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Opinionated conversations in telecoms with Monica Paolini, Senza Fili, and her guests. Networks should be open, and so should our discussions on them.
86 Episodes
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The latest Sparring Partners delves into the meanders of EU regulation and its ambitious goal to unify telecommunications across the 27 member states with the recent the European Commission’s Digital Networks Act (DNA).
Richard Haas, Spectrum Policy Consultant at LS Telcom UK, graciously and patiently explains the complexity of the DNA so that even I could understand it. Not a small feat. Our discussion navigates the complexities of use-it-or-share-it spectrum provisions, the secondary market for spectrum, sharing arrangements, the shift toward unlimited license durations, and the peer-review process for national auctions. Will the DNA be a cure for market fragmentation and boost infrastructure investment, or add an extra layer to the already byzantine bureaucratic processes in EU countries? And how do these changes compare to spectrum allocation in countries such as the US and the UK?
More from Richard: Brussels may soon get the power to veto spectrum auctions — here’s what that means in practice
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Canada faces massive geographical challenges. As the second-largest country on Earth, with 80% of the population living along the southern border, operators must navigate a unique mix of dense urban centers and vast, rugged rural areas. How can Canadian telcos provide top-tier service without breaking the bank?
Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO Emeritus at TELUS and Executive Director at Guardian Safety Net takes us through a fascinating journey covering his career at the forefront of Canadian wireless evolution—from Nortel and Bell Northern Research to his long tenure leading technology at CTO at TELUS.
Topics covered:
The vastness challenge: How Canada built one of the world's most resilient networks despite its size.
Infrastructure sharing: Why collaboration is the key to balancing cost and coverage.
The future of innovation: Ibrahim's leading role in Open RAN adoption and the shift toward telco-led (rather than vendor-driven) technology.
The AI frontier: How artificial intelligence is being integrated into the current wireless landscape.
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Is Agentic AI the latest hype or a fundamental shift in how we run telco networks? Philippe Ensarguet, VP Software Engineering, Orange Fellow, Orange is a visionary believer of a rare lineage: he spent decades running large-scale mobile networks and knows what needs to be done and what can be done, but also has the technological insight into what AI and agentic AI can (and cannot) deliver.
In this Sparring Parters, Philippe goes beyond the vision and explains what AI agents can do today and in the long term, how they can interface with network APIs, and what safeguards we need against hallucinations and security threats and to develop trust.
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Backhaul and fronthaul (or xhaul) don’t get the attention they deserve. It is the RAN that gets most of the limelight, even though insufficient xhaul capacity is a deadly bottleneck. As we move to 5GSA, DU/CU splits and virtual RAN, we have more xhaul choices, but also we need to manage the xhaul more effectively to give the RAN the capacity and latency it now needs.
It was a pleasure to dissect the topic and look at how xhaul is evolving with Andy Sutton, BT Fellow & Principal Network Architect at BT Group, who has an extraordinary experience across multiple Gs, and he is now leading the Advanced RAN Coordination (ARC) project at BT. Despite the “RAN” in the acronym, the coordination requires a more sophisticated way to manage the xhaul to optimize RAN performance across cell sites and that is leading towards a cell-free architecture.
BT’s press release about ARC here:
https://newsroom.bt.com/ee-unlocks-next-gen-5g-performance-for-millions-with-world-first-technology/
The financial model on impact of backhaul/fronthaul on the Open RAN business case is here:
https://senzafili.com/publications/which-open-ran-is-best-for-you/
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The evolution of wireless networks from MIMO to M-MIMO and, finally, to GIGA MIMO is a fascinating story that tracks how a concept that initially few people believed could become a commercial reality has become a crucial technology for increasing the efficiency, performance, and availability of connectivity in cellular and Wi-Fi networks.
In this Sparring Partners with Zhang Jiong, RAN Marketing Director at ZTE, we look at this amazing story, starting not with cellular connectivity, but with an earlier form of wireless communications: the African talking drums used to send messages between villages. Listen to the conversation to find out what we can learn from the talking drums and where the future of MIMO will take us — think drones, reliability and security for critical communications, dense urban capacity, rural coverage, and more.
You can read the essay on African Talking Drums in Interfaces of the word by Walter Ong and Steve Pinker’s discussion of them in The language instinct.
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What do we need 6G for? In this conversation with Colby Harper, Founder and CEO at Pathfinder Wireless, we skip the argument over whether we need 6G to fix or improve on 5G, which is so boringly pervasive these days. Instead, we talk about how 6G can be a horizontal enabler for sharing connectivity across air interfaces and modalities, and for expanding connectivity options across verticals.
