Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:07):
So we are in Barcelona. We're at MWC26. I'm here once again and very pleased to see Abdu Mudesir, who is now the member of the Board of Management at Deutsche Telekom with the responsibility for product and technology. Abdu, thanks so much for taking time out of your agenda to join us again. Always a pleasure to see you. It's a tradition now for us to chat.

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (00:30):
Yeah. Absolutely. It's a pleasure to see you as well. I'm really looking forward for our chat.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:35):
Fantastic. So before we ... AI is everywhere at the show and all across the industry, but before we dive deeper into AI developments, I want to ask if traditional telecom operator companies like Deutsche Telekom are capable of reinventing themselves from end to end and top to bottom for the AI era. Is this something that's really possible in this industry?

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (01:01):
Absolutely. And it must be possible because I think it's not a question of A, if it's the question, how quickly can we do that? And I believe we are seeing some of it from ourself and some others as well. The way we are integrating AI into our products, into our service, into our network. It's exactly what needs to happen at speed, but always with clear understanding in a responsible way and scaling that. And that's exactly what I believe must happen as a teleco. And we have such an important role to play. We are the infrastructure provider, connectivity provider. Without connectivity, there is no AI.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:38):
Absolutely. Yeah. No, that's a great point. And hearing that echoed a lot of times here, especially when there's talk about physical AI as well, so important. Deutsche Telekom clearly investing a lot of resources and AI developments for its products and network operations. What advantage does a company like DT have over the pure AI companies and hyperscalers in terms of such developments? And how big an issue is trust? We're hearing a lot about trust now in terms of AI developments.

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (02:11):
Yeah. So first off, look, what are we? We are a connectivity provider. It means we have the infrastructure. And what's happening is we are seeing that AI deeply integrated into our network, enables our customers to remove some of the friction for AI access. If you see what we've done with AI voice call assistance, is we took the AI capability and integrated it deep into our network and allow now every customer, regardless of what devices they have, including their old Nokia 3310 or anything, can access the cool innovations like live translation or as for restaurant, manage your calendar, all of that directly in your call. You don't need any devices, you don't need any app. And that's actually the differentiator. When we go back to our core capability and then integrate AI deeply, that's where the difference happened. Now, for us to do this at speed, we have to make sure that we have invested in our core capabilities and we've done that over the last years and we continue to do that.

(03:19):
And second, we have to make sure trust is at the center of it. We are still regulated industry. We need to make sure that what we listen in and how are we processing the voice data or any data. And we need to make this clear as well and transparent. And I believe trust will become another differentiator for us as a teleco industry.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (03:41):
Okay. And vitally important with the tens of millions of customer engagements that the telcos have that, that's kind of a unique situation to have there. Now you mentioned some of the AI developments that Deutsche Telekom has been making. For you, in terms of excitement levels, what do you regard as the unique and key product and service offerings that DT has developed with AI? Look,

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (04:09):
Coming from the network side, as I do and being a network engineer and now seeing how do we help our customers remove friction and democratizing access to AI. What I'm really excited about is how we deeply integrated AI into our core and allow for this AI call assistant AI translation to be a reality. Now that's just a start because we can do a lot more functionality. We do now also in our vision working with small partners, deep fake recognition, voice, and these are the kind of capability that we can invade. And this AI call assistant for me was my personal life. And we've done an amazing work also where we use AI to operate our network and resolve customer issues before the customers really realize it. And you and I have been talking about predictive maintenance doing exactly, that was a vision. Now with this agentic AI, the capabilities that we've integrated into our network, we are making this a reality.

