Senza Fili Sparring Partners

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.
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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:
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
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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:
Multi-technology approaches, including Wi-Fi and satellite
Network sharing, neutral hosts and private networks
New approaches to regulation and cooperation
Designing networks for resiliency and redundancy
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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The mobile market is maturing as a vertical, limiting new revenue opportunities, but technological innovation also creates opportunities to improve network efficiency and capabilities (while increasing complexity, however).
In this Sparring Partners, I talked with Itsuma Tanaka, CEO of Docomo Euro-Labs, about how MNOs in Japan and elsewhere are changing in response to user expectations, new competition and new technology.
Among the topics we discussed:
The role of basic connectivity and new services that expand it
AI optimization, satellite, ISAC
Different impact of geopolitical environment in Japan, Europe and the US
Reducing network complexity to facilitate adoption of new technologies
You can watch the video of this podcast on Sparring Partners on Substack
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We all know that most traffic (80% or even more) comes from indoors and most of it goes through Wi-Fi (another 80%). This means that cellular is not doing very well indoors, which is something we experience all the time. Yet, reliable data on how bad indoor coverage is has been hard to get.
Luke Kehoe, Lead Analyst at Ookla, has embarked on a project to measure indoor connectivity accurately and has done so in London, Berlin and New York. In this Sparring Partners, we discuss the methodology, the results and the implications of the research. Not surprisingly, the results confirm that, yes, indoor coverage is poor, but possibly even poorer than we (or at least I) would have guessed. It is not a name-and-shame exercise though (spoiler: London does not come out too well), because the reasons and the distribution of bad indoor coverage vary across locations and reveal a diverse set of challenges and ways to deal with them.
But I won’t say more. This is a discussion packed with new information and food for thought, so watch or listen to it.
You can watch the video of this podcast on Sparring Partners on Substack
Read Luke’s article on his preliminary results here.

AI is power hungry. The token economy is both a necessity to allocate limited resources and monetize AI, but also imposes constraints on its adoption. What’s the solution to this?
In this Sparring Partners, Julio Gonzalez-Saenz, AI Champion at Vodafone UK, makes the case for quantum as a technology that allows us to scale the adoption of AI by reducing its computational and power requirements and limiting token-economy bottlenecks.
The contribution of quantum in telecom networks:
Optimize use of data center resources
Overcome AI token anxiety
Reduce GPU requirements
Create new real-world use cases for AI
Reduce energy consumption
You can watch the video of this podcast on Sparring Partners on Substack
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We know that AI models need high-quality, reliable data to produce good outcomes. But do operators have access to the data and can share it across vendors? Do we have the standards in place to facilitate this, and are they sufficient to share data reliably?
In this episode of Sparring Partners, Paul Patras, CEO and Co-founder of NetAI and Professor of Mobile Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, works on these issues on a daily basis and takes us through how shared and synthetic data and standards are essential to effective AI deployment in the telco networks, and what to do when the necessary is not accessible.
What we talked about:
Why is it difficult and yet necessary to share data
Standards are crucial, but not sufficient
Collaboration within the ecosystem is crucial to success
Digital twins and synthetic data are a valuable complement to network data
 
