployed to the Low Earth Orbit had been less burdensome. They didn't require coordination among nations. But as these new projects with large number of satellites emerge, the ITU saw a need to change its regulations. So in 2019, at the world conference, they decided to define what a constellation is. It was defined for the first time. And then they also established a requirement for a coordination procedure. It's a time‑phased approach.
Could we move on to the next slide? It's there. And this time‑phased approach is designed to help ensure that the registration is aligned with the actual deployment. Of the non‑GEO satellite systems. It's intended to establish the balance between conventional spectrum warehousing and proper functioning of coordination and notification and registration maintenance.
So the ITU's years of expertise in a management of spectrum and associated orbital resources was instrumental in taking these essential steps. And I think this is a good start to achieve a fairer and more equitable system of education of the LEO resources and associated frequencies.
Now I'll talk a little bit about the EU's response to all of these developments. Could we move to the next slide, please?
Okay. So what has been the response in the EU to these projects? Now, the EU does not have a constellation. Many of the EU states ‑‑ in the slide you can see in the map of the EU, it's the light blue states that authorize the services of Starlink. Also authorize and license other broadband companies as well.
So unlike China and Russia, they are open to allowing foreign enterprises to provide services within their borders. Of course, only if they comply with their rules and regulations.
Now, this doesn't mean the EU authorities are content with relying on non‑EU companies for these services. Now, the critical role that starting broadband services played in Ukraine when the Russian forces stopped their Internet services, is a key role in this type of infrastructure.
Recently the European Commission in its work programme announced they will get World Bank constellation. It's proposed EU should have its own network to ensure guaranteed access in an unrestricted manner by avoiding dependencies. And this is a key word, dependencies, on third countries. It has also stated that ‑‑ it has also started improving space sector documents regarding strategic autonomy and cybersecurity concerns.
Now, there are two new directives on the resilience of critical entities. One is on the resilience of critical entities. The other is on networking information security. They have now, you know, they are new and now include provisions that target the cybersecurity of the ground‑based infrastructure of space‑based services.
The new proposed directives are going to impact the space sector. Even though they do not apply throughout the whole space value chain, they apply to the operators of ground‑based infrastructure. As well as to public telecom service providers.
I think it is safe to say the EU not only aims to harmonize the regulation of the LEO satellite broadband in a most efficient manner, but it would also like to see itself as a competitor in this emerging sector. Its motivation is not only economic but also one that's motivated by a strategic and security interests. So thank you, Joanna. This is my presentation.
>> JOANNA KULESZA: Thank you very much, Berna. I'm going to stop sharing my screen right now. I am going to turn the floor over to Michuki to see if any similar complementary approaches might have been implemented anywhere in the African region. I do understand it's a broad space we're talking about. Quite a diverse one. But the intervention from Berna clearly tells us on one hand, there is a fundamental regulation in place that deals with the use of outer space. But at the same time, states, individual states and regions, are noticing the potential policy issues that come with services like SpaceX and Starlink. That's not the only company and it's not the only business model. We're not getting into details there. But clearly, there are policy issues to consider to make sure that the access of the next million in developing countries is fair and equitable. And if any liabilities are to come up, there's insurance and a clear liability scheme to be applied.
That is another tall order, I realize that, Michuki. That's a lot of questions. Feel free to share the perspective that would be applicable to this IGF. In the specific region. With regards to LEOs, what's the next step? What would we want our audience members to take away from this session? Thank you for being here. Michuki, the floor is yours.
>> MICHUKI MWANGI: Thank you, Joanna. Thank you, panel, for that background. From an African perspective and just maybe want to provide some context here that from a connectivity perspective, if you look at reports and surveys and studies that have been done, looking at research, it shows that around about 40% of the people in Africa will actually live farther than 25 kilometers from a fiberoptic node. And that means getting them connected with respect to connecting the unconnected will require, you know, solutions that will need to extend this connectivity from that point to where they are. And that based on the current landscape, the costs of doing so, using the backhaul that exists of terrestrial fiber cable connectivity or wireless does become expensive. If you're doing wireless, you'll need to provide power in between the distances. If you're doing fiber, you need the permits and all the other to sort of meet all the other costs, regulatory requirements, and costs involved to be able to extend that connection.
I normally call this point the edge of profitability because that's where the commercial operators are able to get to. And anything beyond that will need complementary solutions or alternative business models to be able to get the people connected.
