A DJ plays out from a gazebo in a public square in Bristol. In stark contrast to a similar day held seven years ago, the sun is shining and the DJ does not need to worry about wet decks.
Across the square a large inflatable snail called Luma wiggles and nods, controlled by small (and often larger), excited hands pinching a model. Less excitingly for the owners of those small hands – when different latency is applied, Luma responds more or less quickly.
Inside a large marquee, serving now to protect machines and screens from the glare of mid-March UK sunshine rather than snow and rain, are a host of demos.
There’s a smart factory showcase, part of the REASON project, showing live capture of drones and robots in a digital twin model, analysis of the drone’s application needs and then dynamic allocation of WiFi and Lifi resources back to the drone.
In another space, 48 cameras capture live images that are sent at 2.4 Gbps each over an aggregated private 5G, Wi-Fi 7 and Lifi wireless link to an on-site server. These are then sent over the Janet optical network to London where they are created as volumetric 3D images, and then on to Cambridge where the images are placed in a virtual background, alongside another real person’s captured image. Resources in this demo are being controlled by a RIC-to-RIC controller known as mATRIC, which is being provided to the JOINER research project.
Your intrepid reporter looking happy about being ignored in virtual reality. If you want to find out more about how the image on the screen was created, read up on Gaussian Splatting.
JOINER is an 11 site, government-backed project that provides a communications and cloud platform for researchers to explore new tech and use cases. Back in the square, next to the DJ tent, there’s a van with a mobile, cut-down JOINER site onboard. Server racks, Benetel RU, vRAN software from BubbleRAN, optical components.
In the marquee, children play VR games by waving their hands over sensors. Move along and there’s an Integrated Sensing and Communications demo from Imperial College using a technique it terms Rate Splitting Multiple Access.
Using tennis balls and sharpie-drawn 1s and Os, a researcher explains qubits and quantum entanglement to a primary-school aged child. And, by extension, a primary-school level reporter.
What’s going on?
Well, this is the Connected Futures Festival, hosted and run by Bristol University, research programmes JOINER and REASON projects, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Federated Hubs.
The aim is showcase Advanced Connectivity (note the nomenclature) research, and to engage with the public, showing the potential for co-creation with some of Bristol’s active creative community.
Moving from research to commercial scale
Upstairs, in the adjoining conference centre, research and programme leads, and one Government minister, wrestle with the questions surrounding these uplifting demonstrations.
A series of lightening pitches show off further innovation: new non-GNSS timing and synch tech, a new candidate waveform for 6G to solve the doppler effect, new signal processing for Integrated Sensing and Communications, cell-free massive MIMO, NTN and cellular convergence, AI assistants for telecoms operations, a distributed orchestration tool.
Either mobile operators need to unlock business models that enable them to generate a much better ROI on their network investments, thereby becoming more attractive to investors in turn. Or else investment needs to come from other sources
How, then, can such research advance commercially from the R&D lab to commercial deployment? How can the UK build companies around these innovations which can go on to be the employers and value creators of the future? How can the global communications sector, whose ability to invest in new network technology underpins all that potential development and progress, get itself into a healthier state to enable it to make those investments? If investment will not come from the network operators – what alternative sources might drive Advanced Connectivity?
The situation is this. Either mobile operators need to unlock business models that enable them to generate a much better ROI on their network investments, thereby becoming more attractive to investors in turn. Or else investment needs to come from other sources – alternative providers, cloud hyperscalers, private network deployers, major industry verticals. Or it’s a combination of the two.
Because without that, Luma the snail is destined to dance alone. Rate Splitting Multiple Access, holographic volumetric imaging over wireless, AI-powered edge orchestration, digital twin AI, even perhaps QKD, all of that remains in limbo, inside the tent but not out in the world.
Government steps in and up
Inside the conference we hear that the UK Government has just responded to a report from a council set up to advise on the structural issues caused by a lack of diversity in the telecoms supply chain. As part of that response it is going to invest a further £60 million in R&D projects, such as JOINER which, TMN learns, is going to receive some of that £60 million.
Also, “Future Telecoms” is now to be known as “Advanced Connectivity”, and the Government is going to put Advanced Connectivity as a favoured child within its Infrastucture Programme. It wants the UK to be a hub for Advanced Connectivity research and commercialisation.
“We have the potential to be at the forefront,” says Chris Bryant, Telecoms Minister. Listing some advances (BT and Toshiba in QKD, global companies placing R&D in the UK, Vodafone’s NTN trials and the creation of JOINER and other programmes), Bryant says the UK could become a global leader in ten years’ time.
