Networks as the backbone of digital sovereignty
By Guy Daniels
Dec 5, 2025
To embed our video on your website copy and paste the code below:
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EsCCZWEuRA0?modestbranding=1&rel=0" width="970" height="546" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:08):
Right. Hello everyone. Welcome back to start our second session of the day. Please take a seat with your coffees and hot drinks. Don't spill the hot drinks. I just want to comment because Dominic referenced our poll in the first session and I didn't mention the poll earlier, but we do run a viewer poll at all our events. You can find that on the website. So please, thanks for mentioning that. Please do go at the website and have a look at the question we're asking and vote. That's for our online audience. As I say, we're not live streaming, so our online audience will be voting in the next few weeks, right? So networks as the backbone of digital sovereignty. Delighted to have four guests with me for this session without secure and resilient networks. Is digital sovereignty no more than a concept? What is the critical role of telecom's infrastructure from fix to mobile networks to subsea cables to edge in enabling sovereign control over data services and national capabilities? That's the setup for our discussion and we want your involvement in this as well, please. So let's first of all meet our panel and I'm just going to ask our guests very briefly to introduce themselves starting on my immediate right with Aaron.
Aaron Partouche, Colt Technology Services (01:33):
So hi everyone. I'm Aaron Partouche. I'm Innovation Director in Colt, also exploring all the new emerging tech in Colt. Before Colt 13 years ago, I was in the mobile industry in Cent and all the manufacturing suppliers.
Warren Bayek, Wind River (01:56):
Hi, Warren Bayek. I am in the CT office at Wind River overseeing the strategy of the intelligent edge. Been in Telco most of my life and as you can tell, I'm an American, but to ingratiate myself a little with the audience, I did spend the earliest part of my career mostly in Europe doing ISD and homologation testing for all of the individual countries. So I'm aware of this kind of EU and the individual country requirements in Europe and how complex it can be.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (02:24):
Fantastic one. We've got a specific question on that coming up later, so we'll test it over.
Aaron Boasman-Patel, TM Forum (02:30):
Well, I'm Aaron Boasmen-Patel. I'm the vice president of innovation at TM Forum. So I lead all of our global innovation activities across the globe with our 850 members. I spent a lot of my career in autonomous networks, so this is great. Used to founding and heading up the a n work at TM Forum.
Carsten Rossenhoevel, EANTC AG (02:49):
And my name is Carsten. I'm the CTO and co-founder of E-A-N-T-C. That's the European Advanced Networking Test Center in Berlin in Germany. And we are an independent test lab over 25 years. I think we've covered a number of technologies. Let's see which ones we'll discuss, fixed and mobile. And we're testing for vendors ified as enterprises and governments.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (03:11):
Thank you Carsin. Thank you much everybody. Well, before we get into our q and a and our panel discussion, we have invited all of our guests to give a short three minutes opening gambit opening statement around this subject and delighted that all of them are going to do so. So we're going to go down the table starting with Aran, but Aran if you'd like to start off and you have a couple of slides there as well.
Aaron Partouche, Colt Technology Services (03:35):
Exactly. I think I'm maybe the only one. So digital sovereignty is not just about data trust, it's also about data in motion. And to achieve this true digital sovereignty, we must give control over how data travel across borders and continents. So we see an increasing demand for data path control to comply with local laws and radio exposure. Sovereignty, we were talking about cloud this morning must extend beyond the cloud to the one. So managing a global infrastructure across continent as we are doing in cold brings greater responsibility and complexity. Long distance routes, as we all know, remain on, rely on subic but remain main internet backbone, but are exposed to geopolitical and physical risk. So satellite could offer this complimentary path, but as you can see in my slide, different SLA different characteristic, much less capacity. And we see more and more sovereign infrastructure initiative at our launch.
(04:51):
And from what we saw very focused on this critical asset subsea and satellite. So our vision called is that network should involve into platforms. And so using NAS and API for integrating practically sovereign path policies, we are also evaluating a new protocol like ION that is currently used in Switzerland by the financial ecosystem. And we are expanding our tel backbone with new diverse route, particularly where we are more exposed. But beyond the fiber infrastructure, we embrace new technologies. As I was saying, satellite fixed fire success are two of them to provide this diversity and resiliency that was mentioned also this morning. And we are even looking at if we could send critical data flows leveraging INTERSITE links. Last but not least, we are also looking at how we can be prepared for quantum, which means that potentially exploring a mix of terrestrial and satellite to potentially, potentially, because we don't know yet what would be the quantum technology deploy quantum key distribution. So our mission is clear, secure data in motion across multiple infrastructure and making sovereignty, practical and future proof.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (06:22):
Aaron, thank you very much indeed. That's great. I'm sure we'll get some questions on that later, but let me hand over for our next opening speech too to Warren.
Warren Bayek, Wind River (06:30):
Yeah, thanks guy. So I'll focus on a piece of that which is the operation side. And without secure and resilient infrastructure, so will never actually be realized it'll be aspirational rather than a reality. And that rests on a simple operational truth that an entity or country controls the digital assets that it can observe, secure and operate with confidence. So to be able to do that, we've had other industries that have done that for decades. When you look at places like aerospace and defense, industrial automation, energy delivery, those environments have the same expectations that we're putting onto telecoms now. And what's changing for telco is the scale. Telco used to be more confined and more individually built stacks. Now we have these demanding environments with incredible diversity and this far reach into the far edge with thousands of edge sites being brought into this environment. And in order to bring sovereignty into those sorts of environments, we need a few things, visibility, excuse me, verifiability and velocity.
(07:41):
And I'll really touch on each of those. So observability, we need observability across various hardware platforms, software platforms, and increasingly workloads including AI workloads. We need the ability to recognize, update and remediate problems at machine speed in real time. And we need continuous validation and verifiable integrity runtime out of station of what's happening on these systems so that you can be sure that what you put there is still running there. So these are all operational, interesting operational problems that have to be solved to keep sovereignty as a valid concern. And as the edge, as we've moved from the cloud out to the edge, this becomes a more interesting problem and that so goes out to the edge with us. So we have to create solutions that allow us to control the sovereignty at all of these thousands of edge devices. And we've talked about a few of these things earlier, but it's not a policy statement or a government regulation, it's an engineering standard that we have to set up to make sure these networks are built in a way that can support digital sovereignty.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (08:49):
Warren, thank you very much for that. Appreciate those comments and we'll pick 'em up later. Sure. Aaron, next.
