Afleveringen
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I have to admit: I got stumped while looking for a title. Gemini was also stumped and offered no helpful suggestions. I think this is because Chris Lewis at Lewis Insight and I took a very broad look at the current telco environment and tried to extrapolate where it is going, leveraging seven decades of combined life in telecoms, and openly talking about our hopes and our fears.
It felt like a cathartic experience, as Chris put it after we recorded it, and we left nothing untouched. And we went on a tangent about why mobile operators may want to be like FIFA, but they are unlikely to succeed. And that's a good thing.
We talked about Wi-Fi, enterprise, private networks, NTN, utilities, data centers, hyperscalers, 5G, 6G, AI, AI-generated traffic, monetization, IT, China, and the need for better storytelling and efficiency in telecom. And I certainly left out some other topics we covered.
You can watch the video of this podcast on Substack’s Sparring Partners. All content and subscriptions are free.
More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com
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Small cells have come of age. They are no longer the rebellious teenager on the fringe. They have reached a more mature stage, offering multiple complementary solutions to address insufficient coverage, capacity and reliability in indoor venues and dense outdoor environments. These are the locations where the macro infrastructure is not well-suited to provide both the performance and cost efficiency we need.
In this Sparring Partners, Simon Fletcher, CSO at the Small Cell Forum and CEO at Real Wireless, and I reflect on what we heard and talked about at the Small Cell Forum Summit, and how that fits into the evolution of small cells.
We covered a lot of ground:
Reliability, not just capacity, crucial for indoor coverageNeutral hosts and shared infrastructureSmall cells and macro cellsSmall cells and DASSmall cells and Wi-FiThe need for a new regulatory approachYou can watch the video of this podcast on Substack’s Sparring Partners. Subscriptions and content are free to all.
More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Clearly, we have not nailed down monetization in telecoms. After decades of double-digit CAGR, revenues have flattened or declined. 4G did not reverse the trend. 5G did not either. AI and 6G will likely be more of the same. Why is it so? And can we change it?
Faiq Khan offered an intriguing view on monetization, drawing from his work across different countries, with vendors and operators and, finally, at Rakuten, an operator with a distinctive approach to monetization. We talked about how in telecom, we focus more on technology than on its users, and what we can learn from other verticals and services:
Prioritizing business strategies over technology innovationLearning from coffee shops: Monetizing experiences, not connectivity.Capturing wallet share with airline-style loyalty plans.Developing skills to unlock non-telecom revenue streams.More on the topic in this report from Rakuten Symphony
You can watch the video of this podcast on Substack’s Sparring Partners. All content and subscriptions are free.
More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com
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AI promises higher efficiency, more automation and greater user experience. Yet it may also fail to scale or to deliver, or require more resources than it saves. How to get the good sides of AI and protect network operations from its challenges?
In this Sparring Partners, I talked with Rick Fulwiler, Senior Director Product Management at NETSCOUT, about how to make AI efficient through token reduction and how this is done primarily by curating the data to make sure the AI models and agents don’t get sidetracked or tempted to hallucinate.
Data curation is not just about selecting accurate data. It is about figuring out which data sources, and at what granularity, are relevant to the user's intent. In a way, this is an art steeped in human expertise, but it has to recognize that the data is used by AI rather than humans.
These are some of the highlights of our conversation:
Why AI struggles with traditional network KPIsPacket data versus alarms and dashboardsData curation reduces cost and improves accuracyAI agents need governance and transparencyMore from NETSCOUT
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AI and quantum can strengthen network security and resilience, but can also amplify vulnerabilities and expand the scope for security attacks. We need a new approach to cybersecurity in an era of geopolitical tensions, AI and quantum, and increased reliance on telecom networks to protect us.
In this Sparring Partners, I spoke with Caroline Chappell, a fellow independent analyst and founder of CC Squared, about how a holistic approach to derisking network infrastructure can improve security and resilience and create new services and revenue streams for operators.