So there are two issues here. There's, of course, the sustainability part of extending connectivity and the policy and regulatory aspects that need to come into play to help facilitate that connectivity.
And LEOs present a unique approach because they're now looking at it from a perspective where they can come in from the sky directly targeting the community that needs the connectivity. And provide an alternative that is not subject to the challenges of the limitations that the terrestrial connectivity is facing at present. You know, that could also include the landscape and so on.
And so the question is I think ‑‑ I'm going back to your question, Joanna. What are we seeing? There are a couple of challenges that are emerging that ‑‑ and I think Joanna has alluded to some of those. The first one which is becoming more prevalent is on data localization laws and regulation. By design in terms of the way the satellites will work it means that for those people who are connected, the packets will have to go out of the geographical, in some instances, if the ground station is outside of the country. And, you know, by virtue of trying to scale the solution, they will need to be strategic in where they build the ground stations.
So, for instance, if you look at East Africa, they'll probably not have a ground station in each country. They'll pick one location which will be more strategic for the ground station for that region.
So if a country in this region has data localization that states that the data, local user data, traffic cannot be hosted outside the country, then it means that this presents a new challenge for the service to be taken up by users because then the question is where will the data that the users will have be hosted? And trying to bring it back once it's already left, again, comes at an additional cost which could then have an extra cost for the users.
So there's some consideration and discussions that will need to happen with respect to the detail localization laws. I know some countries like Ghana, for instance, has a data localization move. So that will be something that will need to be evaluated.
The other aspects that are quite connected to this is taxation. So one of the value that LEOs provide is low cost. We've seen telecom equipment coming in at a very low cost. I think we've seen up to $600 for SpaceX and others. But then the taxation that actually is applied in many countries across the region would actually then increase this price and make it go much higher than what most people would be able to afford. That in itself would take away the initial benefits of trying to connect the unconnected. If taxes go up, it increasingly goes out of reach for many.
And not just on the equipment but also on the service. We've seen a number of countries in Africa including taxes on connectivity. This in itself, this means that if the LEO operators were coming to specific, to some countries, where there's a data tax of some sort, then it means that that cost will also increase. So we've seen about $100 a month for SpaceX. So if you add the local taxes, which could be about 15% in some places or 8%. I've seen some numbers between 8% and 15%. Then that cost goes considerably higher. That means that it's putting it beyond the reach of people who could actually benefit from that.
Then, of course, there's the other challenge which comes with this with respect to being able to operate locally. The requirement of having local operations in terms of local service provider licenses in each of these markets. And that means they have to scale the operation. As they scale and grow the operations, they had overheads, the more expensive the cost of providing that service becomes.
So those are issues, policy issues that will suddenly need to be discussed at the local level. And the national level.
Strategically, I think there will be an opportunity here for the regions. Each region to see whether there's room to actually come together and jointly negotiate with these service providers. And, you know, give sort of like a unified approach to the service that they will be providing. Because if you look at movement of the satellite, it might make sense in providing, you know, a unified approach to the licensing and regulations across multiple countries as opposed to each individual ones trying to have a different one for each service provider. And that might signify lower costs and basically make it more accessible to many people.
The other thing that I wanted to point out in terms of the value we are seeing from the availability of LEOs is that their presence in Africa will suddenly be helpful in not only bringing backhaul connectivity to remote and underserved areas for service providers to be able to extend their services there but it means there's affordable backhaul as a solution for complementary access solution providers.
We've seen as we've done some of the discussions around connecting the unconnected and providing community network solutions to connect those in underserved areas. The biggest challenge has always been backhaul. And so if LEOs are a solution for that, then there are other policy concentrations that need to be discussed at the national level. Policymakers creating an enabling environment for this complementary access solution providers to actually exist so that they can take advantage of these technologies and use it to connect those in underserved areas.
So that's one area where more discussions need to happen. Because at present, there are only three countries that do have policy and regulation on complementary access solutions. Like community networks. And actually four, so you have Kenya. Uganda. South Africa. Zimbabwe. You can actually look at the licensing and get a license for the community network. For the rest of the region, this is an area that actually needs more work to be done.
