Hello, everyone. I am Johan Wibergh, and I am the Chief Technology Officer at Vodafone. I'm very happy that you have taken your time to join us for this Q&A. This Q&A is part of our technology investor briefing. I hope you have had time to review the detailed presentations on the IR website that we released this morning. Also let me highlight then that there were five additional supporting mini brief technology deep dives on that website on subjects such as Open RAN, with a special appearance from Michael Dell. We got a lot of interest earlier regarding the cable evolution DOCSIS, so we provide a specific deep dive on that, and also giving you a view on our supply chain sourcing model. I would really encourage you to take a look at those presentations as well if you haven't had the time to do that yet. Before we open for questions today, let me provide a couple of key takeaways that I want to make sure we get across to you. I think all of us know that due to COVID-19, the pace of the digital transformation has really been speeding up. It's almost like a dramatic digital transformation that's ongoing for the last year. I think we all understand that would have been impossible to do without a well-performing mobile and fixed connectivity from operators. We think that Vodafone is well-positioned to take advantage of this speed-up in digital transformation. I think there are a couple of, specifically three items I really want to lift up as being important here. First of all, I think we are good on leveraging our group scale. I really am thinking about ways of working and scalable platforms, et cetera. We're probably going to come into that several times during the Q&A. Secondly, I think we're really good in driving relentless cost efficiencies and improve asset utilization at the same time as driving up quality and customer satisfaction. Thirdly, I'm fully convinced that all the changes we're going through is really creating a foundation and really enabling a revenue growth in new product and services. I think we're really creating the capability in-house to make that happen, and that becomes a value add on top of the core connectivity business we are doing today. We placed a lot of focus in the video on our recent reorganization as being taking the efficiency of our factory to the next level. I think it really leveraged our scale benefits, both of doing things much more efficient, but also then speeding up what we are doing to get to more revenue. This will help us as we transition into a new generation connectivity and digital services provider. For this Q&A, I'm joined by two of my colleagues. First of all, Scott Petty, who leads our digital and IT organization in Europe, and also Alberto Ripepi, who leads networks in Europe. They both have a global responsibility in Vodafone when it comes to the strategy and architecture. Together, we will handle all the questions that you will be bringing up. I have to say, I'm very fortunate to have as good team members as Scott and Alberto. Both of them have been with Vodafone a long time. They are extremely capable. They are really good at making an organization perform really well. It's really about getting things to work faster. It's really about getting things to work better for our customers. It's really about doing everything much more cost-efficient. I think both of them have a very big track record in achieving that. We will do our best to answer all your questions. We are not the ones that are meeting investor analysts every day. We will do our best to answer your questions in a good way. We will try to not get too technical. Hopefully we can get the message across well. With that, operator, we are ready to take the first question. I've also been asked to please remind all of you that only one question per analyst as we get going. Thank you very much, Johan. Our first question today comes from Polo Tang from UBS, sorry. Polo, your line is now open. Please go ahead. Hi, everybody. Firstly, thank you for all the videos today and all the presentations. It was very helpful, very informative. My one question is really about DOCSIS 4.0. You mentioned that broadband speeds with DOCSIS 4.0 could reach up to 10 gigabits per second. What are the CapEx implications in terms of deploying 4.0? Would it require a big re-engineering of the cable network, and would it lead to a step-up in terms of CapEx? Thank you, Polo. It's a great question. Maybe if I start, and then I will ask Alberto to walk through the evolution steps to getting to DOCSIS 4.0. If I take a market as an example, if you take Germany, because typically that's where the question comes up, since Deutsche Telekom have made a lot of comments regarding their fiber build. I think overall, we feel like we are in a starting point in a very strong strategic position in Germany. Today, our network reaches, with gigabit speeds, 22 million households, while the market has around 5 million, the rest of the market. If you look on the mobile network side, there are three mobile networks that are built. They have all got similar type of performance. Maybe one of the competitors is a little bit weaker in the countryside, but all three mobile networks in Germany have very similar type of performance. There's not really a big difference. We've got a very strong IoT position in Germany, and also on TV due to the cable TV positioning. I think we're starting from a very good position in meeting competition due to those acquisitions we have made. Alberto, maybe you can walk through the specific cable steps we would take. Yes. Thank you, Johan, and thanks for the questions. As you mentioned, what matters is the fact that we have 22 million households that are already gigabit capable. You need to keep in mind that we have a very flexible architecture, and this is the beauty of our architecture, because we already fiberized our network. The strategy that we have to evolve this hybrid fiber cable network is in following different steps. First of all, during the pandemic, we saw growth of the demand in some specific areas, and we are addressing, and we addressed it through what we called node segmentation. This is the way that we put the fiber very close to the customer to reduce the sharing of the common asset. This is something that is for us, BAU, that we continue to do because we are doing the traffic modeling forecast to understand what is the evolution of our traffic, identifying the areas where there is demand, and investing in a cost-conscious way only where the demand is growing. Keep in mind that we already deployed almost in all markets the DOCSIS 3.1, and we are going to complete Germany in the next calendar year, at the beginning of next calendar year. This will bring us to 24 million households gigabit capable. We have several areas that we can continue to invest to improve our performance, and are very cost-conscious and focusing on where the demand is growing. We will go through, number one, the distributed cable architecture that will allow us to bring the modem closer to the households, and so reducing again the sharing of the media. We have the possibility, and we already started to deploy in Spain, of high split of full spectrum, where we can increase and we can modulate the bandwidth between downlink and upstream to increase the upstream capability. This is something that we can do in a very reasonable way, in a progressive way when the node segmentation is happening. It's not necessary to do nationwide tomorrow, but where demand is growing to cope with the growth of the demand. It will come to DOCSIS 4.0 that has been now released by the Cable Association from the Cable Labs, and we are starting to trialing. It's too premature to say what are the CapEx required in the DOCSIS 4.0. What I want to stress is the fact that our architecture can allow us to invest progressively where demand is growing and where capability, and we have a network that is already capable much more than our competitors in the markets. In the past, we suffered due to the shift of the usage pattern in some areas of capacity issues, but this is largely resolved, and we have a very strong process now in place, like what we have in the mobile to invest where it matters. Thanks, Alberto. That's all from my question. Thank you, Alberto. Really good. I think we can move on to next question operator. Thank you very much, Polo. Our next question today comes from Emmet Kelly from Morgan Stanley. Emmet, please go ahead. Your line is now open. Yes. Hi, good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for taking my question. My question relates to 5G and which killer apps you see emerging for 5G and how you are preparing for that. If I look back at 3G, I think the killer app for 3G was probably the iPhone, which came a few years later after the 3G networks were launched. When you look at 4G, I'd say video was probably the killer app for 4G. Again, that kind of manifested itself a few years after 4G was launched. What are the killer apps you see for 5G? In specific relating to, you say network slicing or autonomous cars, is this something that you're already preparing for? Thank you. Thanks, Emmet. That's a great question. Maybe if I start and say a few words and then maybe, Scott, since you've been involved in some of the business applications, if you want to add on a couple of examples there. As you said, I think the reason, if you look on the business case for Vodafone in deploying 5G, it's mainly driven by all the cost savings we can do. The key thing for us when we look at the data growth we are having and the cost per gigabyte that we need to have to make sure, because we always need to make sure that