You can watch the video of this podcast on Sparring Partners on Substack
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I have to admit: I got stumped while looking for a title. Gemini was also stumped and offered no helpful suggestions. I think this is because Chris Lewis at Lewis Insight and I took a very broad look at the current telco environment and tried to extrapolate where it is going, leveraging seven decades of combined life in telecoms, and openly talking about our hopes and our fears.
It felt like a cathartic experience, as Chris put it after we recorded it, and we left nothing untouched. And we went on a tangent about why mobile operators may want to be like FIFA, but they are unlikely to succeed. And that's a good thing.
We talked about Wi-Fi, enterprise, private networks, NTN, utilities, data centers, hyperscalers, 5G, 6G, AI, AI-generated traffic, monetization, IT, China, and the need for better storytelling and efficiency in telecom. And I certainly left out some other topics we covered.
You can watch the video of this podcast on Substack’s Sparring Partners. All content and subscriptions are free.
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Small cells have come of age. They are no longer the rebellious teenager on the fringe. They have reached a more mature stage, offering multiple complementary solutions to address insufficient coverage, capacity and reliability in indoor venues and dense outdoor environments. These are the locations where the macro infrastructure is not well-suited to provide both the performance and cost efficiency we need.
In this Sparring Partners, Simon Fletcher, CSO at the Small Cell Forum and CEO at Real Wireless, and I reflect on what we heard and talked about at the Small Cell Forum Summit, and how that fits into the evolution of small cells.
We covered a lot of ground:
Reliability, not just capacity, crucial for indoor coverage
Neutral hosts and shared infrastructure
Small cells and macro cells
Small cells and DAS
Small cells and Wi-Fi
The need for a new regulatory approach
You can watch the video of this podcast on Substack’s Sparring Partners. Subscriptions and content are free to all.
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Clearly, we have not nailed down monetization in telecoms. After decades of double-digit CAGR, revenues have flattened or declined. 4G did not reverse the trend. 5G did not either. AI and 6G will likely be more of the same. Why is it so? And can we change it?
Faiq Khan offered an intriguing view on monetization, drawing from his work across different countries, with vendors and operators and, finally, at Rakuten, an operator with a distinctive approach to monetization. We talked about how in telecom, we focus more on technology than on its users, and what we can learn from other verticals and services:
Prioritizing business strategies over technology innovation
Learning from coffee shops: Monetizing experiences, not connectivity.
Capturing wallet share with airline-style loyalty plans.
Developing skills to unlock non-telecom revenue streams.
More on the topic in this report from Rakuten Symphony
You can watch the video of this podcast on Substack’s Sparring Partners. All content and subscriptions are free.
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AI promises higher efficiency, more automation and greater user experience. Yet it may also fail to scale or to deliver, or require more resources than it saves. How to get the good sides of AI and protect network operations from its challenges?
In this Sparring Partners, I talked with Rick Fulwiler, Senior Director Product Management at NETSCOUT, about how to make AI efficient through token reduction and how this is done primarily by curating the data to make sure the AI models and agents don’t get sidetracked or tempted to hallucinate.
Data curation is not just about selecting accurate data. It is about figuring out which data sources, and at what granularity, are relevant to the user's intent. In a way, this is an art steeped in human expertise, but it has to recognize that the data is used by AI rather than humans.
These are some of the highlights of our conversation:
Why AI struggles with traditional network KPIs
Packet data versus alarms and dashboards
Data curation reduces cost and improves accuracy
AI agents need governance and transparency
More from NETSCOUT
 
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AI and quantum can strengthen network security and resilience, but can also amplify vulnerabilities and expand the scope for security attacks. We need a new approach to cybersecurity in an era of geopolitical tensions, AI and quantum, and increased reliance on telecom networks to protect us.
In this Sparring Partners, I spoke with Caroline Chappell, a fellow independent analyst and founder of CC Squared, about how a holistic approach to derisking network infrastructure can improve security and resilience and create new services and revenue streams for operators.
Resiliency coming to the forefront
Security and resiliency as a unified strategy that works across network elements and services
Sovereign cloud and infrastructure tradeoffs
Premium resiliency and security as revenue-generating enterprise services
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In Sparring Partners, I try to track down hot topics. This episode does the opposite by exploring an issue that has quietly faded from industry awareness: CALEA and lawfulintercept. Nick Johnson, an independent telecom consultant and friend since his days at ip.access, and I discuss how attention has shifted toward encryption and privacy, perhaps too much so.
What is happening with wiretaps now that most traffic bypasses traditional carriers and goes through end-to-end encrypted apps?
Does law enforcement have sufficient access to track down and prevent criminal activity?
Is data extraction from end-user devices replacing traditional network-based intercepts?
Will AI and quantum change how lawful intercept works and its effectiveness?
 
If you want to know how the US government uses CALEA, check out the US Courts 2024 Wiretap Report.
Note: Nick mentioned the Mavenir acquisition of ip.access as happening in 2000, but he meant 2020.
 
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[This is a bonus episode sponsored by VIAVI Solutions]
As telco networks grow more complex, CSPs are under increasing pressure to turn AI from experimentation into measurable business value. AIOps has emerged as a critical foundation for autonomous networks, enabling operators to improve customer experience, reduce operational risk, and scale automation safely. 
In this executive webinar, moderated by Monica Paolini, Senza Fili, Claro Colombia shares how it has operationalized AIOps with VIAVI and Iquall to align network operations with real customer impact across live environments.
The speakers share their market perspective on why AIOps is a strategic priority for telcos and present a production deployment showing how AI-driven, closed-loop operations deliver tangible customer experience and efficiency gains today. 
Questions addressed:
Why is AIOps becoming the foundation for autonomous networks? 
How did Claro Colombia turned AI into safe, deterministic, and cost-efficient operations?
How can we use network events to drive measurable customer and business impact, moving from reactive service operations center (SOC) models to AI-driven, closed-loop operations?
How can CSPs pragmatically scale AI operations without operational risk?
What lessons did Claro Colombia learn from a live AIOps deployment as they moved from reactive operations to scalable, AI-enabled autonomy?
 