The other component that is important here is making sure that there's affordable broadband connectivity solutions for those in rural areas. In terms of the service provision. So as Berna mentioned and I think also Dan pointed to these, the business models the LEO providers are coming up with are mostly to single‑subscriber models. So in the discussions from a policy perspective, the question will this be the only business model that they need to come with or they need to have a diversity of business solutions that would then make it possible to take advantage of, or to leverage that solution for different use cases that may exist. When I say use cases, it means that if it's a single subscription model, it means community networks may not be able to take advantage of the affordable backhaul that LEOs provide. Whereas, if there's a diversity of options where they have a fallback for community networks or for an enterprise kind of connection, then it can actually have a distribution model. So those are things that will need to be considered in the licensing that will be provided to the LEOs and operators to sort of keep a form of broad‑based subscription type. But also in the discussions to make sure that that is something that can be provided to the markets that they're being licensed in.
So I think those are sort of, like, the initial reactions that I would have based on that conversation. And happy to take on any comments and questions that our participants may have. Thank you very much, Joanna. Back to you.
>> JOANNA KULESZA: Thank you. Thank you very much. To be quite honest, all the points we were hoping you would raise. We have security, data, we have affordability, backhaul issues. Thank you very much for putting all of these on our agenda.
I can see the questions coming up in the chat. We do have a dedicated Q&A section. So I will make sure that these are addressed. Thank you to our speakers for picking these up. As we move on with the session.
Just to look at what has been said thus far, this seems to be relatively novel technological solution allowed for by the advancement of technology. The law is there. There are countries and regions trying to adopt the circumstances through local regulations. Finally, Michuki very rightly pointed out the policy questions that should be at the top of mind when allowing LEOs into data security, affordability, reliability, are the topics that are close to our hearts having researched that topic previously.
With all of these introductory remarks, I would like to kindly ask Larry Press to take the floor. Larry, we're not seeing your camera there, but we have tested your audio and video. So that should work fine. Yeah, there you are. All right. Brilliant. You might wish to unmute. I'm happy to hear your slides for you, if that would be useful.
>> LARRY PRESS: I guess I can do it, too. I see I have a sharing option. Let me see if it works.
>> JOANNA KULESZA: Brilliant. Please take us away. We're looking to answer questions of what has been done in the North American region. Are these issues being addressed? How should they? How should we best solve this challenge? Thank you for being here, Larry. The floor is yours.
>> LARRY PRESS: What I'm not seeing ‑‑ let me ‑‑
>> JOANNA KULESZA: I'm glad to assist, if useful. Just let me know.
>> LARRY PRESS: Okay. I'm going to share. But I don't see my PowerPoints. That's weird. Oh, here. Okay. Can you see that? Do you see the PowerPoints now?
>> JOANNA KULESZA: We can see your PowerPoint. Not in full screen yet. That's probably the next step.
>> LARRY PRESS: We got it working. Now I have to do this. How's that?
>> JOANNA KULESZA: Yeah, thank you so much.
>> LARRY PRESS: I can get going then. Let me put these out of the way so I can see it. Joanna asked a few questions. Picked two of them to give some answers to. One is what is the role ‑‑ what role is going to be played by these LEO‑based Internet systems? And then talk about that for a while. Then I'll switch to the potential benefits and challenges.
So let's ‑‑ okay. Here's a short‑run answer on that role. The short‑run answer is that it's important where installing terrestrial Internet fiber is impossible. The kind of thing we just heard about in Africa, in rural and remote areas, to ships at sea, airplanes that are flying around. And so forth.
And there's over here on this side, I got a bar chart that shows the percent of urban and rural people using the Internet in 2021. You can see that rural people depending on region is only as low as 13%. And nowhere higher than 85%. So that's the short‑run answer.
And here's the long‑run answer. And this gets a little speculative. Joanna asked me to speculate. So here it goes. In the long run, I think we're going to have a Multi Orbit Multilayer Internet. And I'll call it MOML. Because it's too many words to say.
Here's a picture that kind of depicts that. And the components are shown on the left. They run from deep space to cis‑lunar space. Cis‑lunar space is between the Earth and the moon then around the moon. And then GEO and MEO which we've heard about before and LEO. To put it in context there. I think maybe there are some companies trying to do it ‑‑ it's not clear whether they'll be a success. Trying to do narrowband communications in Low Earth Orbit as well. HAP stands for High Altitude Platforms. That's things like balloons. They have been ‑‑ they don't exist yet, but there still are people who think that that may be a possibility. And then airplanes, they're flying. Then obviously, the terrestrial land and sea network.
This is, I would envision the possibility that this may be 10 years from now, 15 years from now, will be an integrated network.
Next one. So where are we today with this MOML connectivity? Data relay services using LEO and GEO satellites. Like a LEO satellite will gather some, say, Earth observation data. Send it up to a geostationary satellite which will broadcast it, send it back to Earth.
