• BT hires DT exec to be its new chief digital officer
• A dozen European telco CTOs call for 6G spectrum action
• Cisco unveils its Quantum Network Entanglement Chip

In today’s industry news roundup: DT’s transformation expert, Peter Leukert, to join BT to lead digital overhaul; twelve of Europe’s leading telcos urge the EC to open up the whole upper 6 GHz spectrum band to network operators; Cisco opens its Quantum Labs and unveils an innovative new quantum networking element; and much more!

BT Group has appointed Peter Leukert, currently group chief information officer at Deutsche Telekom (DT), as its new chief digital officer, starting on 1 September. The role was formerly held by Harmeen Mehta, who left last September as part of a top team shake-up by CEO Allison Kirkby. Leukert will be responsible for leading BT’s Digital unit and “driving the company’s digital transformation,” the UK national telco noted in this announcement. “I’m thrilled to be joining BT. The opportunity to transform and simplify BT’s operations will improve customer outcomes and drive sustainable business growth, and I am really excited to get started,” noted Leukert. He has been group CIO at DT (which holds a 12% stake in BT) since 2017, “where he has led a significant and successful transformation of their IT and digital platforms, products and services, and [has] been a key contributor to the customer experience-led transformation that has fuelled DT’s recent growth,” noted BT. He has held previous roles at McKinsey & Co, Commerzbank and the New York Stock Exchange in Germany and the US. According to BT, its Digital unit “is at the heart of the company’s modernisation and transformation. It plays a critical role in the bold customer experience-led transformation underway, as we radically digitalise and simplify our internal and customer-facing systems and processes to be better for all our stakeholders. Our Digital unit is also a catalyst for digital thinking, and in how we embed data and AI in everything we do, in order for us to become the most trusted connector of people, business and society.”

The CTOs of 12 influential European telcos – A1 Telekom Austria Group, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Elisa, KPN, Orange, Proximus, Telefónica, Telia, TIM (Telecom Italia), United Group and Vodafone Group – have written an open letter to the European Commission (EC) urging the region’s authorities to “make available the complete upper 6 GHz band for mobile for the benefit of Europe’s economy and society,” hammering home the message sent to the EC by the telcos’ CEOs in October last year. The publication of the letter comes shortly after the early work in the 6G standards process began and telcos and vendors alike outlined their hopes for 6G (see TelecomTV’s dedicated reports on this topic in our Defining 6G Networks channel. “The upper 6 GHz band is a critical opportunity for launching 6G in Europe and should be an integral part of Europe’s future mobile infrastructure,” noted the CTOs. “The decisions and the strategic approach that Europe takes now on the upper 6 GHz band will have profound and long-lasting implications on the ability of Europe’s telecoms sector to enable that future. With escalating demands on current spectrum capacity and with future services including 6G on the horizon, it is critical that the entirety of the upper 6 GHz band (6.425-7.125 GHz) is made available to mobile networks,” the telcos pleaded. They added: “We remain concerned that access to upper 6 GHz band is still sought for Wi-Fi by US stakeholders, despite the recent availability of a new but widely unused block of 480 MHz in the lower 6 GHz band, expressly reserved for this purpose. Telecom operators are the primary providers of Wi-Fi services to European consumers and enterprises, and we do not perceive any current or future Wi-Fi spectrum shortfall. If the decision to make the upper 6 GHz band available to European mobile operators is delayed, while US technology interests are permitted to secure further 6 GHz capacity, Europe’s competitiveness would be threatened. This would stifle the future economic potential of European business and society and ultimately erode Europe’s influence over its own digital future and global competitiveness.” Read more. 