Aaron Boasman-Patel, TM Forum (08:58):
Thank you. Yeah, I agree with a lot of what has been said and this is all about transparency. Being able to understand what's happening on the network. Having observability is absolutely critical for sovereignty, but I really think networks are becoming more complex rather than becoming simplified. And I spend my life trying to simplify networks. We're doing that through a n and automation and we are looking at that through a N level four, which is the standard that TM forum has set. And we're saying that's where we want to really drive AI on the network to make it more observable. We're also making the network more componentized to our open digital architecture. That means we won't have things like vendor lock in. But actually this becomes really interesting. It does come back to the question I think Dean was good in previously asking the question. We need to look at things like what do we mean by sovereignty for example?
(09:39):
We need to look at what does that infrastructure look like? This is actually an architectural question in most of the senses. But then also we do have to look at economies of scale. And if you look at the diagram that Alan showed earlier, we're now having things like Satcoms becoming really important and backbone of the network. So one of the questions I ask myself is, what is the role of a telecom player in the next 10 years? If you look at what Elon Musk's plan is, right to launch satellite comms everywhere. So actually sovereignty becomes a really big question in the network. So we can argue about, okay, the data that is in your geographical location, we must be able to pinpoint that. That becomes very important in observing that. But what happens, 99% of our data traffic goes under sea cables. So then who owns that data when it's transported there?
(10:24):
If you look at subsea cable companies, each cable has about 20 different owners who are operating who are partner in all of this. Again, satellite companies. You've got likes of Airbus and Boeing getting into this space as well as Elon Musk. And I've been working with a lot of them through our cast, these programs of late. So yes, whilst we do of course want to use open APIs for example, so you can look at the data across the network at any time, we want to stop reliance on certain vendors. The network, particularly the fixed network has had and still has a lot of problems with that. You'll see Vodafone is having a problem removing one specific vendor from their network, from their core network because it's just too ingrained. So these are a lot of questions we think about and I think we can all sit here and talk about, and of course that's what my day job is, open digital architecture, APIs, putting AI onto the network, but we do have fundamental questions of how do we build the architecture of the future who really owns that infrastructure?
(11:18):
And the challenge that telecom operators have today is if you're in a democratic country like the United Kingdom, governments can change every four to five years. And if you look at government policy of late, you'll see the massive changes in big companies and also existential threats if you go back to that subsea point, which is where the backbone of this international traffic goes. And as we've just said, we are now really complex in terms of what the role of the telecom operator is. 40, just like this year, 40 attacks on subsea cables have been made by hostile states in the last year. So sovereignty, I am going to go back to the political question more than just infrastructure.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (11:57):
Aaron, thank you very much indeed. And I made some notes here because it leads very nicely into a part of the discussion that we're going to have coming up very soon. But to round us out for this initial phase and the clicker has made its way down the desk. Caston, please, please.
Carsten Rossenhoevel, EANTC AG (12:13):
Okay, thank you. Oops. Yeah. So from ENDC, we never had digital sovereignty explicitly at our mind in the past, but we found ourself working towards that as we always had the idea to create open global ecosystems. And as Mike has said before, sovereignty doesn't mean to remove people explicitly by just name or country. Well, he didn't say that, but you said you're in favor of openness and standards and that's also what we've done all the time. So we've tested many technologies, which I will not go into detail. We've run interoperability tests and performance benchmarking. And always our goal has been to create viable global ecosystems with many sources where many vendors are ready for production because that's the big problem with these simple plug fests. Often it's just playing around in the playground, but it doesn't mean that the market actually works. So our events look a little bit different.
(13:11):
So there is more equipment much more time. So typically for an interop events, we spend around two to three person years in preparation execution for a performance benchmarking event. Usually the test, normally 30% of our results are not published because the vendors are not happy and we're not agreeing with cherry picking. And this is the kind of infrastructure that it looks like in the end. So the right one is from a transport event, we are running annually with more than 15 vendors, 80 people typically. The left one is from a joint level with structured telecom on all ran. And we just believe that we need to put much, much more effort into creating these ecosystems for digital sovereignty. Now the question is which of these markets actually work? And some of them work pretty well. So there are lots of suppliers, they are well interoperable and exchangeable and some markets don't work at all.
(14:00):
And I think we will probably talk about that. I don't have time now to explain why, but there are reasons. And then there are some markets which are worrying like firewalls and security markets for example. And so then I started crafting digital ecosystem blueprint, but I think my time is not enough here, but just to say, so basically for a global ecosystem to work, there are so many factors the stars need to align well, and it's a really hard job also for the SDOs, the standards bodies. As Diego has said earlier, the SDOs have a critical role, but it only starts there because then the regulators also need to go in the same direction. They cannot just say like, yeah, we are axing one vendor because we don't like the name. Or somebody from another secret service has told us that they're bad guys. I have seen so many bad guys in my life. I don't think that they're confined to one specific geographic area. And so the last thing is that the network operators also need to play because in the mobile space, for example, there was a, oh, 10 seconds I have to stop. So basically there are a lot of steps that need to come together to create a digital ecosystem and maybe we can talk about it later. Thank you,
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (15:18):
Carsten. Thank you very much. Thank you everyone for adhering to those three minutes. That's terrific. Gives us more time for conversation, but we will indeed come back to some of those points, some fascinating points, great points made by everyone. By the way, I've got some questions here, but whilst we are still fresh and those presentations are still fresh in our minds, anyone in our audience wants to pick up on what they've just heard and we'll get an immediate interaction. Comment, Francis, start the knowledge flow.
Francis Haysom, Appledore Research (15:47):
Carsten, I thought you actually chose a very interesting photo right at the beginning, which is a picture of East Berlin, Alexander Platz for example. We tend to think of sovereignty as it's almost like as a point activity, how much is it important that we start to recognize that it's an ongoing problem? You are maintaining sovereignty because you're constantly testing networks or you're maintaining networks through time. So as I said, that picture would've had a large wall in it for 20 years, well, 30 years ago, 30 years ago. But how much is that understanding that this is not a point activity and how do we start to build that in rather than it's a lab test, it works. We're seeing it as a constant process of sovereignty testing as it were.