Several vendors have developed and demonstrated MOML terminals and antennas. That's you can see in the picture over here. That kind of illustrates that.
Two companies that are doing Low Earth Orbit satellites, Telesat and Eutelsat and OneWeb which I think are merged now, they both operate geostationary satellites today. Of course, they're building out LEO constellations.
OneWeb and SpaceX have demonstrated Low Earth Orbit to aircraft integration already. And SpaceX Starlink is already marketing consumer and maritime connectivity. The previous speaker said that everybody's focused on consumer. To date, that's been the primary emphasis of SpaceX, which is the only company that's got anything going now. But both SpaceX and all the others are going to branch out and cover other markets as well.
Okeydoke. Here's speculation on how I see that on that network. I've talked about this. It's going to be, perhaps, this MOML network. And what I'm going to talk about here is a project that I think may be giving us a look at the start of that. The project that may lead to it. And here it is. It's a lot of words there. It's the Hybrid Space Architecture project of the United States Innovation Unit. HSA and DIU. These may lead to that MOML integration that I spoke of earlier.
Let me just tell you a little bit about them. The DIU has eight HSA demonstration contracts so far. The first one, kind of the most important, is to a company called Aalyria's. They have an operating system for this kind of network called Spacetime. You can see over here just a screenshot from Spacetime. And that is what, if all this, if my conjecture turns out to be true, will keep all this together.
Two other contracts have been left to Amazon and Microsoft. And that's for supplying their cloud computing services, ground station services, which they both offer.
There's another company, Project Kuiper has gotten more of these contracts. It's owned by Jeff Bezos the founder of Amazon. And the thing they're trying to demonstrate is service to underserved users like we're talking about here.
Then there are five other contracts that are military related for battlefield status, security, and privacy.
The bottom line is these companies have been tasked to demonstrate what they can do in two years.
And a couple little notes I kind of put down there at the bottom. One is SpaceX, which is the kind of big elephant in the room here, is missing in this list. I don't know, but I suspect that may be because SpaceX is committed already, so much committed to what they're doing that, perhaps, they wouldn't be willing to fit into this Spacetime architecture.
Microsoft and Amazon appear to both be competing. But my guess is that if this comes true, they will both be participating. In the final solution. I guarantee you that. Like I say, Aalyria integrates it all.
And the final thing is this DIU and HSA, they're reminiscent of the start of the Internet which was pretty much done by the Department of Defense, Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA, and ARPAnet which preceded the Internet. So we may be seeing a replay of that.
Okay. That's what I have to say about kind of where it all fits.
Now the second thing that Joanna asked us to talk about, potential benefits and challenges of LEO‑based Internet access. We all ‑‑ I think the benefits are well known. I'm going to look at four challenges. And I've listed them here in order of increasing difficulty.
So let me start the first one which was just ‑‑ obviously, mentioned it for Africa, affordability. The tweet here on the left was a year or two ago by Elon Musk. The head of SpaceX. And you can see he's saying it's meant to be the same price in all countries. And at the time, that struck me as crazy. And I wrote something about it. Because it seems that that just can't be. Market forces ‑‑ oops. How do I get this out of the way. Oops. There we go. Market forces have led to affordable pricing. And the reason is these satellite constellations, they represent a very large investment and fixed cost. The marginal cost of adding a new user is quite low, if the capacity exists. At the U.S. price, demand would be very low in poor countries or, say, on an island. Therefore, operating at full capacity requires affordable prices. And that's, in fact, what has happened.
SpaceX now has, regardless of what Elon said at the start, SpaceX has adopted variable pricing and also different service levels. Service‑level guarantees. For example, for the kinds of enterprises that were mentioned before. And that will help ‑‑ that will allow them to do their best to utilize available capacity.
And the thing about that is that capacity is a really dynamic thing. SpaceX capacity today is not going to be their capacity tomorrow. I think we see probably prices jumping around.
Some of the things that make ‑‑ lead to changes in capacity, one is adding satellites. As they add more satellites, capacity goes up.
As was mentioned before, there's regulations regarding replacement of these things. And the U.S. I think now they're asking for a five‑year replacement cycle. A lot of technology changes take place within five years. And, for example, SpaceX, their version 2 satellites are already being manufactured. And they have nearly ten times the capacity of the current satellites.
