From BCE and BCE CEO Mirko Bibic to our Conference. Thank you so much for joining. It means a lot that you made the trip down. We really appreciate it. Our pleasure. Thank you, Matt. All right. I thought I'd begin maybe focusing on kind of your AI initiatives and announcements and Ziply before getting into kind of the business update and what's going on in wireless and back to school and broadband. I think there's a lot of it's very topical, I think, at the moment. Maybe to begin and set the stage, I think the backdrop to a lot of the AI announcements is really the sovereign AI push, which is occurring, and why that's important and what it means for the country and for BCE. OK. Two very good questions. Let me start at what it means for the country at the macro level, maybe thematically. It is the macro themes that then inform the investment thesis, certainly for us in terms of where we're making investments and obviously for investors looking at AI opportunities. At the macro level, if you think of the geopolitical environment globally, you've got countries certainly like Canada who are, and we're not the only ones, but you've got the national security considerations. You've got the diversification of the economy, economic growth. Those all come together. AI is a significant component of that, where we are very, very strong in AI in Canada, then less strong in production and deployment, but certainly in the science of it. It is a massive opportunity for economic growth everywhere. Canada is certainly alive to that issue. We are on the cusp of AI. With AI, we're on the cusp of kind of massive transformation that we haven't seen since the advent of the internet. If you look at it from that perspective, it's a very big opportunity. Particularly so when we go back to the geopolitical issue where sovereignty becomes an issue. What is sovereignty from an AI perspective? It's the idea that the data resides in the country entirely, so it doesn't traverse any other border. It just stays in the country. Where the data is stored and where the technology is housed are in data centers that are in Canada, owned and operated by Canadian entities who are subject to Canadian laws from beginning to end. Beyond that, sovereignty goes beyond that. The technology that's used to power AI is actually also operated and controlled by Canadians. When you look at it from that perspective, therefore that macro theme, it's a very large opportunity in Canada. We should probably, I think you're going to ask me kind of where we play there. I'll stop here with one more sentence. Let me let you ask me your specific question on where we're going to play there. If you think about what Bell's core business has been for 145 years, it's been connecting people to each other, connecting companies to their customers, and connecting everyone in Canada to technology. What we're doing in the AI space is connecting Canadians to AI technology. I'll stop there. I'm sure you'll want to. No, that's a good overview. I think you've made some announcements, specifically more on the inference side of AI and on some announcements on size, general size of data center build that would accompany it over a period of time. What is it that Bell is doing on the inference and with the data centers? Who are you partnering with to make that happen? That's a good question. Let me unpack that quickly, but in its entirety. I said what I said my last sentence in the last question was said for a reason. We're connecting Canadians to AI Technology. What that means, we're going to play in the full stack of AI. Let me very quickly go through them. The first layer of that stack is network. You're connecting data centers with fiber. That is our wheelhouse. No mystery there. The next layer of the stack is data centers, purpose-built AI data centers, not standard colo, purpose-built AI data centers. There, if you've got the land, the power, the cooling, you've got an advantage. The critical advantage in this space right now is time to power. We have all of those. You see we've launched a site in British Columbia in June. We have announced more. That is, fairly frankly, it's just putting up a data center. You have access to low-cost hydropower, so it's quite capital-light. That is the second layer. The third layer there is compute infrastructure. As you can see, we have not owned and purchased the compute. We have chosen to partner with those who do compute. In the case of Grok, inferencing, we have done another—we just announced another one with Buzz High Performance Computing. We are partnering in a capital-light way in order to provide the compute infrastructure to our customers. Above that, you have the software layer. Again, think of LLMs. We are not going out and designing and building LLMs. We are partnering, for example, with Cohere. We have a massive partnership with Cohere. The last layer on that stack, in my mind, is all the AI Technology advisory services. We have a managed service provider called Ateko, where we're able to provide those very sophisticated AI advisory services to our customers. That is part of our business. The top layer on AI advisory is part of our business. The bottom, the very first layer, fiber, that is our core wheelhouse. The data centers, we can do in capital-light. Everything in between, we're partnering. Can we maybe focus on one element of that right now, which is the compute? Because if I look at Grok, and they have an example of another sovereign AI deal that they've done. Saudi Arabia is an example, which I don't know if that is a good analogy or not, but it's the one that I kind of come across. In that instance, somebody is a partner that purchases