Letter to G20: why the road to recovery will be digital first

Letter to G20: why the road to recovery will be digital first

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the pace of digital transformation and increased the demand for smart and reliable communications solutions across both consumer markets and emerging industrial markets. These sudden, dramatic changes in our behaviour have put an enormous amount of strain on our networks, yet they continue to remain highly resilient to the ongoing shifts.

The importance of continued digitalisation as a means for ensuring long-term economic competition cannot be understated, particularly as the world prepares to embrace new 5G systems and the nature of competition changes. It is clear that our national economies and enterprises will not move forward by returning to the pre-pandemic status quo.

Instead, the way forward will be built on infrastructure, innovation and inclusion: strong digital infrastructures as a basis for fast enablement, open innovation frameworks through multi-stakeholder governance, and a clear agenda to ensure fair and equal access to new opportunities created by digitalisation.

Two-day meeting of the world's wealthiest nations follows a bitter US election and comes amid ongoing coronavirus crisis

At last week's B20 summit in Riyadh, a precursor to the G20 summit, we have had the pleasure to co-chair the first ever Digitalisation Taskforce, together with the chair Nasser Al Nasser, deputy chair Abdullah