cost per gigabyte goes down faster than any possible data growth, because otherwise we will have a problem. Since 5G is up to 5 times more cost-efficient if you use Massive MIMO technology, the business case of deploying 5G starts and builds upon really all the cost savings you can get from it. It's important to keep that in mind. Secondly, when they look on the various use cases coming up, the first use case then is just to provide data for the smartphones, because as I said, due to the cost savings. From our perspective, we want to have as many customers as possible to buy 5G-based smartphones, we hence would invest in less 4G technology that would be more cost-efficient for us from a network side. We have seen shorter term, more examples on the business side and then more consumer to come. I've asked Scott then to talk on the business side. We see things starting to come, being talked about, we have very little on the consumer case being there. I think augmented reality will be an item that on the consumer side, I think we really believe big time in. The first use cases have been on the business side. Scott, can you cover a couple of cases you've been involved in? Sure. Thanks, Johan, and thanks for the question, Emmet. First of all, it's probably worth just reminding us where we are on the 5G journey. The networks we've deployed today are non-standalone 5G networks, which means we're using 5G radio access network, but the core is still our LTE core. We'll go live with standalone core over the coming months, and that's important because it adds the speed improvements that we get with non-standalone, but adds network slicing, mobile edge compute. You may have seen our announcement yesterday with AWS, and ultra low latency, which I think are important features and capabilities for applications. We've seen a couple of really good examples in the U.K. We ran our first standalone core trial with Coventry University, which is one of the leading medical teaching universities in the U.K. They've been using virtual and augmented reality in their teaching facility. Students can actually travel through the anatomy of the body, look at the organs, and understand what's happening as part of that teaching experience, and they're building that as a capability that they'll launch into production next year. We also did a partnership with Proximie in Wales. They've been running remote surgery applications between two hospitals, one in Cardiff and one in Llandough, where remote surgeons are able to offer expertise, follow the outcome of the surgery in the remote location, actually track all of the vitals and machinery that's in that environment using 5G applications. That's taking advantage of network slicing capability to be able to maintain the traffic. I think we'll see a lot in the mobile private network MEC space. We're really pleased with our partnership with AWS using AWS Wavelength that lets developers who are used to developing AWS take their applications and rather than just run them in a technology center under AWS, push them to the edge of our network and really benefit from low latency. A great example is our partnership with Sportability. They're a sports tracking company. They provide trackers for players. They've just done a deal to insert sensors into the rugby ball to gather analytics and data about what's happening in contact sports. They found that deploying MEC and 5G was cheaper than building a Wi-Fi LAN environment inside their stadium, gave them access to much greater speeds and much, much lower latency to create a new broadcasting experience for the capabilities that they're leveraging. I think we'll see those will be the early consumer-style applications leveraging MEC and low latency and wrapping that into a fan experience that people can leverage. Finally, a lot's happening in the Industry 4.0 space. We've announced a number of projects in the Mobile Private Network area. Probably the most visible is the Ford electric car factory in Essex. They're using a 5G MPN to build that factory and use it as a way to control the massive amounts of data, build virtualized applications, augmented and virtual reality for the engineers and tracking those capabilities. That factory will go live next year as they start to build out the components. The early investments we made in our incubation centers to build partnerships with different players is really starting to pay benefits. It gave people early access to 5G technology, particularly standalone 5G technology, which is not yet live. They've been building platforms and code that will come into production next year. Super. Thank you. Thank you, Scott. Emmet. Operator, time for next question. Thank you very much, Johan. Our next question today comes from Maurice Patrick from Barclays. Maurice, please go ahead. Your line is now open. Hi, guys. Yeah, thanks for the session today. If I could ask an ESG-related question, please. On slide 45, you show your energy consumption as being broadly flat over the past couple of years, despite the increase in data traffic. Just curious to know where you see energy consumption going in the next few years. In the presentation, you talk about techniques such as Massive MIMO, which I believe have double the energy footprint compared to normal radio configurations. I'm guessing with the move to cloud and edge, that might also bring increased energy consumption. Curious to understand where you see overall energy consumption going. Thanks. Thank you, Maurice. Great question for that. Alberto, do you want to start from the network side? Yes. As you say, over the last years, we were able to maintain almost flat our energy consumption despite the dramatic and the significant traffic increase that we had to manage. We are doing several initiatives to cope with what you said. Number one, we are shutting down the 3G almost in all markets, moving the spectrum from 3G- 4G and 5G. That is most efficient from the spectral efficiency perspective. It's correct that 5G will introduce incremental consumption in terms of Massive MIMO. On the other side, we need to keep in consideration that to manage 1 GB, to download 1 GB of traffic in 5G, the energy consumption is more or less 10x lower than the energy consumption that we have in 3G and several times lower the energy consumption that we have in 4G. The combination of these in terms of downlink efficiency that we can have, it's an element. You need to keep in consideration that we are working with several vendors in parallel to reduce the consumption of 5G Massive MIMO to make more efficient. We are confident that we can achieve it in the next time frame. Don't forget that we have also the programs that are running in parallel that are all the sharing agreements that are making energy efficiency. It's one of the key levers of the sharing, both passive and active, that we're doing in several markets. We are optimizing our core, reducing the consumption thanks to the cloudification, both in network and IT. In network, we already reached 64% of our network in private cloud. We aim in two years to reach more than 80%-85%. We are optimizing all data centers, we have in the long-range plan our cooling and infrastructure consumptions. We are starting to include the energy consumption in our consideration when we work on upgrading the network. It's one of the elements that allow us to decide where we need to deploy additional spectrum to optimize the consumption. It's matter of fact that energy has an increased trend due to the 5G deployment, we believe that with all the initiatives that we have in parallel, we can contain at a reasonable level this kind of impact. Scott, over to you if you want to comment. Scott, do you want to add on something? Just briefly to say, we've also been innovating in managing our energy consumption. We've been deploying our IoT smart meters to our radio access networks, leveraging lithium batteries to be able to turn off sectors and components during that period. We've built a series of applications to optimize our power consumption across our network. We're experimenting with on-site generation capabilities for both our data centers, leveraging solar, but also at our radio base stations using wind, and alternate energy sources to reduce our load on the grid. Now, thanks, guys. Just to add on, our models where we analyze investments, also including buying from suppliers, it's based on the total cost of operation, total cost of ownership. We include energy consumption in the modeling when we decide how to do things, which means then that we favor solutions that are energy efficient. Okay. Thanks, Maurice. Operator, next question. Thank you very much, Maurice, for your question. Our next question today comes from Matthias von Lehnhorst from Credit Suisse. Matthias, please go ahead. Your line is now open. Yeah, good afternoon, gentlemen. In the previous comment you said you will see an impact from phasing out some of the legacy infrastructure like 3G. Could you quantify the impact for us? You want to comment on that, Alberto? Yeah. I think that this is visible already in terms of energy savings where we did, in terms of efficiency in the deployment of a new capability. We did in Italy, Czech Republic, and we will do in Germany by June. All the other markets will follow before the end of calendar year 2022. The benefits are significant in terms of performance for the customers, because with the spectrum that we free from the 3G, we can easily deploy on 4G and 5G because it's already there. We need just to do either a software activation or a small activity on the site. Just to give you an example, we completed in March in Italy the