SpaceX, Dan talked about intersatellite links. SpaceX has them now. I think certainly SpaceX is going to deploy all of them. I think all of the other vendors will, too. That in itself adds capacity.
And finally, the radio frequency ground stations that Dan mentioned, they're adding them all the time. And they're getting better. Same thing with the technology improvement.
And I think, I'd be surprised if in the future we don't see optical ground stations that don't use radiowaves but use light. They have several advantages. Two main ones, they have much faster transmission rates and don't need the kinds of permission, regulation, from regulators, to install them.
Okay. Here's moving up to something more difficult. Is dealing with the problems of political interference and social division. Which I think are well known.
Just two examples here. The one on the left is a wanted poster. Those 11 guys are Russian actors who are wanted by the FBI or the United States for interfering with our election in 2016.
And the one on the right is a sad one. It's well known there's ‑‑ I got references in the notes to these slides ‑‑ to the fact that Facebook hate speech has promoted violent ‑‑ Facebook has promoted violence against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. Just backing up on that, in 2011, only 1% of the population in Myanmar had Internet access. In 2013, the government let contracts through two competing mobile companies to come into the country. And by 2016, almost you can see in the chart here, the left‑hand part is Myanmar. Almost 90% of the people were online.
So the ‑‑ once SpaceX was ‑‑ once SpaceX? Once Facebook was able to be seen by people, it had kind of a disastrous effect.
The reason I think this is maybe, it's certainly a harder problem than affordability which I think the market takes care of. But I think that a partial solution to this is critical thinking education. And for this, I did some original research for this presentation. I asked two of my grandchildren whether when they're in school whether they were kind of given lectures or if they talked about fake news and critical thinking. That sort of thing. I'm kind of happy to report one said yes. One is a junior in college now. The other is still in high school. It's interesting, she was even more positive. She's positive that the unit that they got and the stuff that's been brought up in their classes, that it's really worth it. All students in her school would be very sensitive to these problems. That's slightly good news.
Getting harder, I think it was mentioned earlier with the necessity to regulate the satellite licenses is the problem of debris in Low Earth Orbit. What I'm showing here is this is from the Bulletin of Atomic Science. They have this database on Low Earth Orbit. And as of May 21st, that was the date this was done, they say there were 4,700 satellites in Low Earth Orbit. A couple of breakdowns. Over here on the left, we see that the big majority of those are commercial. And, of course, commercial companies worry about profit. And, therefore, kind of do need to be regulated sometimes.
Looking at the applications, the preponderance in communication. That is more than just the Low Earth Orbit broadband that we've been talking about. It's other forms of communication. There's a big chunk of them doing Earth observation. Those things are absolutely critical in the climate problems that the Earth is going. Without them, we would be in dire straits. We're in dire straits with ‑‑ anyhow. You can see there are a lot of other satellites who aren't doing broadband Internet.
Then if you look at the thing over here on the right, these are the companies that are committed and working on putting up broadband constellations. Look at it. This isn't what's approved. They applied for 59,000 satellites. So you can see things are going to get kind of crowded. Obviously, more satellites increase the probability of collisions, which generate debris. Those debris then cause more probability of collisions. So there's a thing called ‑‑ they can get out of hand.
Tracking and mitigation is a difficult technical and political problem. And it requires international collaboration. And that's why I say this is a difficult one.
And then speaking of international collaboration, we're going in the other direction. Just this slide is just talking about China versus the U.S. Both economically and politically. And I got a couple of examples of China policies. Couple examples of U.S. policies. This diagram or map is actually a year or so old. But it shows what the Chinese call their Digital Silk Road project in which they're investing in digital infrastructure all around the world.
And, of course, the U.S. down here and Joe Biden as well is very much worried about China cutting off supplies and becoming independent. So this is a tough problem, which I will leave on that.
Okay. The slides that you've just seen, they're giving you just a really quick overview. Tried to keep it brief for the thing. The slides, themselves, have a lot in the notes part. There are references and links that elaborate on a lot of what I've said. And if you send me an email, I'll send you a copy of the slides. And that's about all I have to say.
>> JOANNA KULESZA: Brilliant. Thank you very much, Larry. That's very comprehensive. Again, ticking all the boxes that we might have wished to be put on the table for this discussion. Particularly, the developing countries' angle with the Chinese so proud, with the economic war, if you will, that is unfolding before our eyes. The plans that Europe has for also possibly spreading investments in developing countries.
