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

More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com

Sign up for the mailing list at https://senzafili.com/senza-fili-mailing-list/ to receive invitations to Sparring Partners events and updates on what we do.

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.

More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com

Sign up for the mailing list at https://senzafili.com/senza-fili-mailing-list/ to receive invitations to Sparring Partners events and updates on what we do.

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

More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com

Sign up for the mailing list at https://senzafili.com/senza-fili-mailing-list/ to receive invitations to Sparring Partners events and updates on what we do.

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

More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com

Sign up for the mailing list at https://senzafili.com/senza-fili-mailing-list/ to receive invitations to Sparring Partners events and updates on what we do.

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.

More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com

Sign up for the mailing list at https://senzafili.com/senza-fili-mailing-list/ to receive invitations to Sparring Partners events and updates on what we do.

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

More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com

Sign up for the mailing list at https://senzafili.com/senza-fili-mailing-list/ to receive invitations to Sparring Partners events and updates on what we do.

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:

More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com

Sign up for the mailing list at https://senzafili.com/senza-fili-mailing-list/ to receive invitations to Sparring Partners events and updates on what we do.

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.

More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com

Sign up for the mailing list at https://senzafili.com/senza-fili-mailing-list/ to receive invitations to Sparring Partners events and updates on what we do.

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/

More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com

Sign up for the mailing list at https://senzafili.com/senza-fili-mailing-list/ to receive invitations to Sparring Partners events and updates on what we do.

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.

More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com

Sign up for the mailing list at https://senzafili.com/senza-fili-mailing-list/ to receive invitations to Sparring Partners events and updates on what we do.