switch off of the last 5 MHz of 2100 spectrum on 3G, and almost all sites already have activated these 5 MHz on 4G. It's capacity that is available for our customers. You know that the spectral efficiency of 4G is much bigger than the spectral efficiency on 3G, and this is bringing significant energy savings. At the same time, this is a significant CapEx reduction because we should not deploy additional spectrum, but we can reuse what is already in the site. In all the markets, we are progressing quite speedy because we do believe that this is a very important factor for the efficiency but also for the customer experience. Just so you guys have an understanding on how we operate. Because many of the things we invest in have between three and seven years write-off cycle. Everything we do, we think long term, we try to make sure we are cost efficient over a longer-term horizon. All of these things have been in our planning for a long time, and it doesn't really change on our CapEx envelope. We have already communicated to the market on how we see our CapEx envelope and our financial targets going forward. Thanks, Matthias. Thank you. Operator, next question. Thank you very much, Matthias. Our next question today coming from Georgios from Citigroup. Georgios, please go ahead. Your line is now open. Yes. Hi, and thank you for taking my question. It's on network virtualization and more specifically on Open RAN. I think during your presentation, one of the presentations discussed the importance of MIMO in delivering great experience and consistent service to the customers. Also you talked about your aspirations on Open RAN, and I know there are already contracts in some of the less dense areas in Europe that you have allocated to Open RAN vendors. I'm just curious as to where you think the ecosystem is when it comes to denser areas and solutions that are more equivalent to the Massive MIMO solutions you get from the established vendors, where you are in terms of your collaboration with some of the other telcos that are working on this, like Telefónica and Deutsche Telekom. Anything you could share in terms of the key milestones we have to focus on in the next 12 months just to track the progress. Thank you. Yeah. I will ask Alberto to talk about this, but I want to say just a couple of things beforehand because he wouldn't say it himself, I think. I think Alberto's team has been really leading and driving Open RAN since we started with this many years back. We've been doing trials in many countries with different vendors, starting back obviously at least 2016 when we started doing testing on different things. His team is also having some of the important external, like chairman in the TIP as an example, with 500 companies that are working heavily on getting Open RAN established. We are part of board members of the O-RAN Alliance. On Monday this week, we did a major press announcement on awarding the first European commercial deployment on Open RAN to a combination of vendors, which included Samsung, NEC, and Dell. We tried to explain how we see it in one of the mini deep dive videos. I think Alberto's team has been really pushing the envelope here, being really first out, and we have also then teamed up with the other large European operators to go down this path. Alberto, do you want to put some more color on the situation on Open RAN? Thanks, Johan, and thanks for the introduction. The team will be very proud for your words. Yes, it's correct. Since 2014, we are working on the O-RAN Alliance to make sure that this is a reality happening. As you know, Open RAN, logically, it's a separation of hardware from software, and this will give us the ability to create an ecosystem that is more flexible than just having a vendor that is providing the full stack. This will drive in the future. At this moment in time, no, it will be a cheaper solution. At this moment in time, it's not a cost strategy, but it's more a strategy to create diversity in the RAN environment and to create the possibility to innovate at a better speed. This will be possible once that you separate hardware from software and software in multiple components because you can have multiple new companies that will join this arena and will compete and will introduce innovation. We saw this in the past in the cloud architecture that was happening. We have significant plans with Open RAN. We will deploy 2,600 sites in the U.K. As you mentioned, you were very correct. The first initial implementation will go in the rural areas where we need to have low spectrum capability, and Massive MIMO will come later. We have plans that are very aggressive to deploy. We are very serious on this technology because we do believe that the diversification in this arena is very important, and this will allow us to introduce faster innovation and reduce further the cost. The performance that we're measuring in all the pilots that we are doing, we have three markets piloting the Open RAN, are very encouraging. In the 2G, 3G, 4G, we are starting to see performance that are comparable with the traditional vendors. We are working with very innovative vendors to evolve. We selected the vendors in all the stack. For the U.K., where we are already serving with several sites and multiple customers, we are happy with the progress so far. We do believe that in the next couple of years, the sites that we committed to deliver will materialize, this will improve significantly the ecosystem and the speed of the innovation for the RAN world. Thank you, Alberto and Georgios. Next question, please. Thank you very much, Georgios. Our next question today comes from Jakob Bluestone from Credit Suisse. Jakob, please go ahead. Your line is now open. Good afternoon. Thank you for taking the questions. I wanted to follow up just on your overall CapEx step-up starting from this year. I think Johan said in his presentation that a big part of it's clearly related to the integration CapEx for the new partners that are coming on board, that future CapEx would be lower. I'm just trying to understand your thinking around the mix of CapEx and how you see your CapEx overall levels evolving longer term, particularly as you complete this integration CapEx. Do you think it steps up and curves down, or will you find other stuff and hence it stays flattish overall in terms of your absolute CapEx levels? Thank you. Thank you, Jakob. It's a great question. Let me talk a little bit briefly about the growth in CapEx. As Nick and Margherita talked about at the full year results, it's split more or less in three different buckets. One third is going on network, and it's predominantly going to Germany. The second part is going into new product and services, where there is a business case where return on capital is better than WACC. That is mainly decided centrally by my two colleagues, Fánan for Vodafone Business and Alex for Consumer. Third part is in Vantage Towers, and that's very much about where they have strategic growth opportunities, i.e., they get customers and hence they need to build out more sites, or they need to do changes on the sites to allow for more customers on them. That is what that CapEx is paying for. That's also then driven on business case analysis. Everything is driven from what investments that make sense, and it's not done by us in technology. We of course, a key part in saying, "This is how we would execute it, this is what it would cost." It's the various CEOs that are deciding upon to do that. We have provided visibility on some of our key financial metrics going forward, and that is the granularity we can give you. We provided on EBITDA, free cash flow, et cetera. We haven't said more on how CAPEX would evolve, this is how we think. Our key job here is to make sure that every single EUR is spent as efficiently as possible, we are brutally chasing everything we can do in the organization to continue to drive down costs. You can see what we have done as a company on the OPEX side, and that's despite, as you said, growing energy costs, huge growth in data volumes, build-out of the networks, and we've still been very effective in getting costs down, and we continue to chase on doing things on that. A key part will be the new technology organization that will enable us to take it to the next level. Before, even if we have been very efficient as a company, when we now create one organization in Europe, it means basically that Scott and Alberto can drive this to the next level. Just a practical example. We have maybe a way of doing network operations today that is almost the same in every market, but it's not exactly the same. We do it exactly the same. You can cut away huge amount of the tools, and then you can drive digital automation. There are a lot of ways we can do to further drive efficiency. That is what we are very much focused on. Okay. Thanks, Jakob. Next question, please. Thank you very much, Jakob. Our next question today comes from Robert Grindle from Deutsche Bank. Robert, please go ahead. Thanks very much indeed for the presentations. You have highlighted that your cost per gigabyte will fall by 60% by full year 2025. Is that on all the traffic carried in the year, or is that the unit cost of incremental capacity added in the year, effectively falling by 20% CAGR? I think you're trying to reassure us that the greater efficiency will offset the increase in volumes. Historically, mobile traffic growth rates in Europe and emerging markets at Vodafone have always been very similar within a few percentage points. Do you think that's because the increased capacity that becomes available in the two regions is driven by the stable capital intensity target, and that the businesses basically sell what the factory makes for them, rather than the capacity being scaled up and down quickly depending on the business need? Thank you. Thanks, Robert. Great question. What we're trying to tell you in the presentation is that it's going to be at least more than 60% cost savings. It is, like you say, we need to make sure that the cost to produce a gigabyte really goes down faster than any erosion on revenue. Any growth of data means that we can do that with the similar cost as we have today. If you look back for, I don't know how many years, we have always succeeded in doing that. I feel very confident that we can do that going forward also. That's why we always are chasing the latest technologies, because it always will be so that the latest technologies will be more cost-efficient per gigabyte. You then look on the data growth, it is not really so that this is, okay, this is what the network can produce in capacity, and that is what has been sold. It doesn't technically work like that. It actually is the demand coming from customers. There always are a few sites, it can be a beach in the summertime with a lot of tourists, but there is a limit on how much data that can be produced. Usually, that is not the case. The dynamics is really driven more from demand from customers, not what can be produced. