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:

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Integrating AI into the RAN is no longer a fanciful promise: it has become an unavoidable tool for managing complexity, increasing network efficiency, and reducing costs in an environment where revenues are stagnant.

Karsten Gaenger, Principal Product Line Manager for the RAN at NETSCOUT, outlines a strategy for integrating AI into the RAN, starting with traditional AI/ML models and gradually integrating LLMs and AI agents, assisting operators on their path to Layer 5 automation.

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.

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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.

Learn 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:

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