Scarcely a day goes by without another important announcement about developments in quantum communications. Today it’s the turn of Cisco Systems and its Quantum Network Entanglement Chip that is being touted as the answer to the knotty problem of how to build and scale the foundational infrastructure of the quantum internet and to quickly advance distributed quantum computing. In a new blog post, Vijoy Pandey, Cisco’s vice president of emerging technologies and incubation (ET&I), explains that the company is now focusing on the creation of quantum networking technology with the goal of making practical quantum computing commercially feasible within the next five to 10 years. As a major step towards that he announced the introduction of Cisco’s latest “breakthrough technology”, a research prototype quantum chip that will enable quantum networks to scale and connect quantum processors for real-world applications. Currently, quantum processors can accommodate only a few hundred qubits (the basic unit of information in quantum computing and communications), but functioning, practical applications will require millions of them. Unfortunately, even today’s most ambitious quantum computing roadmaps are predicated on the probability that, by 2030, quantum chips will be able to carry no more than a few thousand qubits. Cisco wants to greatly accelerate the entire quantum ecosystem and envisions a practical and achievable solution in “scaled-out quantum datacentres, where processors work together through specialised networking.” The new entanglement chip is a key component of that vision. The chip, that has been designed by Cisco in collaboration with the University of California, Santa Barbara, generates pairs of entangled photons that, via quantum teleportation, enable instantaneous connection regardless of distance, be that to laboratory next door or across the other side of the universe, seemingly in defiance of Einstein’s insistence that nothing can travel faster than light. He called quantum teleportation “spooky action at a distance”, and that’s just what it seems to be because nobody yet understands it. Cisco’s new Photonic Integrated Chip (PIC) chip is remarkable because it works with existing infrastructure and operates at standard telecom wavelengths and is thus able massively to exploit existing fibreoptic infrastructure. What’s more it has very high energy efficiency as it consumes less than 1mW of power. Most remarkable of all is the chip’s ability to deliver 1 million high-fidelity entanglement pairs per output channel, with a rate of up to 200 million entanglement pairs per second in the chip itself. These attributes should make it suitable for practical scalable deployment today, rather than five or 10 years down the line, and provide immediate business value both for quantum enhanced classical applications today and the quantum datacentres of tomorrow. Pandey’s announcement coincides with the formal opening of Cisco’s Quantum Labs facility, also in Santa Monica. Meanwhile, Cisco teams are implementing post-quantum cryptography (PQC) NIST standards across the company’s product portfolio to ensure that classical networks will remain secure in a post-quantum world.

Japanese giants KDDI and NEC are set to form a jointly owned cybersecurity business this year as demand grows for greater critical infrastructure and supply chain security, The Nikkei has reported. 

And still with KDDI… The Japanese telco is to offer its satellite-to-smartphone service, launched in April for its own mobile user base, to customers of other operators, the company has announced. 

Japan is about to enact its “Active Cyber-Defence” legislation. It is a law that encapsulates some strange and potentially disquieting provisions that will lump telcos and IT companies together into a real-life variation of aspects of the film ‘Minority Report’. The 2002 movie envisions a future where crime can be foretold before it happens, thus enabling the authorities to take pre-emptive ‘pre-crime’ action against those who, apparently, will commit a murder – even before they have actually actively thought about killing anyone. OK, so the new Japanese law isn’t as extreme as that but within it can be heard definite echoes of the fictional story. Under the terms of the new legislation, telcos and IT companies will have to report “potential” cyber threats that could, in any way, affect the government – even if no actual cyber attack subsequently materialises. Basically, the Japanese state will require companies compulsorily to register with it to enable the departments to “monitor” them. Those that do not tell the government about potential cyber threats will be “punished” if it later transpires that their systems have been attacked and compromised. A posting on the Cryptopolitan website notes that the main force behind the push to pass the law is Japan’s current prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba. The sanctions outlined in the legislation are comparatively minor with private companies being made liable for fines of up to 2 million Japanese yen (US$13,793) for each occasion they fail to report potential cyber threats but, as many of those whom object to the law point out, the overarching law is a step down the slippery slope to the emergence of a fully fledged government-required surveillance society in Japan. The new legislation amalgamates public and private entities and organisations in an entirely new and unprecedented way and involves pre-emptive spying on telecommunications. According to Cryptopolitan, “The government will acquire and analyse communications information between foreign countries and between domestic and foreign countries. If there are signs of an attack, the police and the Self-Defense Forces will invade the other party’s server and neutralise it.” As you might expect, Japan’s minister for digital transformation, Masaaki Taira, insists that, despite the legislation’s express intent to spy on telecoms, “privacy will be protected”. He does not explain how. Instead, the emphasis is on enabling pre-emptive “infiltration of an attacker’s computer to render it harmless.” Supporters of the bill say the new legislation is vitally necessary to help prevent ever increasing cyber-espionage plots against Japan by the Chinese government and to further counter the endless onslaughts perpetrated by North Korea. Since 2022, after belatedly admitting the country had fallen badly behind the cybersecurity standards, protocols and regimes deployed by its allies, such as the US and Europe, Japan has been moving to update and toughen its cyber defences in the face of rapidly changing and more dangerous political realities.