With that, I'd like to take us into the Q&A session. We are relatively good on time. All our participants are remote. ISOC has been great at facilitating a person on the ground, working on behalf of ISOC on the ground in Addis Ababa. What I'd like to do is kindly ask Mark to see if there might be any questions or comments in the room on the ground in a region that is hopefully particularly interested in these policy topics.
So we will start the Q&A session with Mark, if possible. Reaching out to our audience in the room. I know that we are relatively well attended on the ground. If there are questions or comments in the room, Mark, if you could facilitate, that would be wonderful. And we will then move to the questions that I have diligently collected in a little notebook. I will read those out giving our panelists a chance to respond.
I do note the answers in the chat happening as we speak. But I am going to give our participants an opportunity to hear those questions discussed by the panelists as well.
Before I do, however, Mark, if you're able to facilitate any questions or comments from our on‑the‑ground participants, that would be wonderful.
>> Okay, Joanna, hope you can hear me.
>> We can hear you well. Thanks very much for being here. Please go ahead.
>> If there's one lesson from the IGF here, it's always to test the audio. Find out if you can be heard.
Okay. We do have ‑‑ I've seen three hands go up for questions, comments, and feedback. So I'll take them in order. Gentleman on the right. If you'd like to introduce yourself then go ahead with your question or comment. It'd be helpful. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairperson of the room. Let me thank the presenters for this topic of satellite. I'm a member of parliament.
The question I'd like to pose here. As you know, as a politician, we have to make sure that the deliverables are achievable. So right now, I would like to understand the issue of what we're talking about to put up the satellite. The cost associated with the satellite. And, again, the capacity of the satellite. Right now, we have rolled out fiber. The fiber has been almost 2,000 kilometers within the country. On the ground. The people are not using it because they're not connected. How is satellite more durable than the optic fiber?
And, again, maybe to expand on my question. Hypothetically, let's say we talk about a population of 200 million. How many satellite can we put up that is going to that kind of population?
The ground stations, what happens if a third country doesn't have a ground station to collect the information from the satellite as agreed? Thank you.
>> Thank you very much. Joanna, I think there were three questions there. Much appreciated. Do you want to take the first stab at answering or ask somebody from the panel or speakers? Thanks.
>> JOANNA KULESZA: It might be useful for us to collect the questions, if that's okay with Dan. I see him raising his hand to answer that one. But it might, indeed, be recommendable for us to collect the three questions if that's just three questions. And we will then turn the floor to our speakers. If that's okay. Thank you very much, Mark, for facilitating.
>> Okay. I'll take the other questions now then, yep. Okay. So second question. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Yes. My name is Jose. Actually, I think I'm the youngest Commissioner so far. So first of all, thank you for this nice discussion. I think it was a unique opportunity to see two different perspectives on two sides of the ocean. One was more innovation‑friendly. Other was concerned with regulatory issues, et cetera. It was really insightful.
My question is that as far as we have seen in the other online platforms like social media, et cetera, the U.S. version of innovation is more advanced normally. Let me just back to one important phrase was mentioned that Europe has recently (?) to a European constellation. Right? So the big question is if Europe cannot catch up the U.S. Internet satellite providers and we reach one day that all European citizens, they have more affordable version of a U.S. Internet, they can use it with less price and more easily. So what are the options in front of Europe to keep those satellite Internet providers responsible to its regulatory system? Because we know very well as far as U.S. companies are advanced in terms of innovation, Europe is advanced in terms of the regulation framework, et cetera. What is our estimation of the future of this debate? Thank you.
>> Thank you very much. A very interesting question. A lot of sort of geopolitics there as well as orbital issues.
And I think there was one question ‑‑ is it Roberto? Do you want to put a question and then we'll go back to the speakers for responses. Thank you.
>> Thank you very much for the moderation as well. I'd like to ask two questions. One related to price expectations. In all satellite services, or the current satellite services we use for telecommunications is regarding ‑‑ I mean, regarding with the cost and also with the capacity. What we can get for Internet services which is really low for services.
I think we may be solving one of these issues with Low Earth which is the capacity. The speeds will be better. But the other problem, I think it's going to continue to be a problem in the future. Is there any expectation about how the service will be regarding how affordable it can actually be for the peoples, I mean, for the population that will actually will be using it in the future? Particularly, in the rural areas where they don't have any other option.