Carsten Rossenhoevel, EANTC AG (16:37):
Yeah, I think that's a no-brainer, right? Everybody in the software industry keeps saying, we need to fail fast, we need to improve gradually. We need to be agile, work in sprints, we need to do continuous improvements. And that of course includes also the quality assurance part, right? You need to validate, you need to protect, you need to secure, you need to make sure that a software that once was compliant with, for example, TSA here in the UK remains compliant and people don't get lazy or there are bad actors chiming in something after the first release. So that's a lot of our work to keep testing for innovation gradually. And East Berlin's picture was not meant intentionally because I'm just from Berlin, but East Germany was frantically trying to be digitally sovereign until they collapsed and they spent billions in trying to copy designs from the west and create their own ship sets. So in the end, they had a complete auta attack, how do you say this in English ecosystem, but it was so expensive and so much behind that they couldn't survive. So that's the other extreme.
Warren Bayek, Wind River (17:46):
Yeah, that's a great question and I think it has at least two layers to think about. And one you've brought up very well, Carsten, which is the initial testing verification, supply chain, non opaqueness, that non opaqueness is critical in all of this with the incoming what we're putting onto the networks, hardware, software, workloads, operational, everything we're doing has to be open, but we can test and verify everything in the lab and it works great and put it in the network and it works great. But the real important thing to make sure we don't lose track of is as we're operating these networks, we have to make sure going forward that nothing untoward has happened to them. Sometimes not nefariously configuration, drift, AI model drift, those kind of happen on their own. But there are also, as you mentioned, bad actors everywhere including by the way inside your own company. So we need to be sure that what we put on the network is what is still running on the network. So we have to sort of assume that we've been infiltrated at all levels and have ways and put things in place to make sure that we've maintained our security, we've maintained the things that we tested against because it's impossible to remain digitally sovereign if what we're running is not what we think we're running. So I think that's an important piece that we have to think about of how we do that going forward.
Aaron Boasman-Patel, TM Forum (19:19):
And I want to go back to a point that you just said Carsten, because these things are still happening out actually about the economics of all of this. So we were in Bangkok last week and I was at dinner and sat next to a very, very large infrastructure provider recently who was asked to provide data sovereignty, for example, on the network for Germany, because Germany has lots of data laws, they want to do this, spent billion Germany spent billions of pounds building this great big data sovereign cloud just for German and German companies and enterprises to use. Guess what? They don't use it because it's far too expensive. Instead they now run it from Holland. So this is the questions again, back to economics, we can do everything you've just said. We can build really secure, can make people aware of what's going on. But if the economics don't end up, it's going back to East Germany where you end up with useless, very, very private, very data sovereign networks. But if the economics aren't there, who's going to use them? Because enterprises won't use them because everybody wants now scale. It's all about scale. And I think this is the biggest challenge the industry is going to face today. Again, I'm not sure what we mean by sovereignty.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (20:26):
Thanks very much, Aaron. This quick follow up, Beth.
Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (20:31):
So I want to pick up on some of the stuff you were saying about innovation and fast fail, et cetera. And what I've found is the telecom networks can't afford to do that because they're expected to run 100% of the time, 100% reliably. So there's a kind of a push pull. So I'd like to have you address some of that. And of course also I know we're going to talk about later about the supply chain, which is Carsten. That was a great diagram. The industry tends, the innovation is like the SD-WAN. There was a ton of SD-WAN companies and now there's three. So anyhow,
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (21:15):
Who'd like to take that first? Any takers first? Yep.
Aaron Boasman-Patel, TM Forum (21:20):
Hi. Yeah, no, I can just because I dare press that naughty button, I might eject out my seat. So actually I'm seeing much more. So I run innovation for TM forum and we run our catalyst program and at DTW last year out the 58 innovations, 28 of them were on the network, just come back from Bangkok there. We had 18 catalysts and 12 were on the network. So what we're starting to see is a lot of experimentation in the network and we're starting to see some amazing results as a result of it. If you look at China mobile for example, now again it's to do with the sovereignty regions, you've got much more control. But if you look at what they've been able to do with the work we've done, they've been able to save, for example, five and a half thousand FTEs, which has made the network actually much more reliable, much safer, because actually a lot of it's being digitized, it's being automated.
(22:05):
I think that's becoming really, really important. So I think actually innovation is on the network. I think the digital twin has been really good for this. We're doing lots of data simulations and I think we're about to really see what the network can be. And it goes back to your network is your product. Everybody sees network as really expensive, which stops innovation. As soon as you see network as this platform that's archaic and it's sold, everyone's like, well, I'm not judging that. Or we still have examples where there's one person in a company that can run one part of the network, which scares me to death. But on the other side, I think we are now at the precipice of innovation and people saying, actually we can't continue building networks the way we've done it. But the most interesting question I get asked when we're showcasing innovation on the network and really moving, and we've now CM four has now certified three companies actually achieving a and level four, which really is a lot around innovation sovereignty, but the questions we have to ask is, are we building networks incrementally? And that's kind of what happens when you think of level two, level three, level four, or are we truly building networks of the future? And that's an answer. I don't have the answer to that because, and I'm doing this every single day. So are we innovating enough is what I would say as opposed to are we innovating on the network?
Aaron Partouche, Colt Technology Services (23:17):
Yeah, I don't know how, if we are enough, realizing the creativity of what we are operating today. I mean sometimes I have the impression that we are a bit, maybe not naive, but not considering the need for its sovereignty high enough. I mean, we are pushed. So what I mean here is we indeed, you're right, innovation, we can't completely afford to be two because we have so much pressure on the operator side. But it has, and this is what Aran was saying in his speech, it has to be almost a political fight. We are attacked on subic balls. We see now that we are not, I mean we see a big, big push from some actors in the satellite and the satellite is almost US versus China, even if we have still some good champions in Europe, but we are still lagging behind. So if we don't identify the critical infrastructure and start to control them, we are at risk.
