Kanchana Kanchanasut: Thank you. You know, I was very sur­prised to receive this recog­ni­tion. However, once I received the news I became so hap­py. Not just for myself but for all my Thai col­leagues who worked togeth­er with me in bring­ing the Internet to Thailand. It’s not just me. And I think my expe­ri­ences may be very sim­i­lar to Gihan Dias and to oth­er South American [?]. And so I will not repeat that. Instead, I would like to briefly talk to you about what I had to go through play­ing this pio­neer­ing role in a devel­op­ing country.

The most dif­fi­cult thing was in order to get involved in this type of activ­i­ty, we need­ed to get finance. We need­ed to get fund­ing. And for us, it was very dif­fi­cult because our gov­ern­ment would not under­stand what we want­ed to do. The tel­cos would not let us touch their equip­ment. So that was our first task. And once you over­come that, we had to start find­ing peo­ple, stu­dents, and we had to try to train our engi­neers. And for this I received a lot of help from a lot of my friends in [SRC?] and APNIC. And I real­ly want to thank them here as well. 

Apart from that, after train­ing all these peo­ple, all the engi­neers and get­ting ready for the net­work expan­sion, we had to come across a lot of prob­lems with pol­i­cy­mak­ers and gov­ern­ment in order to— We need­ed to always try to strike for a bal­ance, whether the mul­ti­stake­hold­er mod­el is going too far or the oth­er way around. So, we are a kind of peo­ple in the mid­dle that tried to bal­ance these two pow­ers. And this recog­ni­tion may help me and my team to do a bet­ter job in this role. Thank you.