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Thanks, Robert. Next question. Thank you very much, Robert. Our next question today comes from Nick Delfas from Redburn. Nick, please go ahead. Your line is now open. Yeah. Thanks very much indeed. A couple of questions, please. Can you prove that the scale you have across markets is working? Are there any metrics that you can share, I don't know, from A.T. Kearney or from other studies that show that the group effect is working in helping you achieve these scale economies? Another quick question on the technology. Have you given us how many homes per node you have in Germany? Is Massive MIMO already working well? Are there any problems with it in terms of the weight or EMF, or local planning? Thanks very much. Thank you very much for your question. I will take the first one, then Alberto, if you can take number two. As a company, we've been doing an external benchmarking with, I think it's not confidential. It's been with A.T. Kearney that has been benchmarking many companies. We are now up as a company up in the top quartile, and on the way up. I say I have a passion for benchmarking, and the way we think about this topic is a little bit like if you take the situation with our data centers, it used to be that we used to benchmark the cost of our data centers with other telco companies. We weren't bad. Well, we may want great data. We're doing well. We decided then to change the benchmark to say who's best in the world of running data centers? Yeah, that's the hyperscalers. Okay, let's benchmark with hyperscalers. Let's understand how we really are. We did the benchmarking then. We said, "The cost position isn't good enough. We need to do things." We could see also they were spending much more money on doing transformations versus what we were doing. Hence, Alberto initiated several initiatives. This is back to 2016 and 2017, where we identified what are the key transformations we needed to do, how we were operating data centers. When we look at it now, we are really up where we need to be. We are very close to where the hyperscalers are on the things we are managing. We have done the same in different areas. In network operation. We also have JVs that we operate as a group where we sell services. Alberto's selling a network operation service to a JV. We have to compete on that in comparison with external companies. We get to provide an offer, and then they benchmark us. In that work, we see that we are coming out and we are winning those bids on an independent basis, so to say, because the cost we are providing is lower than what they can buy from companies out in the market. I think we have come very far. I'm also convinced that we can do much more, and that's what we're starting now in the reorganization, where we can take this to the next level. There are so many more things we have identified that we will be working on in the next coming years to take this to the next level. There's so much more cost savings to get done. You can just imagine, even if in our supply chain, having reduced it to a certain amount of SKUs we are buying, stock keeping units, by reducing it even further by doing exactly the same things we buy, we're going to be able to push prices down even a few more percentage points, which will make a huge importance to CapEx efficiency. There's a lot more things to work upon. Alberto, sorry. Over to you. Saying exactly the node per segment that we have, it's more complicated because the node per segment is a distribution that is depending on the areas of the geography. What I can tell you is that how we plan the limitation of the number of customers that we have in each node, in each segment, to be sure that we don't get congestion. We plan now with one year in advance in the worst and best scenario, the traffic evolution. We identify, in this case, the segment that will be highly loaded and the segment that will be congested to make proper investment in terms of fiber split and node split to put fiber close and reduce the number of customers per node in the next 12 months. We have a very accurate planning process now that we follow, and also the CEO of Germany is following on a monthly basis. I think it's much better to talk how we manage the congestion data rather the number of customers per segment, because it's really a distribution depending on the rural, suburban, and urban areas. Of course, in the urban areas, we have very few customers per segment, and in the rural areas, we can have more customers per segment, depending on the kind of traffic that they are doing. The real-time communication is changing and shifting a bit the way that the capacity is used, because it's not more just a busy hour peak in the evening with the people streaming and television, but it's becoming more a flat peak that we have on the upstream to manage the real-time communication in the pandemic. We have now an accurate planning, the congestion is largely solved in Germany in terms of capacity, we continue to invest several thousands of node segment per year, depending on the demand of the customers, where traffic is demanded and growing by the customers. It's not a massive deployment that we do spread, but we are very targeted and focused on the areas where customers are having a higher demand. You ask your question there on Massive MIMO on 3.5 GHz. It's actually working really well. It propagates better than 1,800 MHz. The grid we have is typically suitable for 1,800 and 21. It actually propagates better than expected. Still some improvements to get done in the algorithms. You can run 4 to 5 beams at the same time on a Massive MIMO base station. There's still some improvements there to get done in the algorithms, it's really getting there. The weights have come down. They're now into some of the suppliers are into 2nd or even 3rd generation of Massive MIMO radios. It's turning out quite well. They are somewhat more complex to install. In some countries, we have EMF regulations we need to consider and take care of. Sometimes there are some steelworks due to that, but the performance is good. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you very much. Operator, next question. Thank you very much, Nick. Our next question today comes from David Wright from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. David, your line is now open. Please go ahead. Thank you very much, guys, for the presentation today. My question is a little bit two-sided. First of all, you've talked about obviously the evolution of the cable networks, and you've given us some visibility into that. What I was wondering is, as you move up through these 3.1, 4.0 technology standards, do you get the step change in efficiency that the guys moving from copper to fiber are getting? What I mean by that is, we're getting told by BT Openreach that the fault tolerance, the fault reporting falls by 50%, for example. There is a very clear benefit feeding through to OpEx. Are you getting those kind of step changes here, or is it much more gradual within the actual efficiency of return on capital and cable? If I could just ask, I'm not sure I saw this in the presentation, but on standalone 5G, do you guys give any basic rollout targets where you expect to be in terms of standalone 5G coverage by year X, year Y, or year Z? Thank you very much. Okay. Let me just comment a little bit first on fiber versus cable and copper, then maybe, Alberto, you can go a little bit more into depth on this. I think, first of all, if we look on actual customer feedback we are having, there's somewhere between 30% and 50% that are related to Wi-Fi performance in people's home. This whole debate about whether it's copper, fiber, or cable, sometimes that discussion get left out. I mean, as an example, if you take on our fiber cable networks, we typically see like a gigabit speed going into the house, and then it goes over to the local Wi-Fi, and it drops to maybe 50 Mb, something like that. Also, that it's very common that there's Wi-Fi interference in the homes because many of the Wi-Fi routers are configured to be working on the same channels. It may work really well one day, and then next day your neighbor is home, and then it doesn't work because they are operating on the same channel. Even if the CPE is supposed to dynamically