(05:12):
We're using agentic Rand Guardian agent do event planning over 240,000 events in Germany, including Christmas markets now completely planned, identified potential issues, remediated and reported so we can see and have a transparency on exactly what's happening in our network. And in our choice, having human in the loop to make sure that we have control as well. All of this is the agentica world, but the one I'm most really excited about is where the customers, our customers, all of them will have in their pockets a call assistant, regardless of which devices they have with no app.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (05:57):
Okay. Yeah. And that focus on the customer is really key because they're really going to see the difference here. They're really going to notice how things are changing and how their lives, whether it's work or personal are going to change. And that's really exciting. Now to shift gears just a little second, another thing that customers note, and so far up to now in a negative way is if they lose signal, mobile signal and they can't get connectivity, they can't get access to their services. But we're really seeing a lot of developments now in terms of the low Earth orbit, satellite constellations bringing connectivity to these hot spots where the terrestrial networks can't reach. Deutsche Telekom has just announced its relationship with Starlink. Can you just tell us how important that is to this whole customer engagement and customer experience push? So first

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (06:59):
And foremost, let's not forget, we cannot get away from investing to close those gaps. We continue to invest in our network. Of course. In all our networks where we operate in, we have the undisputed network leadership. Now that means anywhere between 90% geo coverage, geo coverage and 99% pop coverage in all our markets. In some markets, even much more. Now, that's still the fundamental and we cannot replace that investment by purely partnering with the satellite there.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (07:35):
Oh no, sure.

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (07:36):
But what we really believe is that there are areas where we cannot really close. There are areas in the forest, up in the islands where you really can't have signals. And if you want to invest, it's too expensive. And regulatory wise, we are not even allowed to have sales side in protected areas. That's where having a partnership like Styling allows us to offer worry-free communication. And we do this in all our 10 European countries and we are the first partner globally who has signed the Gen2 bill with Styling, and I'm proud of what we've done for our customers.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (08:17):
Yeah, because I mean, Starlink's been ahead of the game with its initial conservation. This V2 constellation is going to up the game in terms of capabilities. And that's what you're tapping into

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (08:27):
That. That's exactly. And we are the first operator to sign that.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (08:30):
Okay, fantastic news. And then very quickly as well, in terms of what we've talked about here a lot will be impacting consumers in a lot of ways, but across the enterprise sector, really important, especially for future growth opportunities for operators and security, absolutely vital for this customer section. And we're now reaching the time where considerations about post quantum security and post quantum communications absolutely vital to large enterprises and to the network operators that are going to be able to provide this kind of security. This is something that Deutsche Telekom has been looking at and working on for years. Where are you in that development? If you can give us a quick overview.

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (09:20):
So what we have is we have our telecom labs where we really go out and do research, early research to see how can we help our customers remain secure even in a quantum world, which is going to be extremely complex. And we've worked on quantum key distribution. We've been in the forefront, including deploying some of that technology. Now we've done recently what we have announced is also our work on quantum teleportation, which means by using our research in quantum integerment where we say that quantum photons that are really internal, they cannot be broken because the minute you touch it, it basically is broken. It's so sensitive. And that means it's secure and it allows us actually to transport these qubits that states actually this quantum photon of a 30 kilometer radius on our existing fibers, which is very important for us-

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (10:21):
Absolutely. ...

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (10:21):
On investment protection,

(10:23):
On our existing fiber. But there's also another thing that enables this in my eyes. One is the security as you spoke, but the second is also distributed quantum computing, because you can't have quantum computers as these monisters. And I know there are a lot of capable companies who are much, much more investing and developing on that, and we will work with them and we continue to work with them. But this quantum intergel is quite a quantum tail reportation with over 30 kilometer distance and with video meter rate of more than 90% allows us to have distributed quantum computing, which means we can scale. And that's what we've shown in real life in Berlin and we've published our paper

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (11:05):
As well. Okay, fantastic. Well, this is a development and an area that Telecom TV has been looking into and covering for a couple of years. We can really now start to see the ramp up and about time as well, because QDay is going to be here before we know it and it's going to catch a lot of people out, but hopefully not the operators and certainly it doesn't sound like Deutsche Telekom's going to be caught out, so that's great news. Abdu, really appreciate your time. I think we can hear that. Your voice has been straight here at MWC. Really appreciate that you've come along, chat to us again, kept the tradition going. Yes. Absolutely. Great to see you. Thanks for your insights. Thanks very much. Have a good rest of the show. Cheers. Thank you.

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom:
Thank you.