the compute from Grok. Then there is a revenue share that pays the partner back for buying the compute. Once there's a return threshold that's met, revenue gets split among the partner and Grok. It splits differently. Grok makes their money on the back end. Should we assume that Grok is following that same model? Somebody will be announced as the partner that's buying the compute that will then be subject to this kind of revenue share split? Or is the deal a different construct? That is a model that I also understand Grok has deployed elsewhere. That is not the model that Bell and Grok have deployed in the first facility in British Columbia. In the first facility in British Columbia, Grok's own compute that they've taken the entire space. They put up the racks. It's their compute. They pay us for access to the facility on a long-term basis. Now, there are other models, like the partnership model, which you've actually described, a partnership model, where somebody, it could be the person, it could be the entity that actually owns a data center, will buy the inferencing chips from Grok and install the racks in the facility. There is a partnership split between Grok and the partner. That is not the model we've employed or deployed in our first data center. Look, we take a big step back. We're playing in the layers of the stack where we are very good at, or it's our core business, or lanes that we have developed, like managed service provider with Ateko. The other layers, we've chosen to do it in a capital-light partnership way. If you take a step back, what we're going to be building with Bell AI Fabric is to be the backbone of the AI ecosystem in Canada, which has tremendous opportunity. There's an addressable market there that's in the billions, that's growing in the double digits. Bell AI Fabric will ride that wave. There's significant revenue opportunity in the years to come that's in the hundreds of millions of dollars. We're doing it in a capital-light way. We have stated publicly recently that you are looking at kind of in that $200 million-$300 million range of investment over the next two and a half to three years. We are going to be very disciplined in operating an overall BCE business at a 14.5% capital intensity. That factors in all the investments we plan to make in Bell AI Fabric. There is high growth potential. When you are talking about sovereign AI in particular, given the answer to the first question and the kind of geopolitical and economic growth themes there, one significant element that stands us apart from most others or many others is the notion of trust. The Bell brand is one of the most trusted brands in the country in any sector of the economy. When you combine that with our core assets, that it's hard to duplicate, particularly in the enterprise space, where most large, frankly, 95 of the 100 top Canadian companies are with Bell. That's a big advantage that nobody else has. OK. Maybe just to finish off, you mentioned Ateko, which is sort of a grouping of businesses, I guess, really, within Bell's business wireline services that sort of can help kind of modernize companies, updating legacy systems, and so forth. That is where kind of this Bell AI Fabric will fit in with the connection to the business customers buying AI services through Bell. There is a connectivity layer there as well. I know that there is a plan within Bell Business Markets to grow that bucket of revenue. Is that what is identified as growing to up to $1 billion in the next I do not think there is an exact time frame. Is this the linkage? Is this the engine that will get that growth within that Bell Business Markets, this AI initiative through the sales of services Ateko offers? Maybe the best way to answer it is let me answer it this way. The Bell Business Markets, our enterprise business, has been significantly underappreciated. We are starting to surface it more, highlight it more, because the potential in that space is quite large. It comes through a lot of hard work over the years and a lot of really focused strategic thinking. There is a tremendous amount of potential there and growth potential. If you think we have a unique set of assets that cannot be duplicated in the enterprise space in telecom. Most other large kind of mega-cap, traditionally legacy telcos have struggled, including ourselves, in the enterprise space, technology disruption and competitive disruption. It has been kind of a constant decline. We are very unique in the sense that in the core business, the declines are modest, starting to stabilize and inching up to growth. You add the collection of interrelated businesses to the core wireless and wireline business and enterprise. There is now growth. What is that? It starts first with our fiber assets, which we have the scale that nobody else has, our brand, the trusted brand, our deep, deep enterprise relationships that span 145 years. Right there, there is a natural advantage. You have 5G, fiber, the relationships, the brand. You add three related high growth, net new growth. This is not displacing anything. This is net new. The three are managed service provider, the systems integrator, managed service provider business of Ateko, which helps companies on their technology modernization journey, just like we are undergoing ourselves. We have operator expertise in the space. We bring that expertise to bear for our enterprise clients with a particular focus on the hyperscaler ServiceNow, Salesforce, and AI integration. We have cybersecurity, the cybersecurity business. Of course, when you think of security, you do think of Bell. You have core network security, but also cybersecurity. They go