Research undertaken by the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar posits that the average human can manage about 150 social relationships depending on factors including age, personality, and social needs. Dunbar maintains that number has been the limit since at least the time of the subsistence existence strategy practised by hunter-gatherer societies that began with homo erectus some 1.8 million years ago and was primarily evident in homo sapiens some 200,000 years ago in the time before permanent, settled farming communities emerged. Dunbar’s Number says that groups of 150 people include close and extended family and friends and fluctuates in its composition over years as people come and go. In more modern times, research by the likes of Harvard University and Kinsey indicates that in terms of organisational and leadership psychology, the maximum number of direct reports for managerial effectiveness is between four and up to a maximum of nine, depending on the type of organisation. Direct reports in excess of 10 result in dysfunction, infighting, communication bottlenecks (deliberate and accidental), disengagement, burnout and resignations. When it comes to trusted, meaningful, close friends, most humans can count them on the fingers of one hand. The optimum number seems to be between 3 and 5. However, as you might expect, minimal numbers of that sort aren’t enough for Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg. He has announced that he “envisions” a time coming soon when we’ll all have 15 or more besties, most of which (or whom?), according to the Nostradamus of Meta, will be your AI pals. Zuckerberg admits that such a system will, perforce, be based on an organisation owning and manipulating data and gaining “intimate knowledge” of individual people. Such a system will “understand them in the way that their feed algorithms do”. Have you recently read a phrase with more chilling connotations than “feed algorithms.” That’s the road we are being ushered down as we become grist to the AI mill. We are talking about algorithms that enable people to feed themselves on themselves. Anyone remember the 1973 dystopian film “Soylent Green”? The nutritious wafer Soylent Green that is distributed free to the population turns out to be composed of the pulverised remains of humans. That could never happen, could it? Mark Zuckerberg says personalised AI “isn’t just about knowing basic information about a user, it’s about ensuring chatbots behave as a really good friend might and for that a “deep understanding of what’s going on in this person’s life,” will be necessary. So MetaAI is investing huge sums of money at AI chatbots in social media apps as well in its hardware devices. And, of course, the more additional data is collected, the more money Meta will make and the greater will be its control over what people will access, although that part of the equation is scarce mentioned. An article in the Wall Street Journal says that as AI begins to “play a central role in the human experience”, Zuckerberg wants to “feed” more friends to people. In an interview with the podcaster Dwarkesh Patel of Substack, Zuckerberg commented, “The average American I think has… it’s fewer than three friends… three people they’d consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends”. “Says who?” ask others. One (of many) who are disturbed by Zuckerberg’s “envisioning” is Megan Dhar, a former Instagram exec and an expert in consumer technology and AI. She says, “The very platforms that have led to our social isolation and being chronically online are now being positioned as the answer to the “loneliness epidemic”. Dhar believes so-called AI friends will only make things worse. She adds, “It almost seems like the arsonist coming back and being the fireman.” Yup, and providing the firelighters, and the matches and a can of petrol and then asking the victim to pay for them.

– The staff, TelecomTV