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Resilience comes up in almost every conversation about networks, yet we rarely say what we mean by it. It is not a metric like latency or capacity. It is a set of trade-offs across subsea cables, power, supply chains, legacy networks and cybersecurity – and it costs money that operators under strong price competition struggle to find. In this Sparring Partners podcast, I speak with Sophie Greaves, Associate Director for Digital Infrastructure at techUK, where she leads the telecoms, data centers and spectrum policy work. Sophie argues that once telecoms resilience becomes national resilience, government has to step in.  This is what we talked about: Resilience and security trade-offs Retiring legacy networks makes them more resilient, not less Who pays: lessons from Scandinavia and Japan Has price competition left too little for resilience? Power: the dependency (and the cost) that telcos do not control You can watch the video of this podcast and read the transcript on Sparring Partners’ Substack More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com

This time I am the guest, not the host. Lorenzo Paletti invited me to Tutto Connesso, the Politecnico di Milano podcast, to talk about technological sovereignty and 6G with Antonio Capone at Politecnico di Milano. Everybody talks about sovereignty, but everybody means something different. In the US, the word hardly comes up. In Europe, it often becomes a call to manufacture everything locally, which won't work. We cannot replicate the supply chain, or OpenAI and Anthropic, and we would fall behind if we tried. In this conversation with Lorenzo Paletti host of Tutto Connesso and Antonio Capone, Professor of Telecommunications at Politecnico di Milano, I argue that sovereignty means choice, flexibility and visibility into our networks. We covered: Why sovereignty is not autarky Why excluding vendors gives a false sense of security What Europe can learn from ASML, and why its companies sell out when they need to scale How open interfaces, open source and 6G give operators visibility and control You can watch the video of this podcast and read the transcript on Sparring Partners' Substack More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com

Physical AI has been a demo thing for the last few years. It is no longer. Robots that work in teams, drones that need to be told apart from birds, ports and mines that run on sensors: none of them can wait for a round trip to a data center in the middle of nowhere. AI is not leaving the data center, but it is taking an apartment closer to the edge. In this Sparring Partners podcast, I speak with Sameh Yamany, Chief Technology and AI Officer at VIAVI Solutions, about what edge AI needs to support physical AI, and what that means for operators. Here is what we covered:   Why physical AI needs network, compute and AI at the edge Edge AI is like a CDN, but you cannot buffer your way out of latency Where physical AI is already real: mining, ports, critical infrastructure Why standalone 5G matters, and why Asia is moving faster From minutes to data to edge AI: a new way for operators to monetize the network You can watch the video of this podcast and read the transcript on Sparring Partners’ Substack More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com

Nobody wants data centers near where they live: they use too much power, they bring few jobs, and they are tied to an AI that many people do not understand and fear. Yet we will use AI, and we need data centers to run it. The question is not whether we build them, but where and who gets to decide. In this Sparring Partners podcast, I speak with Mike O’Rielly, Principal at MPORielly Consulting and FCC Commissioner from 2013 to 2020, after 20 years working on tech and telecom policy on Capitol Hill.   Mike argues that hyperscalers are losing the PR war to political pressure. As usual, our conversation ranged widely: Why a moratorium on data centers only delays the problem Empty factories as data center sites Should operators build their own data centers? Why AI regulation in Washington is stuck Satellite as the fourth mobile network: Dish all over again? Renewables: the US fight is over subsidies Latency: most data centers can go almost anywhere AI may not push traffic or uplink up as much as feared Open versus closed AI models: we need both You can watch the video of this podcast and read the transcript on Sparring Partners’ Substack More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com

For years, the assumption in the US – and not just in the US – was that broadband means fiber, and anything else is second class. In rural areas, that assumption is running into two hard limits: the cost per passing keeps rising as density falls, and Starlink and Amazon Leo now set the price and speed baseline in the hardest-to-reach locations. In Sparring Partners, I speak with Claude Aiken, Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Legal Officer at Nextlink Internet, a rural operator that runs fiber, fixed wireless and mobile across 12 states. Claude was previously President and CEO of WISPA and spent a decade at the FCC, so he has seen rural broadband from the operator, industry and regulator sides. We don't agree on everything, but we agree that headline speed is the wrong thing to chase. Here is what we covered: Why the US chose facilities-based competition, and what it costs How LEO turned a geography problem into a capacity and economics problem Where fiber, fixed wireless and satellite make sense and where subsidizing fiber is no longer a financially sensible option Why reliability, price and service matter more to subscribers than gigabit speeds Whether mobile can replace fixed broadband in rural areas Whether connectivity should be treated as a right You can follow Claude on his new Substack, Deployment Capital. Highly recommended. You can watch the video of this podcast and read the transcript on Sparring Partners’ Substack More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com  