And the second question is regarding the recommendations for the frequency, the spectrum side. Because some countries, and I can include mine, have international spectrum plans. Particularly, allocations for particular applications. And, of course, it would prevent us to actually access these kinds of services. Is there a way maybe going through the organisations like ITU that could get some particular recommendations or strategies that actually are distributed and discussed with all the countries in order to actually allocate this spectrum for particular applications in the urban satellites? Those are my two questions. Thank you.
>> Thank you, Roberto. So back to you, Joanna and Dan.
>> JOANNA KULESZA: Thank you. Thank you very much, Mark, indeed. Dan, please start us off and we'll hand the floor over to others as we progress.
>> DAN YORK: Great. Those are some great questions that are there. Let me see if I can hit some of these that are here.
For the gentleman in Botswana, if I had that correct on there, if you're already deploying fiber, fiber is going to be a faster, you know, you can have lower latencies, higher capacity, in fiber than you will out of any wireless system. It just will. So if you can get fiber to people, then that will give you the lowest latency, highest speed connections you're probably likely to get.
So I wouldn't stop investing in fiber. Think it's a good thing to keep getting it out there and putting it out there.
But the LEO, the satellite technology, particularly LEO, can provide great connections for people who don't have access to that. Michuki mentioned how many people are within 25 kilometers, too far away from a fiber end point to be able to connect to. So I think that LEOs provide an excellent solution in that kind of space.
I think your other questions around launching ‑‑ it kind of leads into the question from the second gentleman as well around who owns these systems. Right? Does the country of Botswana need to launch its own system? Probably not. Who does control it? Right now the major systems going online are in the case of SpaceX, it's a U.S. company. OneWeb which is the other system up there. I actually lost track of its ownership right now at this precise moment. I know it was owned by the UK and an entity in the Middle East then it was being bought by Eutelsat. It's a consortium of different entities around that kind of thing.
The other major players, two other ones that I know of, Amazon with its Project Kuiper planning to launch in early 2023. Again, a U.S. entity. Then the Telesat is an entity out of Canada. Another place there. Then there is another constellation coming, or the EU just mentioned wanting to put one together there.
There's actually about 16 of these large‑scale constellations that are in the process of going through various different levels of approvals. Some of them are from other North American or European entities. Some of them are from ‑‑ there's one, actually, there's a filing with the ITU for a company based out of Rwanda. There's another out of India. There's a couple out of China. You know, we don't know how many of those are actually going to lift off and launch.
As Berna mentioned, there's a timeline that has to happen that you have to ‑‑ when you get the allocations, you have to meet certain deployment guidelines. You have to have 50% of yours up and 100% within certain timeframes. Or else you lose the spectrum allocation from the ITU and the pieces like that. So there's an incentive to do that. Many countries or many groups will try to launch over this next period of time.
It's expensive even with the costs that are reduced that we talked about to launch those systems. So I think many more countries will be consumers of these other systems. And so that raises the question of the second person ‑‑ the second gentleman spoke about ‑‑ which is how do you, this whole question around whose connections are you connecting to? Are you only connecting to Internet access that's offered by U.S.‑based corporations? What does that mean for regulations, for regulatory reform? These are all questions that need to be addressed by groups, multistakeholder groups, such as the IGF. To think about what are these policy issues?
In our paper that the Internet Society wrote, we highlighted that several of these are exactly these kinds of questions are out there.
One last thing for the person around from I think from Botswana. Mentioned about do you need to have ground stations? I think Michuki mentioned ‑‑ well, Berna mentioned it's within about 900 to 1,000 kilometers. There needs to be repeated ground stations. But that doesn't necessarily mean there needs to be one in every country. And what it will need to be, though, is certain countries will need to be arranging landing rights ‑‑ there's terminology in here. They'll need to arrange ground station access somewhere else. I would expect as Michuki mentioned we'll probably see regional ground stations for some parts of things.
So that would be it. I will answer the one last piece and I'll turn it over to other speakers. The third gentleman spoke about spectrum and spectrum assignment. Berna can probably give us much more detail. I'll say you're not alone. The ITU has established various different spectrum allocations and specifically ones for countries. For satellites. Excuse me. These are the ones that then the countries are going around and getting confirmation of that in there. I spoke at the Armenian Internet Governance Forum a couple weeks ago. Their regulator was on the panel with me. And he said exactly what you're speaking about there. That in their country, the normal frequencies that are being used for SpaceX, in particular, for LEO satellites, are already in use by their military and national security and other elements like that. So for SpaceX to be operating in their country, you know, there's collision there. It's a shared spectrum. But can they both interoperate? Do they have to look at how do they move their military systems to some other frequencies to be able to work with that? There's a whole other host of questions in there and lots of things. Ultimately, it's been the ITU and regulators who've done that spectrum allocation. I'd probably defer to Berna to talk a bit more about that particular question. I'll leave it to my other panelists now, Joanna.