A further step the Government is taking is to ask network operators to please think hard about diversity in the supply chain as part of their procurement. Network operators will have to share that diversity data with Government. In return, Government will help telcos with overcoming any skills gaps in deploying new, open networks.
All welcome measures but of course, the UK government cannot put its fingers on the scales enough to change global market dynamics. These are directional steps.
What else is required?
Dan Warren, Director, Communications Research at Samsung R&D UK, says during a keynote panel that the biggest problem the industry has is its own sustainability. Research is about taking risks, but the industry is not in a position to take many.
Warren points out that recent messaging from operators, evidenced by 6G position papers from the NGMN Alliance and the recent 6G 3GPP kick-off meeting in Korea, tell the story,
“It’s clear that as an ecosystem we have a big problem in terms of ROI on 5G, before we start to think about what’s next.” The capex invested in 5G has not returned what was expected and something has to change before banks will consider lending to fund the next round. The industry, stung by the lack of success to change its business models with 5G, is still wrestling with monetisation. Whatever it does next must increase the uptake of B2B business models.
“We need to enable an ecosystem with the elasticity to bring a use case quickly and allow faster adoption,” Warren says.
Warren’s global Ericsson R&D counterpart Magnus Frodigh, is more defensively upbeat. There are some operators doing a good job of monetising 5G SA and 3.5 GHz deployments, increasing productivity in industry. The values are there, he says, but they are not distributed. He is also positive about the potential for AI-enhanced services such as AR glasses. And again about the Network API model that could see operators monetise network capabilities.
But Real Wireless’ Simon Fletcher thinks perhaps it is time to look past the traditional operator as the driver. Having already identified the dominance of incumbent vendors (three of them sitting next to him) as one potential “pinch point” for innovation, he identifies the hard-pushed telcos as another. Alternative deployers, such as neutral host and private network providers, can unlock different investment because they have different business models. It’s been a struggle to bring these altnets to the top and to project their successes more widely but if the industry could do that, then there could be a pathway forward for the wider ecosystem.
Speaking to TMN during the lunch break, the leader of Bristol University’s Smart Internet Lab, and guiding organiser of the day’s many activities, Professor Dimitra Simeonidou says that commercialisation of advanced connectivity R&D can be achieved. JOINER can play a part, progressing early stage prototypes to advanced TRLs (Technology Readiness Level). Plus, developing new architectures and orchestrators that enable multi-access networks will unlock operators’ reliance solely on the RAN. As well as this, softwarisation and APIs are further areas of growth and opportunity.
Then there’s AI. Investors are willing to invest in AI she says, referencing Madevo, a spin-off from Bristol University which she said attracted a lot of interest from VC, although it chose instead to grow organically. But she does concede that “it is very difficult to find appetite in the UK VC environment for anything hardware-based.”
Listen to users. They are not asking for a 6G hologram call. But they do want coverage. So solve coverage once and for all and make it cheap and easy
A later panel which looks at 6G, has few answers to the same question. Will investment come from MNOs that have somehow transformed their business models, and/or can it come from other sources?
Under prompting, the panel agrees that private networks, and the availability of localised and shared spectrum, could provide a route forward.
Ian Smith from innovation network UKTIN says that the network operators lack the incentive to invest – the industry secret is that the best model is to offload users.
Doug Pulley, CTO of chip developer RANSemi, says that investors only invest in technology that solves a problem. The problem for MNOs is that they say they have no money and that everything is too complex. So the solution that will attract investment is to make things affordable and simple.
“Listen to users. They are not asking for a 6G hologram call. But they do want coverage. So solve coverage once and for all and make it cheap and easy, harness the benefits of new tech like AI, and then you have a proper business.”
The snail and the whale
The conference is enlivened by the enthusiasm in the Square below. The R&D part of the industry doesn’t often expose itself to the public in the open like this – and the engagement of the many organised school trips and interested bystanders is genuine and a good thing. Those in the conference are, by and large, technologists who see its potential and want good things for technology and the society it can enable.
The desire to communicate that potential, and with it the investment opportunity, is real. These are people seeking answers, doing something about it, creating projects and programmes. But what is lacking is the investment.
In Julia Donaldson’s seminal work The Snail and the Whale, no doubt very popular with some of the younger visitors to the day’s events, a small snail hitches a ride round the world on the tail of a very large whale. Our Luma and her friends could do with a whale to solve their wanderlust, and get them out into the world. That whale could be the new money that comes from telcos that are successful in unlocking new business models, or it could come from outside traditional telco spaces.
Without it, the worry is that the chief relevance of Luma the snail will be to apply the proverbial pace of her species to the growth of the communications industry itself.