It helps to think of 6G as a new, intelligent plumbing for telecoms to lay the foundation for a sharing-native architecture, with timing intent, sensing, interfaces, and APIs among the critical building blocks.
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Technology moves fast, but marketing moves fast too, and possibly at a faster pace. AI, social media, and nonstop work demands have created an audience that is overwhelmed, distracted, and quick to tune out. How can we get our message across without compromising credibility? How do we keep our content relevant and engaging while avoiding flooding our channels with easy-to-generate content?
Not easy questions, but Kris Kozamchak, Principal at Chanan Communications, took on the challenge, and brilliantly and candidly addressed them, touching on many aspects that often don’t get the attention they deserve and giving advice on how to maintain relevance in a shallow, fast-paced digital environment.
If you feel you are shouting into the void, you are not alone.
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In the second Sparring Partners on what we can learn from a country, I spoke with Philip Marnick, General Director at the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, about Bahrain. It is a small country, but with much to learn from. It is at the forefront of innovation, but without price hikes. In Bahrain, you get top connectivity at affordable prices. What is the secret sauce to doing that?
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We all want to make wireless networks more energy efficient and sustainable. But how do we measure the progress, and how do we know we are taking the right steps? Not so easy.
Emanuel Kolta, Lead Analyst at GSMA Intelligence, has been working on the complexities of measuring and improving energy efficiency. It is a very challenging yet intellectually fascinating area that has become even more urgent due to rising energy costs and supply uncertainties.
How do we reduce energy consumption as reliability and performance requirements, and traffic grow? What's the best way to increase renewable energy sources? How should we measure energy efficiency across different geographies, demography mixes, networks, and services?
There is enough to cover to keep us busy for a full-day discussion, but we managed to distill all in this half-hour Sparring Partners podcast.
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FWA is one of the bright spots of 5G, especially in the US. But how well does it work for users? What are the scenarios where FWA is most beneficial to users and cost-effective for service providers? How much competition in terms of price and performance comes from satellite? And while, other things being equal, fiber is the best fixed broadband technology for residential users, do most households really need it (or do they just think they do)?
Mike Dano, who recently moved to Ookla as a Lead Industry Analyst, has recently done extensive research on FWA, looking at performance, availability, usage and operator strategies, so he was able to present an excellent 360-degree view of FWA, and he also told us what he is up to at his new job.
If you want to dig deeper, this is Mike’s article we talked about.
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This is the first episode of a Sparring Partners thread on what makes a country special and what we can learn from it. I will be speaking with someone who lives in that country and can share insights that go beyond the usual statistics and market forecasts, revealing things we do not know or expect.
Since I got the idea for this while chatting with Ignacio Perrone at Frost & Sullivan, and a Professor, School of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires, as we were talking about Argentina and comparing it to other countries, it is only fitting that he is the first guest in the “What’s special” thread.
Ignacio and I had an engaging conversation, and you will learn a lot about how people in Argentina use mobile networks, especially if, like me, you have never been to the country or have not been there recently.
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This is the title of a report from Telesemana that was the starting point of my conversation with Rafael Junquera, Editorial Director at Telesemana. We went back to what telecom was 20+ years ago and eventually arrived at the present, tracking the transition from explosive growth to a mature revenue environment and the impressive progress in technology and societal benefits that continues unabated.
What does this tell us about the revenue potential of the new D2D services? Will the increasing competition among satellite operators drive down revenues, as happened in cellular networks? How could satellite operators avoid this fate? Value-added services may help, but how should they price them? Should it be based on the cost to provide a service or its perceived value? Can AI help them in charting this territory?
You can get Rafa’s report here.
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Wireless sensing is an emerging technology with great potential, but it is still in its early stages of development. Fiber sensing is a more mature technology that, surprisingly, has been used mostly outside of telecoms for a long time, and only recently has made its way into protecting telecom assets. Network operators may also use it to offer new revenue-generating services.
I spoke with Andres Chavarria, Fiber Sensing Market Development Manager at VIAVI Solutions, about how fiber sensing works, where it has been used in the past, how network operators can benefit from it in their operations and service offerings.
Fiber sensing has attracted more attention recently because it can reduce the cost and disruption caused by accidental or intentional damage to subsea cables. As we become increasingly dependent on global connectivity and geopolitical tensions rise, protecting subsea cables has become a top priority.
There are many other use cases for fiber sensing, and we covered only some of them, but you will get a sense of how useful (and sadly underutilized) fiber sensing is. And we should expect its adoption in telecom to expand soon.