together. There is Bell AI Fabric. All those three technology solution businesses, AI Fabric, Ateko, and cybersecurity work together. One pulls through the other. Fiber pulls them through, or they pull fiber through. It all works as a unified strategic whole. To your question on the exact kind of expectations of growth, just the Ateko business is what we said would grow from around $200 million-$250 million in revenue to $1 billion by 2030. The other two, cybersecurity and AI Fabric, are over and above that. OK. That's great. That's a good overview. Thank you. Maybe shifting gears now. I mean, we could stay on AI, I think, for a lot longer. Shifting gears to the other kind of exciting change that is happening at BCE is your Ziply deal is closed. I think the debt has been kind of redeemed. You're sort of moving full steam ahead here. Maybe just by the end of the year, you'll have 1.5 million passing. There's going to be another 500,000 that'll be built. Or sorry, yeah, another 500,000 that'll be built to be 2 million in the footprint. You have the partnership, which will build another 1 million in the footprint and then 5 million outside in low-cost areas that you've identified. Can you kind of put some context in the pace of the build that you're planning? I know it's early days for the partnership to be able to, but you must have some targets that maybe it's time to share or maybe just high level would be helpful. I think the Ziply Fiber story is a great story. A couple of high-level points. We closed earlier than anticipated, which is a credit to the Ziply Fiber and Bell teams working together. That is one. The performance of Ziply Fiber, subscriber growth, revenue growth, EBITDA growth has been better than we expected it would be when we made the initial acquisition announcements in November. That is a particular credit to the Ziply Fiber team. The third high-level point I would like to make is this is really, really important. The Ziply Fiber management team that has built Ziply Fiber from scratch, essentially, back in 2020, they are with us. They are now part of the BCE family. I think, again, that is great news because they are an outstanding team. I think it is also a credit to how we are working together as a team. That's important to keep the operational momentum going. What we're trying, what we're going to accomplish is we think that by 2028, we'll have above 3 million homes, fiber lines built, largely in the four core states in the Pacific Northwest, with an ambition to get to 8 million, as you pointed out. I think those give you a couple of milestones there on the fiber passings. OK. I mean, there seems to be a footrace to build fiber that's only accelerating in the U.S. How comfortable are you about being able to be first to fiber in the areas where you want to build? My understanding is you've identified more than enough homes to be able to make that happen. Just if you can get some comments on how you feel your ambitions match up with what's happening in the market recently. Yeah. Again, let's go back to one of the previous points I made. I believe that I know because I've been told. One of the reasons that the management team has stayed with us and wants to execute the plan is they're energized about what BCE brings to the table. What we've brought to the table is the ability for Ziply Fiber to accelerate what was in their initial build plan to get to that $3 million-ish homes in the four core states, accelerate that and expand beyond that. They wouldn't be excited about that if we all didn't collectively believe that it's doable. What we did do with the PSP partnership is we unlocked, certainly, the funding component for that. What do you need? You need to identify areas that don't have fiber. There are a lot of those areas in the U.S. Fiber availability is only 50% of the country. There is tons of opportunity. You need to have the team to do it. We have the team to do it. Of course, you need to have the funding capacity to do it. With the PSP partnership, we have unlocked that. Those are the three critical ingredients. There is the Ziply Fiber backbone that extends beyond the Pacific Northwest, which gives us an opportunity to kind of build along those areas. There is a tremendous amount of potential given how little fiber availability there is in the U.S. compared to Canada. BCE is an expert fiber operator as well. In the U.S., the other big theme is convergence, which you have two camps. It's not as though it's a decided argument. The AT&Ts and Verizon's seem to be pushing the notion that there's a mutually beneficial relationship between offline fiber and wireless. You have on the other side of it T-Mobile, which says, you know what? People aren't buying based on wanting one bill. They buy the best service. Fiber obviously lines up as the best service and can win. Just where do you fall on that? I think both camps are right. Yeah. Here, I'll tell you why. In Canada, clearly, convergence is the predominant theme. There's a reason for that. You've got four very competitive players in Canada. All four operate their own wireline and wireless networks to a larger and lesser degree. That's what they do. The extent of overlap between their own wireless networks and their own wireline networks is pretty extensive. You have a different market structure. You do see the results of convergence, lower churn, higher lifetime value, et cetera, et cetera. From that kind of thematic point of view, that camp is correct. We see it in Canada. In Canada, I certainly endorse that point of view. In the U.S., I think both camps are also right. If you have extensive fiber networks of your own and you have an extensive wireless