Speakers:
Fabian Aranda, AIOps Solution Architect at VIAVI Solutions
Carolina Garcés Zapata, Service Operations Center Manager at Claro Colombia
German Perez Trozzi, VP of Products & Marketing at Iquall Networks
Monica Paolini, Principal, Senza Fili
 
The transcript is available here
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I have devoted many Sparring Partners episodes to the AI models that live in data centers. In this one, Yue Wang, Chief Technologist at China Telecom, and I venture into the world of embodied intelligence and the shift it will create in our network infrastructure.
Drawing on Yue’s technical insights into physical AI, we explored how the need for high-capacity, low-latency, high-reliability, deterministic connectivity will shape the networks of the future, specifically with edge computing and network slicing in industrial environments.
We cannot afford to wait until 6G to meet the network and business requirements of physical AI. If 2026 is the year of agentic AI, 2027 is likely to be the year AI gets physical.
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Most Sparring Partners are about using AI to improve the network infrastructure. This one is about how networks enable new AI-driven applications that need connectivity to work.
I talked with Nigel Wallbridge, Director and Founder at Vivent Biosignals, on how biosensors on plants allow AI models to listen to plants to predict disease and stress, and help farmers to increase crop production and sustainability. It is a valuable application for farmers, but they need reliable connectivity to use it. This is an example of how AI is changing network requirements and may create new revenue sources for network operators.
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Being Italian, I thought I should have one of the country-focused podcasts on Italy. But what is something that sets Italy apart? Having spent more time there recently, I quickly came up with the answer: SPID (Sistema Pubblico di Identità Digitale), the Digital ID platform that not only works well and supports many services, but that also most Italians use. Other European countries have digital ID systems too, but except for Estonia, they are somewhat lagging behind. The US and UK don’t have anything quite like this.
I got another Italian, more knowledgeable than me on the topic and a previous guest on Sparring Partners, Dario Betti at MEF, to unpack SPID for the non-Italians out there. We talked about how SPID picked up speed, how it is evolving, what you can do with it, and compared SPID to digital ID systems in other countries. And we took the chance to boast a bit about our country, which does not happen too often.
Unfortunately, we had a few recording glitches, so there are a few brief silences while Dario speaks, but they do not disrupt the flow of the conversation. Sorry!
 
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Money alone does not drive innovation. You need people with passion, creativity, and talent to work together. You need collaboration. And to foster it.
In this Sparring Partners, I talked with Dimitra Simeonidou, Director of the Smart Internet Lab at the University of Bristol, and Chief Scientific Advisor at the European Commission, about her work, most recently with JOINER (Joint Open Infrastructure for Network Research), a UK initiative linking universities and industry to test networks, collaborate and innovate.
Dimitra is not your usual academic, narrowly focused on a narrow research domain and on writing grant requests and papers (I know to recognize them, because I was one of them). She has been working with industry and public agencies throughout her career, and has the determination to pull everybody together to encourage innovation and, more specifically, to strengthen the connection between research institutions and industry.
 
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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:
Network evolution from 4G to 5G, driven by low-latency, high reliability and security requirements, but also including a fiber backbone
Learning lessons from the Vodafone 4G network
Measurable (and measured) benefits of using applications such as mobile inventory of vehicles, ship-to-shore connectivity, emergency location services, push-to-talk, OCR, ANPR, LiDAR, aerial and underwater drones
Using multimodal integration and standardized protocols and interfaces to share data and work with enterprise customers, rail, and other ports
Active involvement of staff in driving the development and adoption of connectivity applications
Electrification of the tug fleet and compliance with ship-to-shore power EU requirements
Establishing energy sustainability and independence with an offshore wind facility
 
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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.
Bridging the visibility gap: Establishing the ground truth needed to optimize RAN performance and user experience.
Closing the loop: Moving from open-loop manual adjustments to real-time, automated antenna management.
Initial lessons learned: China Mobile’s large-scale digital antenna deployments.
Evolutionary adoption: How to gradually introduce digital antenna capabilities into existing mobile networks.
Getting ready for 6G: Digital antennas as sensors for drone services and Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC).
 
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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.
Edge computing is not a one-size-fits-all solution: latency, power, cost, cooling, and security tradeoffs
AI is reshaping both what networks do and where they do it
Making edge AI commercially viable with federated learning, lifecycle management
From manufacturing floors to retail shelves: how edge compute is reshaping operational efficiency across industries
Moving compute to the edge doesn't automatically mean more sustainable networks
Physical AI, AR glasses drive inferencing closer to the device
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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