(24:34):
We saw that it was for different reasons, but in April power during couple of days in Spain and Portugal. So there is a real need to consider that as a right level. And yes, and we have to be pushed in our side. We are pushed by some of our customers that are managing so much, such a sensible data that are pushing us, for instance, to already work on quantum while the computers are not yet ready, but we know that harvest now decre and so on and so on. So we are pushed to start to innovate in some space, but I think the push should be harder and we should be aware of the situation we have today.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (25:21):
Thank you very much ton that come in as
Carsten Rossenhoevel, EANTC AG (25:22):
Well regarding the fast fail. So of course there are some parts of the telecom networks which are installed and then they must stay in place because of the five nine's reliability requirements. And for example, the sub C cable is something that you install and then you leave it in place and you don't mess around. But there are many other areas where innovation needs to happen much faster. For example, in the management domain, in the security domain. And in some areas innovation helps to gain economic advantage, for example, for mobile network optimization. That was also touched upon in the first panel, how much energy does the mobile does the radio network take? And the mobile operators are all very heavily trying to reduce that. And of course the optimization basically comes in sprints of one month and they're playing around in some areas, playing in unquote.
(26:11):
Still everything works, but operators are also much more inclined to allow innovation and to fail fast in some areas and hyperscalers even more so where it's really providing a benefit. And I'm just lobbying for creating a close loop cycle, cycle circle on with sandboxes and automated testing and making sure that all of the guardrails are maintained and observed in this kind of cycle and not just say we maintain them only first time, the classic RFP work, RFP, it takes a year or two for a vendor to be accepted and then they're in and they can do whatever they want. It's like if you have a badge to the airport and then afterwards you can do whatever you want on the tarmac. And that's also not a good idea. So that's I think how this innovation can be much faster and even with a bigger ecosystem, because that's the other thing, traditionally operators in the mobile space particularly always trust their big supplier and they say, well, Ericsson and okay will not mess it up. There's too much to lose. Haha. And they don't trust the smaller ones. And that's why some of these markets don't work. A few buyers, very large leading suppliers and it's just a give and take between them and a lot of the responsibility is delegated to the vendors, which is maybe not always a good idea.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (27:37):
Great. Thanks very much Carson, thanks for those comments. Can I just bring this back to something Aaron, you mentioned on your statement just now, we know that subsea cables and terrestrial backhaul do represent critical points of failure and not just failure but surveillance threats as well. What specific technology led investments in resilience and redundancy should telecoms be prioritizing now to ensure continuous service? Because we've heard about we can't afford to go down, we cannot, and yet we do. Is there anything specific we can do or should focus on now?
Aaron Partouche, Colt Technology Services (28:25):
Yeah, I mean I think it's a big focus from a lot of countries including UK because we are in an iron, but so we own some subs and indeed we are more and more trying to monitor what's happened and to try to predict, but if there's an attack, there is an attack too. You can't predict an attack. So indeed adding more route, this is also what we're doing and if we, beyond the subic cables so far, the technology that start to try to compensate or at least to provide this reach is mainly satellite. The issue, and it was shown in my slide, is in term of capacity, we don't have the same thing with them. So we could just manage critical data with satellite, it'll improve because we see that we will have satellite links that will be more and more developed, we'll have more and more low actors. But again, we have to potentially to get more European champions that are developed here because Stalin is very strong and China would be also very strong. So yeah, I satellite as today as a main T option.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (29:45):
Great. More comments on this one Warren?
Warren Bayek, Wind River (29:47):
It's a quick one, but obviously having multiple routes is the critical piece as you mentioned, right? But even then, as you said, the backup routes will never have the bandwidth that the primary, of course we don't have the capacity or the money to create completely redundant networks all over the world. So with that in mind, and I'm with you, Beth, one of my biggest fears growing up in this industry was sitting before the Senate subcommittee explaining why 9 1 1 calls were down and people were dying. If our services go down. It's not like if Google goes down where I can't use my phone, people die literally. So to be able to differentiate the important traffic, when we do a lot of red team testing, we're like plugs are pulled and servers are killed. So to be able to differentiate traffic and make sure the critical traffic is somehow separated and understood so that we have redundant paths for at least the critical parts is part of what it's built into telecom a lot now, but we have to keep that in mind and make sure we go forward. It's a financial problem, of course, it's always going to be an economic issue, but that's the critical piece that we keep the ability to separate the AI workloads that we're looking at that do cool things. While those are important, what we really need to keep up is the RAN service that's doing critical jobs. So to be able to differentiate that going forward, especially as we virtualize these environments, there's going to be a really interesting attack that we have to make sure we take care of.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (31:21):
Thanks very. We've just got a cast and we'll come back to Aaron.
Carsten Rossenhoevel, EANTC AG (31:24):
Yeah, I think resiliency and high availability is not magic. So in principle, technically we know how to achieve it and we know how to be sovereign in that regard, but it costs money and it costs extra effort. And so maybe regulation needs to push a little bit there. And it also, as Sophie has said in the previous panel, a risk-based approach is important. So for example, sub C cables, you need diversity on the routes, but you don't need diversity on the equipment vendors. You don't need to buy two different endpoints, I dunno how to call these from different vendors I think. But for example, thinking about the AWS audit recently, if you are relying on a hyperscaler, it's very, very helpful to focus on a multi-cloud deployment and not only rely on AWS or if you think that you are a core fixed core network operator, you should not only rely on one vendor and if this vendor has a bug, everything goes down. So this kind of risk based approach I think is hard to specify concretely in legislation, but somehow should be taken into account in the approach from my point of view. Thanks
(32:31):
Carsten. Aaron?
Aaron Boasman-Patel, TM Forum (32:32):
Yeah, just a point on that, it's also what Warren was saying about, it just reminded me this week, Virgin Media here in the UK have been find an absolute fortune because they don't have the right governance in place for their digital switchover. So they're critical care lines for elderly people or people with severe medical needs. You read the button around your neck, you press it, but they forgot to. And a lot of that lines relies on analog, right? That actually when they did a switchover, they didn't do it properly and lots of people were left without 9, 9, 9 that we have here ability. So you then can extend that to digital sovereignty and all the work that we're doing. So I think all of us in this room can build beautiful infrastructures. I think we can all work on that, but if we don't, and there is a difference between regulation and governance and I think that's the key point I think in this discussion. We haven't thought enough about what the governance is to maintain sovereignty on the network.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (33:19):
Thanks very much, Aaron. I've got a couple more questions here, but I do want to go across to Ray because he's been sitting patiently there and I think we should bring Ray into this.
Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (33:26):
Thank you. So very quickly, I'm wondering if the panel thinks that with networks being so important and with network or communication service providers being trusted suppliers of the services and being trusted to run networks, will we start to see the emergence of new international alliances between network operators so that for example, a multinational enterprise could go to one operator and have that kind of sovereign, secure guarantee across multiple domains? Or is that already in place? Who wants to
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (34:08):
Take this on please?
Aaron Partouche, Colt Technology Services (34:11):
As far as I know, it's not yet in place, but indeed we are more and more, at least in our side, trying to build a federation of operators. And it's a very, very good point because indeed you are always looking for simplicity. I mean we have, I mean we should just rely on you because you have the right partners and you can reach everywhere. And we never, I mean in all our project, in most of our project, we are always relying on partners. It's very rare that it's only in our own asset even if we have a global reach. So it's a very good point we have, it's part of the discussion we had with several operators because we are trying to look at a federation of operators to have this global reach, but as far as I know it's not yet done. But I think it's a very, very good point.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (35:03):
Thanks very much Aaron.
Aaron Boasman-Patel, TM Forum (35:04):
Aaron, it's a brilliant question Ray, and I think I'm smiling because we see these kind of, I dunno, confederations partnerships put together even for ai, we've seen that it just doesn't work. We are really bad as an industry at multi-sided business models to be able to understand what it looks like to have those kind of partnerships. So I think the answer is we should do it, but I just don't think there is the willing to actually to make it work. It's not impossible. And we've had this since the early nineties, was it BT and Verizon had a deal that all one founded was very, very difficult. I know people I worked with, George Glassy was sent to America to undo a lot of that work and try and make it work. So I just don't see it happening, which I think it's a shame. I think what we'll see instead, which is what I'm currently got one eye open on, is where this will work with people like satellite companies where there's a bit less competition for now.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (35:58):
Thanks very much. Unless any more comments, we'll move on. I've got another question here before we go back to the audience. And again, it's building on what you've been saying. This session's all about networks as the backbone of digital sovereignty and it's been mentioned a couple of times or alluded to, is the sovereign or the sovereignty imperative going to change what it means to be a telco? I mean Aaron, you mentioned this in your opening statement and Aaron, I think you and I have had a chat in the past about what does the move towards a TechCo mean and what are the implications there? Is it going to change over the next decade? Fundamentally what it means to be a CSP or DSP is a sovereignty pressure that big. Any thoughts from anyone, Aaron?
Aaron Partouche, Colt Technology Services (36:46):
Yeah, I mean Aaron was mentioning that networks become more complex. Innovation also brings also complexity and it's even more difficult for us to manage. We have this virtualization of all the telco stack that we are seeing with SD one with 5G and so on. So indeed and the new consumers will be machines will be algorithms. So indeed I think we will operate differently. We will have to control much more the technology that we are deploying and so becomes a bit more a TechCo it. It'll be almost mandatory if we want to be a trusted partner.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (37:33):
Great, thanks Aaron. Aaron, did you want to pick up as well? Yeah,
Aaron Boasman-Patel, TM Forum (37:38):
It's really interesting. I was just thinking, and I wrote a white paper six years ago on that actually how have you come a TechCo and we're still not there yet. So I was thinking my mind God, in 10 years, is that white paper really going to be dusty or am I going to do version six of it? And I think Aron is absolutely right and I do think that there'll be an evolution of it. But again, we are just not good industry, these multi-sided business models. And when we think of TechCo, I think this is about Telco being able to really start to leverage their network as a platform, which becomes really important. Look at what types of services that they can sell and then also which types of services they can resell. And this is something, I don't know who it's going to take, I dunno, billions of pounds spent on consultancies that go into Teleco and tell 'em to do this doesn't happen.
(38:29):
But I think there is the need there required. I don't think it's because of digital sovereignty, I think it's because we are a digital society. Society has changed. We need everything to have a different ecosystem. We can't carry on the way we're doing it. We've got to have much more resilience in there. Yes, security comes there, but also observability, all those things we talk about. So the opportunity is massive for telco. We've got so many abilities coming in. The challenge is though is what Alan said, which is now it's to the tipping point. If our industry doesn't change, somebody else will do it. And AI and robotics will take over that space. Amazon is a great example. Telcos could have gone in and powered those warehouses and taken those. In fact, Jeff Bezos has done it himself. So we've got to move fast.
Warren Bayek, Wind River (39:12):
In fact, I think there's a whole session tomorrow on this, but I'll try not to stomp too hard on that. But I agree completely Aaron, and we're at the precipice of the next revolution. And telcos can be a big part of that or they can choose not to be. And I think it is a choice, but it's a very difficult choice because it's economically difficult for them, for telcos especially to spend what it's going to take to be more than just a provider of the bits and bytes. And if this industry is going to move to where it can become a major player in the new world economy, we're going to have to figure out how to economically make it make sense. And I don't think anyone's answered that question yet. And that's the $500 million billion, trillion dollar question that telcos have to figure out.
(40:08):
And hey, if they want to just stay, if we all want to just stay with our 2%, 3% growth rates and make a ton of profit and just do what we're doing today and have done for 20 years and be a pipe provider and let Amazon take over and let the other companies take the biggest chunk of the new digital economy that's coming, that could be fine. But we have to recognize that as an industry, that's a choice we're making. If we choose not to be a part of this new services or industry and this new services economy, we're going to settle for the status quo that we've been living with for so long.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (40:40):
Thanks Aaron. Carsten, the billion dollar question here.
Carsten Rossenhoevel, EANTC AG (40:44):
Yeah, it triggered me because I see the billion dollar question a little bit the other way around. I see big dollar signs in the eyes of some manufacturers and some operators saying like, oh, now this is the chance for us to create an important project of common European interest and really yield like billions of euros from the governments in Europe. Just saying we need to be digitally sovereign and the only thing that we do is we build a new data center at a different location with the same architecture and the same software. And after four years when the money is gone, what Nokia is doing right now is saying like, oh, by the way, now we get more money from the US and now we do the same thing in the US again, same solution, different location for many manufacturing, new government money. So that is the business case to be honest. And we need to be very careful that the business case is still in favor of providing a good service for the consumers and the taxpayers.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (41:37):
Great input as always. Carson, thank you very much for that. Any question? We've got time for one more question. I'm sure who's going to? Mike, please. Over to you.