>> JOANNA KULESZA: Berna, please go ahead. That question had your name written all over it.
>> BERNA AKCALI GUR: I'll start with the question regarding the EU. Joanna and I are working on paper, talk about space resources and spectrum resources. That paper it's mentioned it's not desirable to have one nation, one constellation, in space. The constellations that are already planned should be more enough to respond to the global need at this point. So I don't think the question should be whether the nation should really have their own constellation but how do we use existing constellations, existing infrastructure in a manner that would be acceptable to everyone.
So let me consider your perspective on the issue. The EU's primary concern is not to have its solitary Internet network. EU's understanding of digital sovereignty is not a closed‑door network for the EU from the rest of the world. Rather, understanding mitigating dependencies in infrastructure. So the EU states have authorized some of these non‑EU enterprises. And it's not concerned with authorizing these enterprises. But EU is more concerned about relying solely on enterprises alone. It would like to have a backup system where it could fall back to.
So, and also, of course, economic competition. Strategic concerns play a role in this. But as I said, figuring out how to impose its cybersecurity regulations. Data protection regulations. In relation to these emerging business models.
And business models is also not a single business model. There's a standing model that you have where the company reaches to the consumers directly then you have the alternative model where the company prefers to work with the telecom operators.
That that sense, the policy changes, the regulation changes, the requirements and licenses, they all change. And I think the EU is confident, although still figuring out, that it could impose existing regulations to these emerging business enterprises.
So I think the understanding of digital sovereignty is quite different when compared to some authoritarian state approaches.
So that's my answer to the questions related to the EU.
And as for spectrum allocation, so the ITU is considered the oldest international organisation. You know, it's the states, the nations, who have a I think maybe if you compare with all the international organisations, they have more expertise in negotiating within the EU. You have a different dynamic within the EU compared with all the other international organisations. It's a forum for supporting developing nations. So I think it's an appropriate forum to ‑‑ and civil stakeholder forum as well. In other international organisations, we don't have private enterprises. You do not have nongovernmental organisations. But at the ITU, you have them as members. I think it is the correct organisation to discuss all spectrum‑related issues. And it has been ‑‑ I mean, it has been criticized for being slow. But I think it's still the correct forum to address spectrum‑related issues of developing nations.
So I hope that answers your questions, but if it doesn't, I'm willing to elaborate further.
>> JOANNA KULESZA: Thank you very much. I'll note we're just out of time. I'll try to wrap us up in the last few minutes. Many thanks to the supporting staff for bearing with us for two more minutes for me to wrap things up.
This is by far not an exhaustive recap of the topic. This is an introduction to a discussion. What I'm going to do is I'm going to leave you with a link to the ISOC report that Dan has mentioned on a number of occasions. Do consider that an introduction to the topic. We're thrilled to be able to share our thoughts with you here today during this workshop. Thank you very much for your feedback. Thank you also for the conversation in the chat. Thank you to others for insightful conversations.
This session will be recorded. Our speakers are available should you wish to reach out to them directly. Please feel free to do so. Thank you for accompanying us throughout this workshop and listening to the concerns. Thank you for accommodating a topic that might feel very technical. Very complex. Or on the other hand, already fully regulated because we have legal provisions in all of these things. But as we have learned, that is by far not the case.
So I will try to wrap us up here very quickly. Thank you to our speakers. Thank you to our hosts. Thank you to our audience. I understand it is quite late where you are. And this is not an easy topic. So thank you very much for your active participation.
I will try to conclude here right now. We are leaving you with a recording and reports. And hopefully looking forward to seeing you soon. Talking about affordability, connectivity, and fast Internet. Thank you for being here. Have a good day for Larry being very early in the morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you might be. Thank you very much. This session is concluded.
>> Thanks a lot to you.
>> Thank you, everybody, in the room for staying a bit later than scheduled. Hope ‑‑ I'm sure you thought it was worthwhile. And thank you for the tech guys. Thank you for staying a bit late and the support guys. Thank you.
>> Thank you, Joanna, for being a great moderator.
>> JOANNA KULESZA: Thank you, Mark. We couldn't have done it without all of you. Enjoy your day. Thank you, bye.