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Adrian Scrase, independent consultant at EA Consult Services, has been deeply involved in the evolution of wireless standards throughout many Gs at ETSI and, as you may expect, is now working on the evolution to 6G. What can we learn from 3G, 4G and 5G, to avoid the mistakes of the past? How can we find a sustainable innovation trajectory that is grounded in realistic expectations for what new technology can deliver, how much operators can invest, and how much subscribers are willing to pay? Will we be able to avoid the inflated expectations that plagued 5G?
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This is a podcast I recorded with Claudia Bacco Editor-in-Chief at Global Airspace Radar on what I learned about drones during a recent trip to China for the Huawei analyst event.
This is the description of the podcast, “Telecommunications supporting drones, with a twist”:
Monica Paolini, Principal, Senza Fili, joined our editor-in-chief Claudia Bacco to discuss telecommunications supporting drones. A twist is mentioned in the title and the twist is the view from China. Having just returned from a trip to China, Monica shares insights from visiting China Telecom including their drone program. The twist goes further in that the telecommunications company is leading the effort to test drone flights as opposed to the regional air traffic control organisation being in the lead. Certainly different than what we’re seeing in Europe and the US.
We also dug deeper into the use of spectrum and the mobile infrastructure in this endeavour, what can be re-used, what needs to be changed/enhanced. Join us in the discussion which leans more toward the telecommunication part of the equation.
More on Global Airspace Radar at https://globalairspaceradar.com/
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Wireless security is becoming increasingly challenging to manage due to growing geopolitical tensions, the rise of sophisticated tools and profitable targets, and the potential for AI to make attacks easier and more effective.
In this conversation with Silke Holtmanns, Telecommunication Security Expert at Blue Hour Consulting Oy, we delve beyond the stats to discuss how operators manage wireless security and how they can enhance their effectiveness in preventing or dealing with attacks. Silke has hands-on experience from her work with operators and gives us the insider perspective. We covered the fake small cells from South Korea’s KT network, the SIM farm attack in New York (possibly overhyped for political reasons by the FBI), censorship and security tradeoffs, the non-technological security risks, the impact of APIs and AI on security, spear phishing, and the role of regulation.
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AI will have a transformative impact across all elements in telecom networks, and that includes transport. Yet, most of the attention these days is on the RAN, the core and data center infrastructure.
In this conversation with Kristian Toivo, Executive Director at TIP, we tried to remedy this and focused on how AI is changing the transport requirements and how the ecosystem and infrastructure will have to evolve to meet them. As AI gets integrated into our networks, data center distribution and data transfer requirements will have a major impact on the transport infrastructure, as well as monetization strategies of service providers.
You can find out more about TIP’s activities on transport here or, even better, attend FYUZ 2025 in Dublin on November 3-5.
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AI is everywhere, RAN included. But many questions remain. What role does it take within the RAN? Where can it help and how? How do we transition from an initial, limited use of AI, to reach L4 automation with a native-AI RAN?
Nirlay Kundu, Head of Technology Standards, IMDEA Networks Institute, explores all these topics and more, combining the experience from his work at Verizon in the US and the research he is currently doing at IMDEA in Spain. Plus, we discussed the implications of AI in accountability, the evolving role of humans and agents in refining the job of the underlying models.
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CBRS is gaining traction in industrial and, a bit more slowly, in enterprise networks and some of the complexity and limitations of the initial CBRS have been addressed. Yet, recently, we have seen attempts to turn CBRS into another full-power licensed band. This would give mobile operators exclusive access to the spectrum, as they do with other cellular licensed bands, and enterprises would no longer be able to use the spectrum without arrangements with mobile operators.
Dave Wright has been working on CBRS from the very beginning and was at the helm of the OnGo Alliance for a long time, and he continues to work on it at Salt Point Strategies and Spectrum for the Future. He gave an in-depth overview of how we got to today’s CBRS and what to expect in the future. We also talked about dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) and how to strike a balance among licensed, license-exempt and dynamic shared spectrum.
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Not everybody working in telecom is an engineer. For one, I am not (my college degree is in Philosophy, and my PhD is in Cognitive Science/Neuroscience), and I believe that this was an advantage as it allowed me initially to look at the technology from the outside.
In this discussion with Linda Ligios, Principal Innovation Solutions Consultant at Digital Catapult (spoiler: she is also not an engineer), we talked about how a non-telecom background may be an asset, especially in the age of AI and especially for women (who are more likely to come from a non-engineering background). What are the challenges and benefits for those with a non-telecom background and for the organization hiring them? How should you plan for a telecom career if you don't have a technical background? Any differences between the US and Europe? (Spoiler two: You can learn about technology even without a college degree or formal education in technology)
Linda works at Digital Catapult, which, as we discussed, is an organization that is powerful in nurturing the UK's telecom community. However, Digital Catapult’s primary role is to accelerate the practical application of deep tech in the UK, and its work is outstanding.
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