Senza Fili Sparring Partners

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:

You can watch the video of this podcast and read the transcript on Sparring Partners' Substack

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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:

You can watch the video of this podcast and read the transcript on Sparring Partners’ Substack

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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:

You can watch the video of this podcast and read the transcript on Sparring Partners’ Substack

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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:

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

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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:

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:

You can watch the video of this podcast and read the transcript on Sparring Partners’ Substack

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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.

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:

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.

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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:

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

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6G has to be affordable and resilient, not just for the most advanced, high-GDP markets, but globally. This requires meeting a wide range of requirements, supporting the coexistence of multiple technologies, reducing the cost of providing connectivity, and making it affordable for all.

In this Sparring Partners, I talked with Mike Short, Chairman at UK Telecom Labs and AWTG, about what it will take to achieve these goals through:

Mike Short is also chairing the upcoming Cambridge Tech Week.

You can watch the video of this podcast on Sparring Partners on Substack

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