network of your own, of course, you're going to try to find ways to put those two together. The other camp is also correct that ultimately, the customer just wants better connectivity. Connectivity is critical to every single household. Customer will always choose better. Fiber is better. That is true. It's unassailable because you see companies like Ziply Fiber and there are many others who kind of started from scratch and are taking significant share away from the non-fiber players because customer wants better. Will there be a time where the market will evolve to a degree where that convergence becomes the predominant theme, perhaps? When that time comes, we will be ready. I think BCE is also uniquely positioned from that point of view because we are also an expert wireless operator. We know what we're doing. We have extensive global relationships in the wireless space. We can bring that expertise to bear to Ziply Fiber when the time comes. You can see it in the results. The absence of a wireless offering in Ziply Fiber has not slowed them down. In fact, I think the absence of a wireless offering has perhaps enhanced the early success of Ziply Fiber because Ziply is able to offer such a compelling, simple package to consumers. There are three, four internet packages. Pick the one you want. It's easy. Off you go. There is no confusion. The pricing is simple. The customer service and the NPS scores are through the roof. You see the penetration. Yeah, it's interesting. Even those who push convergence, you say it begins with the network. I take your point. I think you're right. Maybe we'll kind of pivot a bit to the Canadian wireless and broadband businesses. I wanted to get there kind of by asking about kind of your business transformation initiatives, mostly in the context of we've seen prices in Canada, especially on the wireless side, kind of really step down, which highlights how the pricing environment can change more quickly than the cost structure of an organization, especially large organizations. You're busy attacking cost. I think you have a lot of avenues where costs can round the copper side and on combining systems. Maybe just touch on where you are on that business transformation, on that cost-cutting journey, and how much more kind of room there is to run there. Yeah. This is a really important one because as prices go down, obviously, you need to align your cost structure with price and revenues for sure. If you go back to what we've consistently stated, certainly throughout 2025, we are focused on four strategic initiatives or four strategic pillars: putting the customer first, delivering the best fiber and wireless networks, leading an enterprise with AI-powered solutions, and building a digital media and content powerhouse. Those are the four key strategic pillars. We say all of that is supported by our business transformation initiatives. What we're trying to do is take out a massive amount of cost while at the same time delivering better experiences for our customers. You do that by, again, focusing on those four priorities and making the right investments in those four and making sure you cut costs in other areas. That is how you are able to deliver better experiences at lower cost. Things like, what are we doing? First of all, get calls out of the system. Customers who are on fiber call less. That is kind of basic, but it is true. It is a massive cost reduction where you have fiber, they call less. When they do call, we use AI technologies to, first of all, if they have an issue, we do not want them to call. We direct them to self-serve. When self-serve does not work, they need to call in. We make sure that we have kind of virtual agents or chatbots or voice-assisted agents to interact with the customer. That reduces cost. Fewer calls, more self-install, use virtual agents where you can. Finally, when the issue is too complex, you have an expert case manager who can handle the issue without multiple transfers. Every single one of those things reduces cost, delivers better experience. You have self-install has reduced the tremendous amount of take-up on self-install, particularly, of course, it's where we have fiber. That has reduced our overall cost. When there is an issue with your network, we direct the customers first to virtual repair to repair the issues themselves. It saves them time. It's quite intuitive, lowers cost for us, saves them time, better experience, lower cost for us, better for us and our shareholders. Those are the kinds of things that we're doing all the way through. The more of this you do, the better it gets, the more savings you have. That is why we've been quite comfortable sharing kind of our journey on cost transformation and keep upping the targets. Those are the kinds of, there is a whole bunch of other things we're doing, of course. Those are the big, big, big ones that lower cost and improve the customer experience. It is no accident that in an environment the last three years where prices have compressed, like you've pointed out, we've grown our consolidated margins or kept them stable depending on the quarter. Yeah. No, that's great. Maybe focusing a bit on just the wireless market. Obviously, it was the back-to-school season, very important season in Canada, typically kind of characterized by elevated promotional activity. I mean, for what it's worth, my observation when I was walking around the malls before coming down here for the conference was it seemed pretty mute. There were deals, obviously. Everyone had device promotions. I wanted to get your kind of take on how that shaped up kind of nationally and if there were pockets of elevated promotion or maybe