Michael John Short CBE FREng FIET (41:46):
Assuming networks are the backbone of digital sovereignty, how should we test them? Is it done on a multi-country level? So as defined by the EU, the EU toolbox, what is the testing methodology that you are recommending if the networks are the digital backbone?
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (42:07):
Mike, thank you very much Carsten to you from your position and sorry, and your wonderful statement so far. Dive into this one.
Carsten Rossenhoevel, EANTC AG (42:17):
Okay, so I think first it starts with the SDOs, right? So the SDOs need to standardize together with the whole ecosystem. What are really the goals, what are the risks that need to be validated, what are the goals? And testing cannot stop at functional evaluation. That's how it often stops. And then it continues with this kind of consumer reports. Like in Germany we have this infamous connect report where dots telecom always comes out saying we are the best mobile network because we get 5% more throughput. But it doesn't say at all what happens in terms of resiliency. And in my home city, I don't know why, but my administration runs field tests and recently they created an power outage in one of the districts in Berlin for 28 hours it lasted. And so it was a nice field test alone, unplanned one of the mobile network resilience and Telefonica's network continued Vodafone network continued.
(43:11):
T-Mobile was out after four hours, even the micro cells. And this is the kind of stuff that needs to be taken into account account more like a risk-based approach and continuous testing. And for that we need sanitization because I, as a test lab, I always come across this resistance because if I try to do something really meaningful, and for example, AWS had exactly this problem recently that we like to do. We like to say what happens if everything is down and now every customer suddenly wants to start. And many vendors told me, you're ridiculous, Carsten, this doesn't ever happen because everything is always on and never everything completely falls down. And that's exactly why AWS took so much time to recover because their DSP service got so many requests that it constantly failed and started again in waves and they had to manually stop it. And okay, let's not get into details, but that's the problem. And these are the kind of requirements that I need as a lab from the SEOs, from the society, from the regulators to select I have a right to test these and the vendors cannot object. And that is the kind of mindset that we need.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (44:21):
Great. We've got to work. Cut out there, Carsten, thank you very much. Any other quick comments from our guests on this one? Otherwise it looks like we are just about out of time. Thank you very much. Thanks to all our guests. Thanks for your attention during this and participation during this session. We're going to break there now. We've got another coffee and snack break next door for about 20 minutes. That's all 20 minutes. And then we come back for our third session, which is the final session of the morning. So please thank our guests very much.
Right. Hello everyone. Welcome back to start our second session of the day. Please take a seat with your coffees and hot drinks. Don't spill the hot drinks. I just want to comment because Dominic referenced our poll in the first session and I didn't mention the poll earlier, but we do run a viewer poll at all our events. You can find that on the website. So please, thanks for mentioning that. Please do go at the website and have a look at the question we're asking and vote. That's for our online audience. As I say, we're not live streaming, so our online audience will be voting in the next few weeks, right? So networks as the backbone of digital sovereignty. Delighted to have four guests with me for this session without secure and resilient networks. Is digital sovereignty no more than a concept? What is the critical role of telecom's infrastructure from fix to mobile networks to subsea cables to edge in enabling sovereign control over data services and national capabilities? That's the setup for our discussion and we want your involvement in this as well, please. So let's first of all meet our panel and I'm just going to ask our guests very briefly to introduce themselves starting on my immediate right with Aaron.
Aaron Partouche, Colt Technology Services (01:33):
So hi everyone. I'm Aaron Partouche. I'm Innovation Director in Colt, also exploring all the new emerging tech in Colt. Before Colt 13 years ago, I was in the mobile industry in Cent and all the manufacturing suppliers.
Warren Bayek, Wind River (01:56):
Hi, Warren Bayek. I am in the CT office at Wind River overseeing the strategy of the intelligent edge. Been in Telco most of my life and as you can tell, I'm an American, but to ingratiate myself a little with the audience, I did spend the earliest part of my career mostly in Europe doing ISD and homologation testing for all of the individual countries. So I'm aware of this kind of EU and the individual country requirements in Europe and how complex it can be.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (02:24):
Fantastic one. We've got a specific question on that coming up later, so we'll test it over.
Aaron Boasman-Patel, TM Forum (02:30):
Well, I'm Aaron Boasmen-Patel. I'm the vice president of innovation at TM Forum. So I lead all of our global innovation activities across the globe with our 850 members. I spent a lot of my career in autonomous networks, so this is great. Used to founding and heading up the a n work at TM Forum.
Carsten Rossenhoevel, EANTC AG (02:49):
And my name is Carsten. I'm the CTO and co-founder of E-A-N-T-C. That's the European Advanced Networking Test Center in Berlin in Germany. And we are an independent test lab over 25 years. I think we've covered a number of technologies. Let's see which ones we'll discuss, fixed and mobile. And we're testing for vendors ified as enterprises and governments.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (03:11):
Thank you Carsin. Thank you much everybody. Well, before we get into our q and a and our panel discussion, we have invited all of our guests to give a short three minutes opening gambit opening statement around this subject and delighted that all of them are going to do so. So we're going to go down the table starting with Aran, but Aran if you'd like to start off and you have a couple of slides there as well.
Aaron Partouche, Colt Technology Services (03:35):
Exactly. I think I'm maybe the only one. So digital sovereignty is not just about data trust, it's also about data in motion. And to achieve this true digital sovereignty, we must give control over how data travel across borders and continents. So we see an increasing demand for data path control to comply with local laws and radio exposure. Sovereignty, we were talking about cloud this morning must extend beyond the cloud to the one. So managing a global infrastructure across continent as we are doing in cold brings greater responsibility and complexity. Long distance routes, as we all know, remain on, rely on subic but remain main internet backbone, but are exposed to geopolitical and physical risk. So satellite could offer this complimentary path, but as you can see in my slide, different SLA different characteristic, much less capacity. And we see more and more sovereign infrastructure initiative at our launch.