choose channel, often there's a lot of problems around that. There are many customers that sit with older CPEs, with older Wi-Fi standards that actually don't perform that well. They may not even support 5 GHz, only be on 2.4 GHz. There's still also a very limited amount of customers with a meshed Wi-Fi solution. We call it Super Wi-Fi. That gives really great experience. This is actually the biggest problem, and that often gets overlooked in this whole debate regarding which technology. This is for me, the number one issue to get resolved, to get happier customers and get better performance. It is so, of course, that copper cables has a lot of problems, often been there for a long time in the ground. If it rains, you can have issues, et cetera, because getting away from copper is a major thing, because that's not the same with coax, but with copper cables, that is. Alberto, do you want to build on this? I think that you are saying right. If I look to the tickets that we are having to manage, the vast majority are linked with CPE, Wi-Fi, and topics like this one. It's not really an issue that we have in the building with the coax. This is an analysis that we do on a weekly basis and we control. When it comes to the cost, you need to look at this in an holistic way, not only the OpEx that you can have at the end of the journey, but also the total cost that you need to sustain in terms of investment. Our cost to upgrade our network is one order of magnitude lower than another company that needs to build the FTTH. This is the reason why we continue to do this evolution of our very flexible network and very good network that we have step by step where it matters. When it comes to the second question that you raised on the 5G, we have, of course, plans for the next three years in all the markets. We aim to deploy 5G right, first of all. That means with dedicated spectrum on 3.5, where we can experience, our customers can experience the real 5G with regard to throughput and latency. We acquired this spectrum in nine European markets, it's something that is ranging between 80 and 100 MHz that we bought. We deploy through Massive MIMO, where we know that the efficiency of 1 Gb is 4x or 5x the 4G. We currently have a plan to deploy 5G. Of course, there is also an alternative that is used by many competitors. The dynamic spectrum sharing that is giving you the icon but is not giving you the experience of 5G. The sharing of the spectrum with the 4G, you have more or less the same experience that you can have on 4G. In some cases, significantly worse because you can have interference. We do deploy build right where it matters, where customers have high demand, like cities, ports, airports, industrial districts. Overall, we plan in several markets an acceleration in the next financial year. It is already in the long-range plan. We plan to have something in the order of magnitude of 50% population coverage in some markets like Germany, U.K. Ireland is 60%. We have a significant plan that we'll upgrade year by year. This is the technology that we want to push in the markets because it is much more efficient and give a better experience to our customers. That is standalone 5G, just to be clear those times. We start with the non-standalone, we are migrating to standalone. Don't forget that we are the first operator deploying 5G standalone. U.K. and Germany are the markets where we are launching, and the next counts will come. Once that we launch 5G standalone, we'll migrate the traffic on this because this give also the experience of a very low latency and allow us to integrate with the MEC and AWS. That is something that we do believe as a business case, as mentioned by Scott. Thank you very much. There is a limit on phones that's supporting 5G standalone. There are very few phones that do that yet, so we always need to make sure we time it when phones becomes available. Okay. Thank you, David. Operator, next question. Thank you very much, David. Our next question today comes from Sam McHugh from Exane. Sam, please go ahead. Hi there, guys. Thanks for the question. I just wanted to ask about mobile networks and network sharing. You have several agreements, obviously, in Europe, for network sharing, active network sharing, but they quite often include carve-outs in the urban areas. I just wondered what the kind of tech view was on those carve-outs. Are they carve-outs for commercial reasons or technical reasons? Does 5G and Massive MIMO change your ability to do more network sharing in cities? If I can just ask a cheeky clarification. On the 5G coverage, what proportion of that do you think you'll do with Massive MIMO within the 60% coverage target? Thank you very much. If we do like this, just to give Scott the chance to talk also. I think we're going to have Scott answer the first, just on the doing the network sharing, active carve-outs in the cities, et cetera, because Scott's previous job was to be CTO in Vodafone UK, so he's gone through all of that. Then I think the remaining questions, Alberto, if you could help just fill on with those. Is that okay, Scott? Yeah, sure. Thanks, Johan. Our strategy for active sharing is to active share in rural and suburban areas where traffic density is lower and our ability to differentiate our network performance is lower. The cost benefits of active sharing outweigh any potential differentiation that we could create. That's not true in dense urban areas, and particularly in cities where engineering acumen, build strategies, the way we build 5G give us a differentiation, an ability to compete and win customers based on the network quality and capabilities that we use there. There we use passive sharing as our primary sharing mechanism. We've learned these lessons, I guess, over years, and we have reversed some of our original decisions to do active sharing in cities and reverted back to a passive sharing model to get that control and ability to compete in the marketplace. 5G gives us an incremental opportunity for differentiation, and therefore, we've been Carving out to passive sharing in dense urban areas for 5G to allow us to launch applications and new services more quickly than with our partners. In an active sharing agreement, it's more difficult to execute in an engineering sense in dense urban if the two sharing partners are not perfectly aligned on their strategies and their spectrum holdings. We've found certainly as our growth in IoT, new business services, that having flexibility in dense urban areas enabled us to compete, and would outweigh any efficiency savings that we lost in only using passive sharing. Thanks, Scott. Alberto, over to you. Yes. As said by Scott, the importance of the sharing in the big urban areas, it's less relevant because the benefits that we can get, it's limited. In the big urban areas, so in the cities with a population higher than 100K inhabitants, it's the area where we accelerate and we push with Massive MIMO. There is more capacity demand and also typically more demand also from the business perspective. Our plan is to differentiate the rollout in the urban areas and in the rural areas and to adopt 3.5 GHz and Massive MIMO more in the big urban areas. Where we are already deploying, we are more or less aligned with our competitors in all the markets. U.K. is leading in terms of market, the Massive MIMO. As you know, in London, we got also the best 5G network thanks to our deployment of Massive MIMO. The Massive MIMO deployment, as you probably know, is a bit more complex than the normal deployment because you need to raise a bit of the pole, but it's something that is not preventing us to accelerate the deployment. It's something that is in our capabilities, and we are deploying at the speed that we believe is linked with the demand of the customers. Thank you very much. Thanks, Sam. Operator, next question. Thank you very much, Sam. Our next question today comes from Adam Fox-Rumley from HSBC. Adam, please go ahead. Your line is now open. Thank you very much. I had a question on MEC, please. I was interested in the scale of the build that's required to make MEC work. To take maybe the U.K. as an example, do you need 10 sites? Do you need 100 sites, 1,000, 10,000? I'm getting different answers from different people, I'd be very interested in your perspective there. I guess practically, does Vodafone need to buy equipment for each of those sites? A short second question, if I may. Johan, I think five years ago, you probably would've been in charge mostly of network engineers. Now software is a much bigger piece. You referenced the change of culture that's required in your presentation. I wondered how you're tracking that change of culture internally. Thank you. Okay. If I start to take the MEC, if I ask you, Scott, to talk about the U.K. then specifically on MEC, even if it's Alberto's area, if you cover it since you know it well. Sure. No problem. Our MEC deployment in the U.K., you would need to separate MEC used for the public macro network. In that case, we're deploying MEC into our technology centers, so between four and eight technology centers for a country the size of the U.K. It enables us to offer MEC services across the macro network with the low latency capabilities. However, MEC is also applicable to mobile private networks, like the Ford example that I gave you earlier. In that case, you'll see MEC actually deployed inside the factory or at the very edge of the mobile private network. That's where people get confused with the numbers, I think. In a macro network sense, probably four to eight technology centers for a reasonable size country will deliver the services you want. In our