Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:05):
We are at Fuse 2025 in Dublin. I'm here with Dimitra Simeonidou, who is director of the Smart Internet Lab at the University of Bristol, founding director of the Bristol Digital Futures Institute, and also a director amongst many other things of the joint open infrastructure for networks research, also known as Joiner. And we're in Dublin, Dimitra, and Trinity College, Dublin has just hooked up to the Joiner network and become the first international connection to that network. So to start, can you just tell us about what Joiner is and then we'll talk about what Trinity College joining means?

Dimitra Simeonidou (00:46):
Yes, so Joiner is what the name says is a national scale and now international scale open network infrastructure, which has put together to support network r and d, but also to drive innovation and commercialization of academic research in networks into the commercial space. So what it is, it really resembles a real network. So we are actually connecting 14 places at the moment, and this is across the UK footprint. So we go from Bristol and Southampton to London to Oxford to Cambridge, and then Leeds, and then up to Glasgow, Belfast and Debra, and now in Dublin. And what we are providing, we are providing connectivity in different forms. So we are having mostly high speed connectivity provided by disc and that can go up to 100GB per second. We have a domain with dark fiber. We also have six satellite connections. Wow. But networks is not about connectivity as you know anymore. And we are having a very rich public cloud on-premise cloud environment. And we are providing orchestration management platforms, authentication, user authentication platforms. So in each place that we are actually landing, we are delivering what we call a joiner terminal. It's a very advanced route of equipment that gives multilayered switching, it gives access to gpu, to FPGAs and other programmable platforms. It also gives access to on-premise cloud and code rollers.

(02:36):
And then each place, each lab, each location, they can connect their own experimental environment or innovation environment into joiner and become part of that much bigger infrastructure. So what the purpose is, the purpose is first of all to host early TRL prototypes coming either from academia or industry. Give them an environment where they can test and harden their prototype, advance their tls. And we are doing quite a lot of this already, but the real purpose of join is actually to start addressing system level questions about networks. So end-to-end connections, questions, things that they have to their challenged by the complexity of networks. And that's where we are making a difference. Of course, we're delighted to be in W. So we deliver, we delivered one of these terminal racks to Dublin. We have actually now enabled the connectivity between Dublin and Belfast and then through Belfast to the rest uk, UK platform. And the opportunities enormous.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (03:54):
So each of the research departments that are connected to Joiner, do they each have a specific area of focus or are they selecting that themselves or maybe multiple locations doing the same thing? Or how are you dividing it?

Dimitra Simeonidou (04:10):
Both. So we try to connect labs that they have strong complementaries. For instance, some labs they develop free space optics or wifi, like Oxford and Ambridge. And then we have labs that they're looking specifically on Terahertz, for example. If you think those are technologies that they're coming future into our future networks. We have labs like South, they're looking at optical fibers and photonics. And then we are having places like Belfort that they're working with the next generation of, for instance, cell-free communications and new massive memo kind of architectures. And then we have things like, for instance, sensing a networks that seems to be across quite a lot of partners. We have a number of partners that they are working for AI networks. So we have that co modality. We bring quite a lot of diversity, but at the same time, it's good to bring commonalities in terms of thinking. And just to say that joiner is not only for joining research labs and academic partners, we are actually landing in places in the UK where there are very strong innovation ecosystems and we are already start engaging SMEs. We already start engaging, for instance, other smart initiatives like our smart city at Bristol, open Island here, smart city initiatives in Glasgow. So it's becoming written with a time where we are bringing regions and innovators and academics together at a national scale. Okay.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (05:57):
And what does Trinity College bring to Joiner that maybe wasn't there before?