(04:51):
And from what we saw very focused on this critical asset subsea and satellite. So our vision called is that network should involve into platforms. And so using NAS and API for integrating practically sovereign path policies, we are also evaluating a new protocol like ION that is currently used in Switzerland by the financial ecosystem. And we are expanding our tel backbone with new diverse route, particularly where we are more exposed. But beyond the fiber infrastructure, we embrace new technologies. As I was saying, satellite fixed fire success are two of them to provide this diversity and resiliency that was mentioned also this morning. And we are even looking at if we could send critical data flows leveraging INTERSITE links. Last but not least, we are also looking at how we can be prepared for quantum, which means that potentially exploring a mix of terrestrial and satellite to potentially, potentially, because we don't know yet what would be the quantum technology deploy quantum key distribution. So our mission is clear, secure data in motion across multiple infrastructure and making sovereignty, practical and future proof.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (06:22):
Aaron, thank you very much indeed. That's great. I'm sure we'll get some questions on that later, but let me hand over for our next opening speech too to Warren.
Warren Bayek, Wind River (06:30):
Yeah, thanks guy. So I'll focus on a piece of that which is the operation side. And without secure and resilient infrastructure, so will never actually be realized it'll be aspirational rather than a reality. And that rests on a simple operational truth that an entity or country controls the digital assets that it can observe, secure and operate with confidence. So to be able to do that, we've had other industries that have done that for decades. When you look at places like aerospace and defense, industrial automation, energy delivery, those environments have the same expectations that we're putting onto telecoms now. And what's changing for telco is the scale. Telco used to be more confined and more individually built stacks. Now we have these demanding environments with incredible diversity and this far reach into the far edge with thousands of edge sites being brought into this environment. And in order to bring sovereignty into those sorts of environments, we need a few things, visibility, excuse me, verifiability and velocity.
(07:41):
And I'll really touch on each of those. So observability, we need observability across various hardware platforms, software platforms, and increasingly workloads including AI workloads. We need the ability to recognize, update and remediate problems at machine speed in real time. And we need continuous validation and verifiable integrity runtime out of station of what's happening on these systems so that you can be sure that what you put there is still running there. So these are all operational, interesting operational problems that have to be solved to keep sovereignty as a valid concern. And as the edge, as we've moved from the cloud out to the edge, this becomes a more interesting problem and that so goes out to the edge with us. So we have to create solutions that allow us to control the sovereignty at all of these thousands of edge devices. And we've talked about a few of these things earlier, but it's not a policy statement or a government regulation, it's an engineering standard that we have to set up to make sure these networks are built in a way that can support digital sovereignty.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (08:49):
Warren, thank you very much for that. Appreciate those comments and we'll pick 'em up later. Sure. Aaron, next.
Aaron Boasman-Patel, TM Forum (08:58):
Thank you. Yeah, I agree with a lot of what has been said and this is all about transparency. Being able to understand what's happening on the network. Having observability is absolutely critical for sovereignty, but I really think networks are becoming more complex rather than becoming simplified. And I spend my life trying to simplify networks. We're doing that through a n and automation and we are looking at that through a N level four, which is the standard that TM forum has set. And we're saying that's where we want to really drive AI on the network to make it more observable. We're also making the network more componentized to our open digital architecture. That means we won't have things like vendor lock in. But actually this becomes really interesting. It does come back to the question I think Dean was good in previously asking the question. We need to look at things like what do we mean by sovereignty for example?
(09:39):
We need to look at what does that infrastructure look like? This is actually an architectural question in most of the senses. But then also we do have to look at economies of scale. And if you look at the diagram that Alan showed earlier, we're now having things like Satcoms becoming really important and backbone of the network. So one of the questions I ask myself is, what is the role of a telecom player in the next 10 years? If you look at what Elon Musk's plan is, right to launch satellite comms everywhere. So actually sovereignty becomes a really big question in the network. So we can argue about, okay, the data that is in your geographical location, we must be able to pinpoint that. That becomes very important in observing that. But what happens, 99% of our data traffic goes under sea cables. So then who owns that data when it's transported there?
(10:24):
If you look at subsea cable companies, each cable has about 20 different owners who are operating who are partner in all of this. Again, satellite companies. You've got likes of Airbus and Boeing getting into this space as well as Elon Musk. And I've been working with a lot of them through our cast, these programs of late. So yes, whilst we do of course want to use open APIs for example, so you can look at the data across the network at any time, we want to stop reliance on certain vendors. The network, particularly the fixed network has had and still has a lot of problems with that. You'll see Vodafone is having a problem removing one specific vendor from their network, from their core network because it's just too ingrained. So these are a lot of questions we think about and I think we can all sit here and talk about, and of course that's what my day job is, open digital architecture, APIs, putting AI onto the network, but we do have fundamental questions of how do we build the architecture of the future who really owns that infrastructure?
(11:18):
And the challenge that telecom operators have today is if you're in a democratic country like the United Kingdom, governments can change every four to five years. And if you look at government policy of late, you'll see the massive changes in big companies and also existential threats if you go back to that subsea point, which is where the backbone of this international traffic goes. And as we've just said, we are now really complex in terms of what the role of the telecom operator is. 40, just like this year, 40 attacks on subsea cables have been made by hostile states in the last year. So sovereignty, I am going to go back to the political question more than just infrastructure.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (11:57):
Aaron, thank you very much indeed. And I made some notes here because it leads very nicely into a part of the discussion that we're going to have coming up very soon. But to round us out for this initial phase and the clicker has made its way down the desk. Caston, please, please.
Carsten Rossenhoevel, EANTC AG (12:13):
Okay, thank you. Oops. Yeah. So from ENDC, we never had digital sovereignty explicitly at our mind in the past, but we found ourself working towards that as we always had the idea to create open global ecosystems. And as Mike has said before, sovereignty doesn't mean to remove people explicitly by just name or country. Well, he didn't say that, but you said you're in favor of openness and standards and that's also what we've done all the time. So we've tested many technologies, which I will not go into detail. We've run interoperability tests and performance benchmarking. And always our goal has been to create viable global ecosystems with many sources where many vendors are ready for production because that's the big problem with these simple plug fests. Often it's just playing around in the playground, but it doesn't mean that the market actually works. So our events look a little bit different.