something borderline that was hard to see from an observer's perspective. Yeah. Again, on this question, let me start first with focusing on a key kind of investment theme. Canada has always, in the past, been quite thematically a good place to invest if you wanted to be in wireless, particularly given the stability of the environment across multiple proof points, industry structure, pricing, et cetera. That changed with kind of the price compression and the price disruption in the last couple of years. I think we're starting to come back to that theme of Canadian wireless stability. It is different. The pricing has stabilized at a different level than it was in 2019. I mean, that's just a fact. You're seeing green shoots of stability in the pricing environment, which is an undeniably good thing. I think it's a good thing all around. You've got four competitive players. Consumers are benefiting from that. They get a lot of value for high-performing networks, which are among the best in the world. From an investment perspective, we're now through. I think we're starting to have confidence to say that we appear to be through the significant ramp-down in pricing to stability to slight growth. We started hinting at that in Q2 as an industry. Certainly, we have. Saying, look, we've got to wait till back-to-school. That will be the next proof point. I think on back-to-school, which we're at the tail end of, you've seen, first of all, the rack rate pricing or the standard service pricing is higher than it was a year ago, like $5, $6, $7, particularly at the lower end of the market. The level of discounting during the back-to-school period was the same as last year. In other words, it was not deeper. You had kind of relatively stable discounting in certain pockets, but off of higher base pricing. I think it was the volumes are down. The market's still growing, but the volumes are down because of, again, fewer newcomers coming to Canada. I think what we started to see in Q2, I think, has held in Q3. I think back thematically, I think we're back to the stability of the Canadian environment in wireless with kind of growth to come as we look into the back half of next year. With that stability, are we beginning to see if nobody is being overly aggressive promoting, should that create kind of less churn across the system? I think one quarter can be one way or the other. If this is the trend we're on, should that be the natural result? Is it the case that when volumes are down, it's kind of inevitable that people are going to just fight harder, promote harder for the few that remain out in the market? How do you think about what are you seeing and what do you expect? I think there's a desire in the industry. I mean, everybody, of course, wants their fair share. You go through a transition, right? When the market growth declines, still growth, I could say that again, but when the market growth is declining and at the beginning of that decline, you see kind of your sales and net ad declining, kind of you're unsure of where you sit vis-à-vis the others. I think we've all figured out the market's decline. When we each get our fair share, it's going to be you're going to get the fair share you want, but the absolute numbers are going to be less. Nobody wins on how many sales or net ads you get. You win on the financial results you're able to deliver based on the market share that you get. In our case, I think that's where we have systematically wireless market stabilizing. A BCE theme is we have the most upside in wireless compared to the others. I would say that just even in the context of just getting fair share, not outside share, and why? We have distribution strength. We have best networks. We have the most trusted brand in the industry. We have the most upside on churn reduction, so retention. You can see our churn on an absolute level is still higher than our competitors, which is not where we want it to be. Our decline, our rate of improvement in churn has improved the most. I think we have a lot of more churn upside to come. We have been very consistent, certainly for the last, for many years. While I've been CEO, we've been very consistent in saying that our primary focus is premium brand loadings. You see everything we said we would do in the recent past, we have done. We said we were going to tilt very heavily towards the Bell brand. We're doing that. The significant majority of our sales and net ads come on the Bell brand. We said we were going to reduce churn. We said we were going to drive towards leading the industry in a number of kind of having the lowest number of complaints in the industry because no one wants that. We've done that. We have a lot of upside. I think my view is the winner is the player that's able to capture fair share of the growth that's there on the premium brand and deliver improvement on the financial side as we come out and get into that stable period. I mean, do you see a difference in churn? I mean, you are converged in most markets. There are some where you're not. I mean, do you see within Canada a benefit to your business? Is there more upside to run on that front where convergence could increase even more? The percentage penetration of converged customers could increase. That would be a natural avenue to lowering churn, lowering cost of retention because they're just stickier. Yeah. I mean, we have a lot of, we have a lot of, I think we have more upside than anybody else on improving churn, particularly on wireless. That would include fiber internet. Where does that come from? It comes from a whole number of things. What I said before on delivering better experiences and driving calls