Resiliency coming to the forefrontSecurity and resiliency as a unified strategy that works across network elements and servicesSovereign cloud and infrastructure tradeoffsPremium resiliency and security as revenue-generating enterprise servicesMore on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com
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In Sparring Partners, I try to track down hot topics. This episode does the opposite by exploring an issue that has quietly faded from industry awareness: CALEA and lawfulintercept. Nick Johnson, an independent telecom consultant and friend since his days at ip.access, and I discuss how attention has shifted toward encryption and privacy, perhaps too much so.
What is happening with wiretaps now that most traffic bypasses traditional carriers and goes through end-to-end encrypted apps?Does law enforcement have sufficient access to track down and prevent criminal activity?Is data extraction from end-user devices replacing traditional network-based intercepts?Will AI and quantum change how lawful intercept works and its effectiveness?If you want to know how the US government uses CALEA, check out the US Courts 2024 Wiretap Report.
Note: Nick mentioned the Mavenir acquisition of ip.access as happening in 2000, but he meant 2020.
More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com
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[This is a bonus episode sponsored by VIAVI Solutions]
As telco networks grow more complex, CSPs are under increasing pressure to turn AI from experimentation into measurable business value. AIOps has emerged as a critical foundation for autonomous networks, enabling operators to improve customer experience, reduce operational risk, and scale automation safely.
In this executive webinar, moderated by Monica Paolini, Senza Fili, Claro Colombia shares how it has operationalized AIOps with VIAVI and Iquall to align network operations with real customer impact across live environments.
The speakers share their market perspective on why AIOps is a strategic priority for telcos and present a production deployment showing how AI-driven, closed-loop operations deliver tangible customer experience and efficiency gains today.
Questions addressed:
Why is AIOps becoming the foundation for autonomous networks? How did Claro Colombia turned AI into safe, deterministic, and cost-efficient operations?How can we use network events to drive measurable customer and business impact, moving from reactive service operations center (SOC) models to AI-driven, closed-loop operations?How can CSPs pragmatically scale AI operations without operational risk?What lessons did Claro Colombia learn from a live AIOps deployment as they moved from reactive operations to scalable, AI-enabled autonomy?Speakers:
Fabian Aranda, AIOps Solution Architect at VIAVI Solutions
Carolina Garcés Zapata, Service Operations Center Manager at Claro Colombia
German Perez Trozzi, VP of Products & Marketing at Iquall Networks
Monica Paolini, Principal, Senza Fili
The transcript is available here
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I have devoted many Sparring Partners episodes to the AI models that live in data centers. In this one, Yue Wang, Chief Technologist at China Telecom, and I venture into the world of embodied intelligence and the shift it will create in our network infrastructure.
Drawing on Yue’s technical insights into physical AI, we explored how the need for high-capacity, low-latency, high-reliability, deterministic connectivity will shape the networks of the future, specifically with edge computing and network slicing in industrial environments.
We cannot afford to wait until 6G to meet the network and business requirements of physical AI. If 2026 is the year of agentic AI, 2027 is likely to be the year AI gets physical.
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Most Sparring Partners are about using AI to improve the network infrastructure. This one is about how networks enable new AI-driven applications that need connectivity to work.
I talked with Nigel Wallbridge, Director and Founder at Vivent Biosignals, on how biosensors on plants allow AI models to listen to plants to predict disease and stress, and help farmers to increase crop production and sustainability. It is a valuable application for farmers, but they need reliable connectivity to use it. This is an example of how AI is changing network requirements and may create new revenue sources for network operators.
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Being Italian, I thought I should have one of the country-focused podcasts on Italy. But what is something that sets Italy apart? Having spent more time there recently, I quickly came up with the answer: SPID (Sistema Pubblico di Identità Digitale), the Digital ID platform that not only works well and supports many services, but that also most Italians use. Other European countries have digital ID systems too, but except for Estonia, they are somewhat lagging behind. The US and UK don’t have anything quite like this.