case, we have 10 MPN projects in the U.K., and if they all use MEC, then that's another 10 MEC deployments to support those. If you separate the two, it's a fairly small number though for the macro network. Thanks, Scott. If you talk about the important change overall of engineering, et cetera. This is really a journey that started before my time. Started really back in 2014 on starting to build. It started originally in India and in Egypt and starting to create a shared service organization. That was initially more operational items, but also some maintenance and simpler engineering topics. We decided then that it's really key to become big in software engineering for many reasons. First of all, we have found out it's actually more efficient to insource versus buying from suppliers. Every time we insource, we save 20% +. Plus we also get people that are incentivized of doing what's best for us and not for the supplier long term. We realized we also need it because typically the business model of operators have been that you buy everything from suppliers. If you do that, how do you then differentiate? The suppliers will sell it to everyone else. Part of the industry problem we're having is, of course, that there is not enough differentiation in the customer's eye. You can't be naive and think you can create differentiation overnight. We said we need to start adding on and building differentiation. We need to start creating add-on products that adds more value and add more differentiation. If you don't have that, it's hard. As I said in the videos, software is eating the world. You need strategically to build a software engineering capability. Now we have about 7,000 people. It's a sizable chunk of the technology organization. The target is to grow that. As I said, put a stake in the ground and say about 15,000 people in 2025. Always if and buts, depending on how we succeed with things, et cetera. We will, of course, have a balance between what's in-house and what we buy from suppliers. We want to make sure that it's balanced because we'll bring everything in-house. We're working really hard on changing the culture of Vodafone. When we started with the Tech 2025 work back in January 2019, part of the work was to really talk to a lot of other companies. We've been working. One of the advantages of having the scale of Vodafone is that we get to deal with some of the best companies in the world and some of the best people in the world. I'm super grateful for the head of engineering for Facebook, Jay Parikh, he's been a great guy. He helped us so much in the culture change. The chief architect of AWS has also been a great helper. They have talked to us. They have shared information. We've talked about the journey to do, and we've been changing the culture in Vodafone. If you look at our internal presentations on Tech 2025, it talks about 3 key pillars, culture, platforms, and software engineering. We are on the way of getting there. We are by no far excellent, but we are on the way of getting there. We gave some proof points on digital, on the pace in the presentation. I talked about what Scott has achieved in the U.K. That's done with our own teams. That's Vodafone employees achieving those results. We are really starting to get there. We are winning. One of our great guys won an award in the U.K. We are really starting to build an engineering culture in Vodafone. We also need to be realistic that we're not where we want to be, and we can't really compete with the best companies in the world. It's known that Vodafone has, in the network space, world-class experience, and we're working really hard to get there also in overall in software engineering. The interesting thing is when we went down this path, then Alberto's team, his network engineers people, they said, "Hmm, this is really interesting." Now we have a scaled platform for data in Vodafone, which is built on Google Cloud. It used to be that we were doing a lot of drive testing on our networks, cars going around testing the performance. What they have done instead is that we are getting performance data back from our customer smartphones. It goes into GCP, Google Cloud. They are running very smart algorithms to analyze the performance of all the various places to come up with where they need to do tuning. We're actually now starting to reduce drive testing because it's not needed anymore. We both have the ESG benefit, we have a cost reduction benefit, we are faster getting the data, and you can see the excitement in our people when they're working with these things. I think we have turned a corner. Now, having said that, there's still so much left to get done, but I'm very pleased with the progress, Adam. Thank you for asking that question because this is something I'm very passionate about when it comes to Vodafone's future. I think it's so important in evolving, in changing the company long-term. I think it will differentiate us from companies that are telcos. You don't see it today, but it will really change us. It will make us another company in the future. I'm so convinced about that. Thank you. Operator, next question. Thank you very much, Adam. Our next question today comes from Carl Murdock-Smith from Berenberg. Carl, your line is now open. Please go ahead. Hi. It's kind of following on slightly from Adam's question and following on slightly from Jakob's question, actually. If I look at slide 56 of the presentation, it says that your share of technology employees in software development will increase from 23% today to 50% by 2025. Am I right to think of that as your number of software engineers kind of slightly more than doubling from 7,000 today? Or is it that rather than anything that your technology group itself could shrink substantially of headcount over that timeframe? Then kind of the bit following on from Adam and Jakob's is, in terms of that cultural piece and hiring piece and HR piece, how do you attract and retain top talent in an area like this where there's obviously lots of demand? I suppose the bit from Jakob's question that sticks in my mind was in your answer to him, you were kind of talking about technology as a ruthlessly efficient cost center, effectively. How do you attract people to come work for you as a cost center rather than maybe going to other companies where technology is viewed as profit center and potentially therefore more attractive? Thanks. Great question, Carl. Really good question. Scott, do you want to give a try on that one? Sure. Look, I think we have real opportunities in the technologies that we're developing for, and we find attracting software engineering talent actually reasonably easy to do. We've been investing in resources both in our offshore centers and our onshore centers to support our digital initiatives and capability. We focus our measurement of our people on velocity, and let me try and explain that to you as a concept, because this is what really gets software developers excited. If you have a squad of 10- 12 developers, they work in two weekly sprints to develop story points or features that we deploy in the market. We challenge those teams to be as efficient as they possibly can, to get as much throughput through that sprint as we possibly can. We achieve that by building common standard platforms, reusing code, working in open source mindset where we share and we leverage off each other. We challenge our teams to focus on velocity as their primary measure of productivity and the way that they deliver, and then balance that with the quality metrics. How many defects per release? How many issues do we have from a customer point of view? That's built a really strong engineering culture in software development that's got teams very focused on performance and velocity, not cost. We don't talk about cost per engineer or cost per feature point. We talk about velocity and throughput and speed. Ultimately, they reduce the cost per unit that you're producing, but more importantly, you can decide whether you want to produce more units or you can put it somewhere else. The culture of the engineering team is all about how can I go faster, how can I reuse more, how can I leverage technology more effectively? That may result in lower cost, but that's not how we manage them or focus them in the culture. Thanks, Scott. I also have to add on, I think in the new organization, we are creating a European scale. There are actually not that many companies in Europe that have the engineering scale as we are having. There are some really interesting technical challenges for people. If you consider the amount of data we are having, the pretty advanced technical systems, both to fix the mobile networks, it's really advanced technology. On top of that, we're running huge amounts of servers, both on-prem and in AWS and Google. There's some pretty advanced technology available in Google Cloud. We deal with the best people. We're doing co-development with Google. We get to meet some of their best people doing things together. That really stimulates people. I think we have a very strong employee value proposition. I've actually been worried because we've been losing some people actually to both Google and AWS because we're starting to get really good people, and it's like, "Oh, we need to make sure we retain people." I think we are on our way. We have a lot more to do, but I think we are getting there. Now, this capability, we can use this in two ways. One is to drive very efficient things, but also we need to make sure we have enough innovate things when it comes to new product development to make sure we really generate new value added. Of course, there will be different teams that are focused on different things, but it's a very similar capability. Thanks, Carl, for that. Really like that. Operator, next question. Thank you very much, Carl. We've had a couple of questions on the webcast around Open RAN, so I'm just going to tie these together into a single question. What new vendors are you seeing enter the Open RAN software space? What innovations do you expect, and what is their business model? Secondly, are there any downsides from Open RAN, and how can you mitigate them? Thanks. You want to take that, Alberto? The vendors that we see are not the traditional vendors, because I think that they would like to push as much as they can the traditional business, and we are entering a lot of newcomers that are bringing the innovation. The business model, of course, for them is to introduce innovation that can be very easy to be deployed. In the software side, it's something that we can achieve because of the separation from the hardware. Otherwise, we have a much more complexity to do. With regards to the negative side effects, of course, it's something that we are mitigating, in particular the maturity of the technology. We are working exactly on this point, on the maturity, having the right PoC and the right trials and the right testing, and we created an organization that is managing the integration. You have 2 different downsides that we need to consider. 