Honourable Nicholas T. Goche Minister of Transport, Communication and Infrastructural Development I am greatly honoured to address the 10th International Telecommunications Union as it cel-ebrates its 145 years of serving the telecommunica-tions sector and welcomes its 192nd member state, Democratic Republic of Timor Leste, in this historic city of Guadalajara. May I also take this opportunity to congratulate our host the United States of Mexico for the excellent manner in which they have organised this important event and the facilities they have laid at our disposal. Allow me, Mr Chairman to renew Zimbabwe’s com-mitment to the work of the Union. Zimbabwe has taken tremendous strides since the last plenipotenti-ary conference to deploy fibre optic broadband back-bone infrastructure around the country. To meet our national requirements of fibre optic broadband back-bone infrastructure, we need to cover 4000 km nation-wide. We expect that by mid 2011 we would have deployed 1100 km of fibre optic. By end of November this year we expect to connect to the EASSy undersea cable through Mozambique, having already connected to the SEACOM undersea cable through South Africa. We are currently rolling out fibre optic based metro ac-cess networks in major towns in order to offer faster broadband services through fibre to the building or to the home . This is being complemented by the deploy-ment of ADSL, WiMax and other wireless broadband access technologies. The diffusion of mobile services has equally taken quantum leaps having grown from a combined total of 800 000 subscribers in 2006 to 6.8 million today and all service providers being obliged to implement a per second billing tariff regime. The Chairman of Plenipotentiaries; The Secretary General and All elected Officials; Colleague Ministers; Distinguished Guests; Ladies and Gentlemen; We have since begun to deploy services in rural, re-mote and underserved areas under the Universal Service Fund with the licensed operators providing 184