Dimitra Simeonidou (06:03):
Oh, enormous amount of things. I personally have been working with Connect for a number of years and the team here in Dublin as well. So they have a lot of expertise on optical comms, which of course we have quite a lot of interest through that. They have strong expertise on wireless from a system perspective as well. So that convergence integration across wireless and optical, which we don't see everywhere,

(06:36):
Is another lab. My lab that we are doing research across the technology domains, but with the purpose on looking at convergence is Houston solutions. Also, Trinity, very much like my own lab again, that they like very much to produce prototypes and bring them out into the wild for prototype testing in things like Smart Docklands or other experimental infrastructure that they have here. So there is quite a lot of likely minus across the teams and across intrinsic colors is going to bring that energy and thinking and expertise. It is also the industrial and innovation ecosystem here in Dublin that is very interesting and very complimentary with the innovation ecosystem in the uk.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (07:33):
So a lot of exciting conversations and collaboration

Dimitra Simeonidou (07:37):
Upcoming,

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (07:38):
But ultimately the work being done with Joiner and the universities and the SMEs joining, what does that actually bring to the broader ecosystem? What is the hope here? Is it to deliver these prototypes and see if the industry can then take that further to commercialization?

Dimitra Simeonidou (08:03):
Yes. So that is definitely one of the targets. If you're an SME developing the telco space, as you know, it's very difficult to say, this is my prototype, can I bring it into an operators network? The answer is very difficult. No. So there is very little that an SME can do on bringing prototypes, and I'm not talking about hardware only. We are working with SMEs for instance, that they're developing a genetic AI for networks. Where can they deploy the test it at scale? So providing a space for SMEs but also university researchers that they can bring prototypes and test them in real network conditions and probably test them across as well an ecosystem of other SMEs. That is one of the targets. We believe that with this we are providing quite a significant innovation service and actually we can provide SMEs with evidence that they need to build a strong commercialization case, for instance, for VC investment.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (09:13):
Okay. Yes.

Dimitra Simeonidou (09:16):
When we are looking at academic research, the same path could actually lead to quite a lot of evidence for filing IP or even making contribution to standards. But for me, the most exciting thing about join is that is there to actually develop that system thinking and answer challenges that their system level challenges. For example, energy consumption across the system. And this is a huge problem and nobody knows because actually industry do not give their data where actually most of the energies can be consumed. And how, especially when you are running specific services, where actually is the balance of energy consumption. Now in the communication side, the wireless interface at the cloud side, how we can actually start getting these insights. The other thing around security, anomaly detection at the system level. So that is an important one as well. Another thing, and we lost the facility around this, around spectrum. So around joiner, we have lost what we call the national spectrum facility. So in needs of our terminals, we also incorporate spectrum monitoring sensors. So we measure Spencer Spectrum, how it's being consumed with the vision to create these data sets that we can provide out to industry, to academics, and to regulators. And may I mention ai?

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (11:01):
What's that? No, talked about that this week.

Dimitra Simeonidou (11:03):
But the thing is quite of the world optimization that we are looking on using AI networks is very local people. They're talking about system level AI and they're thinking about open run. But actually the challenge is if I have a full system and I try to make sense and move from my local optimization to a service optimization end to end, how this optimization is going to look like. Because we already see that there is a lot of tension across optimizing locally to optimizing globally. And join is a place that we can address this and many other questions. So how I can take something from here, I'm doing something with my prototype and then how this works the system level. And we don't have many spaces around the world that we can do exactly this.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (11:58):
Okay. Well it sounds like amazing work that's just happening in joiner as well as all the other developments you are involved with. Dimitra. So fascinating to hear what Joiner is doing. Great to hear that Trinity College has joined the network and hope to catch up in 2026. Find out how that's evolving and what the next thing will be that you will add to your very long list of things. I don't know how you do all of these things.

Dimitra Simeonidou (12:28):
I think this is my favorite one.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (12:30):
Okay. Oh, there we go. Top of the part.

Dimitra Simeonidou (12:31):
Top of the list.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (12:32):
Yeah. Okay. Dimitra, great to see you again. Thanks so much for joining us.

Dimitra Simeonidou (12:36):
Thank you.