1 is the maturity, and the second is that, of course, there is an integration complexity that is increasing. For this reason, we are adding the lab to manage this kind of integration. We are mitigating with the right test and right PoCs from one side, and the second one, creating a center that is managing properly the integration to make sure that we take the best value from the technology. Thank you, Alberto. Operator, I think we're ready for the next question. Thank you, guys. Our next question today comes from Ottavio Adorisio from Societe Generale. Ottavio, your line is now open. Please go ahead. Ottavio, please make sure you are not muted locally. Ottavio, are you there? Can you hear me? Hello? Now we hear you. Perfect. Sorry. I had some problem with the connection. First of all, thank you for organizing the call. It's very informative. You provided a lot of details about all the developments you're making on the coverage and the capacity. You said that effectively, there is a massive shift also in terms of the culture. My question is a bit broader. It's what's different from the past? Effectively for us analysts, it's very difficult to grasp because what is going on in a network, it's invisible to us. What is visible to us is the financials that a company delivered. The financial has been not great in terms of how to monetize all the capacity, all the good things you're doing on technology. The question is, what you reckon could be different over the next three-five years? I know that you're talking about a big, lengthy amount of time. In terms of the efficiency the company can achieve, both on the mobile and on the fixed, thanks to the technology rolling out, like you said, in terms of the cable in Germany, in terms of the mobile with 5G, Massive MIMO and so on and so forth. So far it's not been visible, the numbers. The question is that when all these changes you're talking today will be more visible and we can actually see either on the margins, on the P&Ls or on the capital intensity. Thanks. Ottavio, great question, and a very difficult question also. I can give you the way I think about this and have it in my head. I think, first of all, I share your frustration that if you look on the revenue development for us and I guess the whole sector, it's not really impressive at all. We can all agree on that if you look on the core business we're having as Vodafone, the pure connectivity business, it is a very flattish business outlook, how it has been up until now. It's a very challenging business. We've been doing maybe slightly better in recent terms. Still, it's very challenging on the revenue, and it's not really what you want to be in. Since I deal with so many of our partners and vendors, many of them have double-digit revenue growth and you're sitting there and be feeling very jealous on what they've been able to achieve. To be realistic around the core connectivity business, that has something between a flattish to a low single-digit revenue growth outlook probably, if you look on the total part of it. If you look on the Vodafone Business piece, and their presentation back in March on how Vinod is seeing the market and his ambition, you're seeing that he has a higher growth rate opportunity. We start looking at those add-on things. We talked several about them here. We have MPN, where they're very, very strong funded. You have MEC, we've got SaaS-based services, et cetera. All of these are things that are sitting in the strategy chart on the six strategic areas, how we want to compete. We see a somewhat better revenue outlook possibility on the Vodafone Business side. Technology is really key to make those things achievable. I think, if you think about the core business, it has a certain outlook, and we're doing the best to really optimize that. In the best case, it's probably a low single digit. There are some other areas around that has somewhat of a better outlook, and we highlight that on one of the slides in the pack. It's slide 58 in the pack, where we try to show the connectivity growth area, where there could be a somewhat of a better growth rate where we have certain items to highlight things like consumer IoT. We have SD-WAN and security that we're doing there. There are a few different areas, some that we not highlighted in March, and Alex will have a, for consumer, an investor day going forward where he will talk about the growth possibilities. Further out, we have an emerging growth areas where financial services is strong for us in Africa with a double-digit revenue growth rate. We have a really strong position on IoT. We need to make sure we utilize the skills and create those added values around the core connectivity that either just adds a revenue per customer, and then gradually, I hope we are able to create things that actually differentiating. If you look on our IoT platform, it actually is differentiating versus competition, and we need to be able to create more value on that. I don't think we've done a good enough job on it as an industry in creating differentiating and adding value on things. The core connectivity is a challenging business there. Maybe it's low single digit, I don't know. Then it's the other things we can add on top of it and around it. That is what we're working on, and that's my way of explaining the next generation connectivity and digital services provider strategy. That's our ambition to execute on. Yeah. If I can follow up, Vodafone has been basically born as a mobile company, and it has been transforming over the last few years into a convergent. Of course, you've been growing mostly organically by integrating the business inorganically in places like Portugal. But you still, in the mobile, you effectively control the end-to-end because effectively it's your network most of the times the one you use it. In fixed, you have to rely a lot on your competitor/partners. Of course, the technology you have in fixed varies according to the geographies where you've got cables in Germany, you've got fiber in Italy, and you've got a mix, a hybrid in Spain. My question is that what's the difference of managing a network when you have the end-to-end control like you do in mobile, while you have to do it and to rely on a partner that in most of the times tend to be also your competitor on the retail market? In terms of how you manage it, the visibility you have, I'd reckon owning the network like you have in Germany makes a huge difference vis-a-vis places like Spain, U.K., or Italy. Alberto, do you want to cover the differentiation between wholesale and our own network? Of course. You are right. You are perfectly right because when it comes to the control on a mobile network or on a full-on network, we have full control, and we can guarantee the end-to-end performance. In some other cases, we are relying on the third party. In this case, what we need to put in place is very strong OLA with an SLA with the other vendor where we control effectively the appliance and the application of this. As already said by Johan, don't forget that the vast majority of the tickets and incident that we are getting on the fixed network is not driven by the pure infrastructure, even in the access. Yes, we can have some problematic copper areas access, but the vast majority is always coming from CPE and Wi-Fi where we have room for improvement, and we are deploying it. We have a very good control in the U.K., in Italy, and in Spain where we rely on partners, and we have also agreement in terms of resolution of the access problems relying on the same third-party vendor to make repair. In such a way, we can directly contact the third party that is doing the repair in the access. As I said, it's not the most painful point that we have in the end-to-end process. Thanks. Thank you, Alberto and Ottavio. Operator, I think we're ready for the next question. Thank you, Ottavio. Our next question today comes from Andrew Lee from Goldman Sachs. Andrew, please go ahead. Your line is now open. Hi. Good afternoon, guys. I had 2 questions, I'm afraid. The first one was just I wonder if you could just explain, in your digital transformation efforts, why are digital sales still such a low percentage of total sales? What are the technological obstacles to it not being higher? It's