I got another Italian, more knowledgeable than me on the topic and a previous guest on Sparring Partners, Dario Betti at MEF, to unpack SPID for the non-Italians out there. We talked about how SPID picked up speed, how it is evolving, what you can do with it, and compared SPID to digital ID systems in other countries. And we took the chance to boast a bit about our country, which does not happen too often.
Unfortunately, we had a few recording glitches, so there are a few brief silences while Dario speaks, but they do not disrupt the flow of the conversation. Sorry!
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Money alone does not drive innovation. You need people with passion, creativity, and talent to work together. You need collaboration. And to foster it.
In this Sparring Partners, I talked with Dimitra Simeonidou, Director of the Smart Internet Lab at the University of Bristol, and Chief Scientific Advisor at the European Commission, about her work, most recently with JOINER (Joint Open Infrastructure for Network Research), a UK initiative linking universities and industry to test networks, collaborate and innovate.
Dimitra is not your usual academic, narrowly focused on a narrow research domain and on writing grant requests and papers (I know to recognize them, because I was one of them). She has been working with industry and public agencies throughout her career, and has the determination to pull everybody together to encourage innovation and, more specifically, to strengthen the connection between research institutions and industry.
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My plan was to have a podcast on a 5G private network at the Rosslare Europort in Ireland. But this is not what this podcast is about. What our guest, Carl Coates, ICT Business Relationship Manager, at Irish Rail (the owner of the port), is doing at Rosslare is much broader, more ambitious and inspiring. It is more than a 5G mobile private network: it is a connectivity and sustainability project that is changing how people work, how the port collaborates with partners, and how it ensures its energy independence.
We covered a lot of ground and more use cases and applications than I can list here:
Network evolution from 4G to 5G, driven by low-latency, high reliability and security requirements, but also including a fiber backboneLearning lessons from the Vodafone 4G networkMeasurable (and measured) benefits of using applications such as mobile inventory of vehicles, ship-to-shore connectivity, emergency location services, push-to-talk, OCR, ANPR, LiDAR, aerial and underwater dronesUsing multimodal integration and standardized protocols and interfaces to share data and work with enterprise customers, rail, and other portsActive involvement of staff in driving the development and adoption of connectivity applicationsElectrification of the tug fleet and compliance with ship-to-shore power EU requirementsEstablishing energy sustainability and independence with an offshore wind facilityMore on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com
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We are ready to move beyond the traditional approach that treats antennas as passive, set-and-forget transducers. Until now, this lack of visibility has left operators unable to fine-tune or optimize the radiation layer, especially in real time. Digital antennas provide the visibility and control necessary to make the antenna an integral part of a closed-loop, AI-driven RAN.
In this Sparring Partners, I talk with Aleksis Anterow, CMO of Huawei’s Antenna Business Unit, about the essential role of digital antennas in increasing network sustainability, efficiency, and supporting new services.
Bridging the visibility gap: Establishing the ground truth needed to optimize RAN performance and user experience.Closing the loop: Moving from open-loop manual adjustments to real-time, automated antenna management.Initial lessons learned: China Mobile’s large-scale digital antenna deployments.Evolutionary adoption: How to gradually introduce digital antenna capabilities into existing mobile networks.Getting ready for 6G: Digital antennas as sensors for drone services and Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC).More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com
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What should we keep in the cloud and in the edge? Computationally intensive functionality will remain in the cloud, but more is shifting to the edge, driven by the higher efficiency of edge solutions and the need to keep more data and processing locally.
In this Sparring Partners, I talked to Manish Singh, Telecom Systems Business at Dell, about his perspective and vision for the edge, as the role and requirements of the edge evolve with AI, and on how to assess the edge/cloud tradeoffs.