out because they have a better network and making sure you address the customer's problem very quickly through self-serve and virtual repair and those things, that is a big determinant of NPS improvement and churn reduction. Take that as a given. We're going to keep working on that. We find that where we have fiber, the churn is significantly better than where we don't. I think that's pretty obvious. Where we sell wireless and wireline together, households who have both services from us have better churn and higher lifetime value. As you increase product intensity in a home, you tend to see higher lifetime value, lower churn. That is a function of the breadth of services you sell that you can sell at a positive margin. You are talking about fiber, internet, wireless, content, particularly streaming bundles now. We have launched a couple of few compelling content offers in the marketplace where you have Crave and TSN. Crave is a premium entertainment product. TSN is the sports leader. You have Crave, TSN. You have Crave, Disney Plus, Netflix, and combinations of those. Our residential business is selling those bundles. You will see our media business also selling those bundles. Where we're uniquely advantaged compared to everybody else is we have owner economics on several of those products, TSN, Crave in particular. The others don't. Then other value-added services where we think we can stand apart. We're offering Perplexity as an example, Perplexity AI to our customers, back to the AI theme. Adding those services together increases product intensity, lowers churn. Those are the things we're doing to add value to our customers, increase NPS, increase lifetime value, lower churn. I mean, they all go together. The Perplexity, that would be like you're paying like a subscription, or that gets the subscription-based app that through a bundle gets included for customers? Is that how? Correct. Over time, what will happen there is if the customer wants to buy, wants access to Perplexity Pro, they'll pay a monthly fee to Perplexity, and we'll get our revenue share of that. Okay. All right. It is just using our, in this case, it is using our vast distribution strength in Canada. That is why Perplexity wants to partner with us, obviously. For us, it allows us to add value to our customers in a way that adds margin to our business. Okay. Just maybe on broadband generally, I know that there was a time when you were leaning in very aggressively to kind of increase share, particularly in Quebec. It seemed to be the primary region of focus. That has waned in certain markets. I am just wondering if you could let us know your kind of stance on that. You obviously will always compete aggressively, but it was heightened there for a while. How is that evolving? Where does that stand today? Yeah. Where we have fiber and the footprint is 10 years, in other words, we've had it for five, six years, we've seen our market share in tenured fiber footprint be quite strong. We're into the high 40s, low 50%, which is pretty impressive. We have that in Ontario, and I think you've seen stability in the market. The providers, particularly in Ontario, are giving significant value to the consumer there. We've got the best networks in the world, the fastest speed at good prices. You've seen the prices stabilize there. In Quebec, this is what you're referring to in terms of some aggressiveness. We have been pretty open that we needed to load the network that we built in Quebec because the market share was too low. That has also improved quite significantly. It's not where it is. Our market share in Quebec is not where it is in other parts of the country. We are at a point where, again, it comes down to me to balancing share with financials. I think we have tempered some of the pricing actions that we have had in the Quebec marketplace the last couple of years. It is a competitive market, so we are not the only player in town. I think the cable company sees market share erosion and sometimes decides it is going to lean more towards protecting financials. At other times, it decides it is going to try to protect market share. We have to react to that. Sometimes it changes from week-to-week. Thank you again for joining. What a difference a year makes. I think the conversation went from how are you going to fix one thing or another to now it's how are you going to grow in AI? What's the opportunity? How are you going to grow with Ziply? What's the opportunity? Are we on the tail end of some improvement in wireless? I think it's a much more constructive conversation this year. Yeah. I think I'll end if I have six seconds here. I'll end with we have delivered in 2025 everything we said we were going to do. Said we were going to strengthen the balance sheet. We've done that. We said we're going to focus on four priorities. We've done that. Thematically, I think there's a great opportunity in AI in the places where we have a right to win. The enterprise business has kind of been largely underappreciated. I think that's starting to change. You see the Ziply growth potential, the significant execution upside in our core business in Canada. We didn't talk about media, but we'll be one of the very few former traditional media companies that is going to deliver consistent revenue and EBITDA growth on an annual basis. It is because of the strategic moves we've made over the last five years to pivot from traditional media to be a fully digital media and content player. I think just reinforcing what you said, I mean, a year has made a big difference. A big difference. Yeah. Very positive. Thank you again for joining the conference, and thank you everyone for attending.