not just you guys. DT also targeted 30% of its total sales being digital by 2024 at its recent CMD, just wondering why in this business it's like that. Then the second question is just how do you now decide what you're going to do in-house versus what Vantage does, if anything? Just specifically maybe you can comment on is fiber backhauling going to be done by Vodafone or Vantage? Is Vantage going to manage your Open RAN sharing, like Cellnex has started to do, or do you think you've got more expertise in that area? Thank you. Thank you very much, Andrew. I think, Scott, if you take first and then Alberto take the second one. Sure. Andrew, great question. Our digital sales have been growing steadily and actually quite strongly through the pandemic. In some markets, we're quite close to digital being our biggest channel from a sales perspective. Not universal, I think you'll see there's differences in cultures between particular markets. What's been driving those increases really are improvements in the journeys and the capabilities we offer in our digital tools. For instance, in the U.K. last year, we launched an upgrade guarantee tool that ran from the MVA app. As you're in an upgrade journey, you were offered a priced upgrade, you ran the diagnostics on your phone, and it gave you a guaranteed price for your trade-in of that particular phone. We saw that result in almost a third of our customers that went through the upgrade process in the app also traded in their phone. That's more than double from what we saw the year before. Part of it is very much capability driven, making sure you have all of the journeys that are required for the upgrade process. Simplification of our tariff models and our structures has helped dramatically. Our move to unlimited tariffs and a simplification of the framework has made it easier for customers to make their own choices through digital journeys. A little bit is reeducation of the market. A perception that's grown in many of our markets that you can negotiate deals if you talk to our contact center staff or if you go into our retail stores, you can get a different price. Setting consistent commercial rules across our digital platforms and our retail and contact center sales platforms has also helped us drive up our percentage of digital sales. I think we're making good progress on our capability, and we're seeing the reshaping of our tariff models that will see us have digital as our largest channel over the next couple years. Alberto? Yes. Thank you. Thanks for the question. I know very well the Vantage setup since I was part of the core team. I was leading the core team of the setup of Vantage. Vantage is focusing on the passive infrastructure, everything that is linked with the passive infrastructure, the ancillary, search of the location, ancillary, tower, and so on, air conditioning, power, but is not linked with anything that is active. They don't provide us neither Open RAN, nor the 5G, nor the connectivity in the calling. We can agree with them in some specific cases when they are digging, for example, to bring the power to do in a synergic way to optimize the cost, the build of the fiber to connect that site. In this case, we can ask them to provide also the fiber, but we will remain the owner, and they will work on our behalf. Only in the case that the new sites have the opportunity to create synergies, deploying and digging for power and fiber. There is a demand that is coming from multiple operators that will be served in that passive infrastructure, and in this case, they can build in an optimal way, sharing the cost with multiple operators. The FTTS, fiber to the sites, or the microwaves are completely managed by the operators. How we manage it, that this was the first part of your questions, Vantage is part of our processes. We work in strictly contact with them, our deployment team, and we monitor the performance. Just for you to know, in one hour, I have a meeting with Vivek and the German team to see the progress of the German rollout in terms of new sites that they need to build to allow us to deploy the active part in the white spot areas. Thank you. Thank you very much, Alberto. Andrew, thanks for the question. Operator, next question, please. Thank you very much, Andrew. Our last question for today comes from James Ratzer from New Street. James, please go ahead. Yes, good afternoon. Thank you, Johan and team. Yeah, thank you for the presentation. I hope you can hear me okay. Question I really had to start with was just around your cable upgrade path, please. I think you set out a pretty clear path around the DOCSIS upgrade. In Gavin's presentation, he seemed to hint at the end that you left the possibility open that there might be an FTTB overlay option. I suppose I was just kind of going to question in what situations would you consider this? If you did, what might the CapEx implications be? In particular also with cable, is N +0 part of your plan for upgrade? If you move to DOCSIS 4, can we then start to move to this nirvana that's been talked about in cable where we can see set-top box costs coming down, and there's more intelligence centralized in the network? If I have a last question, maybe just to follow up, if possible, I think to one of the questions earlier from Nick Delfas around spectral efficiency and the propagation of Massive MIMO. I think in your presentation, Johan, you were showing that there's 3 to 4 times uplift on spectral efficiency with 5G. Could you talk about how you see that uplift across the radius of the cell? I'm particularly interested in what uplift you're seeing in spectral efficiency at the edge of the cell. Are you still seeing the same uplift there? If you are, then presumably there's no real need to have to densify the existing mobile grid. Thank you. Thank you very much, James. If I start with the second question, I'll take that one. Alberto, you get the cable upgrade cost. I know you're quite knowledgeable in these areas also, James. I think what you do on the cell site, and you have various frequency bands, is that you try to optimize in the cell on how you use the various frequency bands. You may have hundreds of customers in a cell, and you try to make sure that the customer that's far away gets served by the lower frequency bands, 700, 800, 900, and customers that are close served by the larger frequency bands, the higher up. It depends on how far the customer is and what the need is. The cell is trying to optimize, the schedule is trying to optimize how this is being served. Of course, the further away you are from the radio base station, you will have a weaker signal because there will be more interference, and the signal will get weaker. Hence, you will not have the same modulation on the signal, and you will lose some of the spectral efficiency in that. The radio base station is really good on analyzing each individual customer, where they are, what are the signal-to-noise ratios, what is the need, and then try to optimize it can serve different customers on the different spectrum bands at the same time. It end up in a very, very complex algorithm, and that's also part of how you really drive high performance there. That is also one of the key things, and I think that is where we have really good engineering skill set on how to configure and tune these things. This is also one very interesting area in Open RAN, where you have a special controller where you can actually do more tuning and optimization from the side. We put out the press release on this a couple of weeks back on some of the improvements we could achieve by using that RIC, as it's called. Sorry if I didn't give exact numbers, but there are so many it depends on. All these things actually drives the cost efficiency. Getting all of these things work together is how you get more data through in that same cell by combining all these different things. Alberto, over to you. Yes. Thanks, Johan, and thanks, James, for the question. As we mentioned already, we have a very flexible architecture that we have deployed in the markets, and we are continuing to deploy with the node split. Of course, we have an evolution over the coax in the access, but this opportunistically does not prevent us to deploy fiber where there is the economic return that is good for us. We can do this with the consortium on joint venture, depending on the commercial and the economics of the case. The fact that we have a network that is already fiberized up to a certain point, make this decision really very easy depending on the economics that are in front of us. Thank you, Alberto. Thank you very much, James. Nothing further. Can I just follow up on that, Alberto, if possible, just on the cable upgrade path. Is Network on Chip part of the plan? Do you see a world where cable set-top box CapEx can start to come down after you've then completed the, or made inroads into the DOCSIS 4 rollout? The set-top box CapEx, it's something that we are working in terms of design of the set-top box in a way that will reduce the cost. I do believe that it's a matter of time, but this will happen. We need to see and to combine with all the other features that are going to be deployed in the future. Thank you. Thank you very much, James, from the operator. That I think we are done. Yes, that's our last question. I'll hand back to you, Johan. Okay. I just want to say once again, thank you for taking time to listen to us. I hope it provided some value and insights in how we are thinking and working with things. Maybe say thank you to you, Alberto and Scott, for also helping me out. I wish you all a nice day. Thank you. Thank you very much. Goodbye.