Edge computing is not a one-size-fits-all solution: latency, power, cost, cooling, and security tradeoffsAI is reshaping both what networks do and where they do itMaking edge AI commercially viable with federated learning, lifecycle managementFrom manufacturing floors to retail shelves: how edge compute is reshaping operational efficiency across industriesMoving compute to the edge doesn't automatically mean more sustainable networksPhysical AI, AR glasses drive inferencing closer to the deviceLearn more on Dell PowerEdge here
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We have done it again! At the end of MWC, Sean Kinney Editor-in-Chief at RCR Wireless and I sat down to compare notes on what we had heard and seen at MWC, skipping announcements and keynotes, and reflecting on what we had seen and heard out of the limelight.
AI moving from demos into ops, the promise and pain of AI‑RAN, the evolution of open RAN, 6G, sensing, drones, and the industry's more realistic mood and expectations after the hype that dominated MWC 2025 are some of the topics we covered. And as always, it is a great pleasure to talk to Sean, and I hope you will enjoy listening to the podcast as much as I did recording it.
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Thousands of protesters were killed in Iran, and the world's attention moved on within days. It is a massive ethical failure, but hardly an isolated example of how social media is driving a culture of polarization, outrage, and misinformation. AI and pervasive connectivity amplify these trends, challenging the very survival of democracy, cohesion, and tolerance.
Siavash Alamouti, Cofounder at mimik and a Marconi Fellow, is back on Sparring Partners to discuss a topic that most would rather avoid, but one that we in telecom have the moral imperative to face. Most of us have worked for decades to build open networks that improve the lives of everybody. We are now finding that the technology and the networks we built are being used as weapons to destroy our culture, our values, and to cover up crimes. What should we do about it?
Content moderation and censorship are often proposed as solutions, but they fail to address the underlying structural problem. The real culprit is the underlying software architecture itself, and the algorithms that leverage fear, outrage, and division to generate profits. That is what we need to change. Siavash shares his insight into how we can use our technology and networks to strengthen social cohesion and democracy, without limiting freedom of speech.
Check out Siavash article The Architecture That Amplifies Authoritarians, Extremists, and Division
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In this second Sparring Partners with Philippe Ensarguet, VP Software Engineering and Orange Fellow at Orange, we talked about how human can remain relevant when AI is much better than us at crunching data, finding answers and running networks. Networks will change, but we have to change too. By 2030, human experts will no longer be knowledge providers and sense makers. They will have to learn to act as a wisdom compass.
We will all need to shift from accumulating knowledge towards using soft-skills, intuition, and strategic insight. We need to move from treating AI models as tools to making them our teammates. We need to learn-to-learn how to operate in a fundamentally new environment if we want to still matter—and have a job.
Dig deeper with Philippe’s Crafting our expertise slide deck or read his articles on LinkedIn
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India is one of the most fascinating wireless markets and not only because of its size and enthusiastic uptake of wireless connectivity to run most daily activities. India defies most of our deepest ingrained assumptions about how wireless technology should be deployed and marketed, and how to profit from it.
It turns out that despite extremely low ARPUs, initially fueled by aggressive competition, users in India have among the highest data consumption, and operators are profitable. Not only that, ARPUs are rising. Maybe there are lessons to be learned.
We should abandon our preconception of India as a low-revenue, slow-to-innovate, and somewhat boring market. Necessity to adapt to a tough environmental and economic environment has spurred a highly innovative approach to wireless services, that does not require advanced 5G services, VIP access, network slicing—all things for which we now know subscribers have little appetite for even in richer countries.
Our guide to the mesmerizing Indian wireless market is no other than Shiv Putcha, Director, Research and Consulting at GSMA Intelligence, who is based in India, but has spent a long time in the US (I know him since his days at Qualcomm in San Diego), so he has a broad perspective on the local market. We spent little time with the basic metrics of the Indian market and headed for the less advertised features that make India unique and an innovative model that can make us think differently about monetization.
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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.More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com
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