Does Open RAN need further opening? Can open-source facilitate and accelerate the adoption of Open RAN? Yes and yes. The OCUDU project was established on these premises to address common challenges that Open RAN deployments face. In Sparring Partners, I speak with Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking, Edge, and IoT at The Linux Foundation, about how we need to move beyond open interfaces (which remain an essential starting point) to open-source RAN platforms that OCUDU builds with open-source software. You may already know this, but Arpit went further and explained what specifically OCUDU does that was missing: Help open the CU and DU Deepen vendor disaggregation Create a more efficient and accessible testing platform Smooth the path to 6G Facilitate the adoption of agentic AI and transition to autonomous networks

Private networks sound such a good idea. There is a clear need for venues and enterprises to have better on-premises connectivity to support their operations and services. They can augment much-needed indoor connectivity, which today is mostly provided by Wi-Fi. Yet, deployments are only slowly taking off, and that’s the case across geographies. Do we have the technology? Yes. Are they too expensive to deploy? No. So what’s holding us back? Mostly the business models, the (real or perceived) complexity for enterprises to deploy them, and regulatory frameworks geared toward cellular networks owned and run by mobile operators. In this Sparring Partners, I spoke with Maria Lema, Founder and CEO of Weaver Labs, who addresses these issues from the assumption that a private network should be viewed as a strategic investment for the venue or enterprise. Once you accept that, many other pieces fall into place. Listen to the conversation, as I do not want to spoil it, but these are some topics we covered: Sharing the infrastructure, without a neutral-host model Business models, stadiums and beyond Digital real estate Cloud orchestration You can watch the video of this podcast and read the transcript on Sparring Partners’ Substack More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com

I don’t think I am the only one annoyed by the homogenization of content, driven by a combination of social media, reduced attention spans, AI and human slop, and strict PR and corporate messaging policies. The side effect of this is that in-person human interaction is becoming more valuable and worth cultivating. This is why I invited Keith Dyer at The Mobile Network to talk about this on Sparring Partners. He has launched a new in-person conference with a format that puts attendee interaction at the forefront. In our conversation, we discussed how industry events have evolved as we become submerged in (and want to avoid) repetitive, shallow content increasingly generated or over-edited by AI. How to preserve independent and diverse views at events and more generally in the published content How to make events more interactive and more valuable to those attending them How should we think of genuine connections beyond traditional metrics Mentions: Check out Keith’s next event on NTN and Sparring Partners in-person meetings You can watch the video of this podcast and read the transcript on Sparring Partners’ Substack

Physical AI can impress us with an outstanding performance that rivals or surpasses human capabilities in a few tasks. Over time, AI-driven robots, drones and other devices will expand the range of tasks they can perform with accuracy, reliability and cost- and energy-efficiency. But to achieve this, they need levels of latency, reliability and security that today’s public networks do not support. For many use cases, physical AI will need a private network infrastructure that may or may not be managed by mobile operators. In most countries, mobile operators will not be the main infrastructure players. I sat down with Gianluca Verin, CEO and Co-Founder of Apeiroon, to examine how we should plan and operate mobile networks to successfully and safely operate physical AI in the real world at scale. Gianluca has accumulated in-depth, practical experience on private networks for a long time since he started Athonet, and explains why many physical AI use cases require dedicated, deterministic, edge connectivity, and why centralized cloud architectures are not sufficient: How to think about network requirements as physical AI gets deployed Edge AI, mobile AI, mobile AI bubbles as the foundation for scalable physical AI deployments Physical AI innovation in Europe versus USA: An opportunity that Europe cannot afford to lose To sum it all up, Gianluca said: "A stationary robot is an IT problem. A moving robot is a network problem." To go deeper, check the white paper that Gianluca mentions. And if you want to find out where Apeiroon comes from, see Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander and the nature of science, it is a beautiful and beautifully written short book. You can watch the video of this podcast and read the transcript on Sparring Partners on Substack or listen to it on your podcast platform. More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com

Innovation in Europe (including the UK) is routinely presented as suffering from all sorts of limitations, with funding and excessive regulation as the top culprits. Yes, things could be much better, but there is, and continues to be, a strong record of innovation in Europe. In this Sparring Partners, Rupert Baines, serial entrepreneur, now working with RANsemi, Forefront RF, Luffy AI, Semiconductor Catapult, UKESF and more, argues (and I agree with him) that Europe lacks the ambition to leverage its talent and resources to the extent that they deserve: What is Europe doing right in deep tech? Injecting serendipity to promote technology clusters Encouraging late-stage venture funding to encourage organic growth instead of early sales Balancing the requirements and tradeoffs of sovereignty, openness, and international collaboration You can watch the video of this podcast and read the transcript on Sparring Partners on Substack or listen to it on your podcast platform. In our conversation, we mention a previous podcast with David Cleevely and one with Mike Short, previous guests of Sparring Partners. You can listen to the podcasts on Sparring Partners too. Other links: Rupert's interview, Arthur Mensch, Mistral CEO, interview in The Economist, and Cambridge Tech Week More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com