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:

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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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