(13:11):
So there is more equipment much more time. So typically for an interop events, we spend around two to three person years in preparation execution for a performance benchmarking event. Usually the test, normally 30% of our results are not published because the vendors are not happy and we're not agreeing with cherry picking. And this is the kind of infrastructure that it looks like in the end. So the right one is from a transport event, we are running annually with more than 15 vendors, 80 people typically. The left one is from a joint level with structured telecom on all ran. And we just believe that we need to put much, much more effort into creating these ecosystems for digital sovereignty. Now the question is which of these markets actually work? And some of them work pretty well. So there are lots of suppliers, they are well interoperable and exchangeable and some markets don't work at all.
(14:00):
And I think we will probably talk about that. I don't have time now to explain why, but there are reasons. And then there are some markets which are worrying like firewalls and security markets for example. And so then I started crafting digital ecosystem blueprint, but I think my time is not enough here, but just to say, so basically for a global ecosystem to work, there are so many factors the stars need to align well, and it's a really hard job also for the SDOs, the standards bodies. As Diego has said earlier, the SDOs have a critical role, but it only starts there because then the regulators also need to go in the same direction. They cannot just say like, yeah, we are axing one vendor because we don't like the name. Or somebody from another secret service has told us that they're bad guys. I have seen so many bad guys in my life. I don't think that they're confined to one specific geographic area. And so the last thing is that the network operators also need to play because in the mobile space, for example, there was a, oh, 10 seconds I have to stop. So basically there are a lot of steps that need to come together to create a digital ecosystem and maybe we can talk about it later. Thank you,
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (15:18):
Carsten. Thank you very much. Thank you everyone for adhering to those three minutes. That's terrific. Gives us more time for conversation, but we will indeed come back to some of those points, some fascinating points, great points made by everyone. By the way, I've got some questions here, but whilst we are still fresh and those presentations are still fresh in our minds, anyone in our audience wants to pick up on what they've just heard and we'll get an immediate interaction. Comment, Francis, start the knowledge flow.
Francis Haysom, Appledore Research (15:47):
Carsten, I thought you actually chose a very interesting photo right at the beginning, which is a picture of East Berlin, Alexander Platz for example. We tend to think of sovereignty as it's almost like as a point activity, how much is it important that we start to recognize that it's an ongoing problem? You are maintaining sovereignty because you're constantly testing networks or you're maintaining networks through time. So as I said, that picture would've had a large wall in it for 20 years, well, 30 years ago, 30 years ago. But how much is that understanding that this is not a point activity and how do we start to build that in rather than it's a lab test, it works. We're seeing it as a constant process of sovereignty testing as it were.
Carsten Rossenhoevel, EANTC AG (16:37):
Yeah, I think that's a no-brainer, right? Everybody in the software industry keeps saying, we need to fail fast, we need to improve gradually. We need to be agile, work in sprints, we need to do continuous improvements. And that of course includes also the quality assurance part, right? You need to validate, you need to protect, you need to secure, you need to make sure that a software that once was compliant with, for example, TSA here in the UK remains compliant and people don't get lazy or there are bad actors chiming in something after the first release. So that's a lot of our work to keep testing for innovation gradually. And East Berlin's picture was not meant intentionally because I'm just from Berlin, but East Germany was frantically trying to be digitally sovereign until they collapsed and they spent billions in trying to copy designs from the west and create their own ship sets. So in the end, they had a complete auta attack, how do you say this in English ecosystem, but it was so expensive and so much behind that they couldn't survive. So that's the other extreme.
Warren Bayek, Wind River (17:46):
Yeah, that's a great question and I think it has at least two layers to think about. And one you've brought up very well, Carsten, which is the initial testing verification, supply chain, non opaqueness, that non opaqueness is critical in all of this with the incoming what we're putting onto the networks, hardware, software, workloads, operational, everything we're doing has to be open, but we can test and verify everything in the lab and it works great and put it in the network and it works great. But the real important thing to make sure we don't lose track of is as we're operating these networks, we have to make sure going forward that nothing untoward has happened to them. Sometimes not nefariously configuration, drift, AI model drift, those kind of happen on their own. But there are also, as you mentioned, bad actors everywhere including by the way inside your own company. So we need to be sure that what we put on the network is what is still running on the network. So we have to sort of assume that we've been infiltrated at all levels and have ways and put things in place to make sure that we've maintained our security, we've maintained the things that we tested against because it's impossible to remain digitally sovereign if what we're running is not what we think we're running. So I think that's an important piece that we have to think about of how we do that going forward.
Aaron Boasman-Patel, TM Forum (19:19):
And I want to go back to a point that you just said Carsten, because these things are still happening out actually about the economics of all of this. So we were in Bangkok last week and I was at dinner and sat next to a very, very large infrastructure provider recently who was asked to provide data sovereignty, for example, on the network for Germany, because Germany has lots of data laws, they want to do this, spent billion Germany spent billions of pounds building this great big data sovereign cloud just for German and German companies and enterprises to use. Guess what? They don't use it because it's far too expensive. Instead they now run it from Holland. So this is the questions again, back to economics, we can do everything you've just said. We can build really secure, can make people aware of what's going on. But if the economics don't end up, it's going back to East Germany where you end up with useless, very, very private, very data sovereign networks. But if the economics aren't there, who's going to use them? Because enterprises won't use them because everybody wants now scale. It's all about scale. And I think this is the biggest challenge the industry is going to face today. Again, I'm not sure what we mean by sovereignty.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (20:26):
Thanks very much, Aaron. This quick follow up, Beth.
Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (20:31):
So I want to pick up on some of the stuff you were saying about innovation and fast fail, et cetera. And what I've found is the telecom networks can't afford to do that because they're expected to run 100% of the time, 100% reliably. So there's a kind of a push pull. So I'd like to have you address some of that. And of course also I know we're going to talk about later about the supply chain, which is Carsten. That was a great diagram. The industry tends, the innovation is like the SD-WAN. There was a ton of SD-WAN companies and now there's three. So anyhow,
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (21:15):
Who'd like to take that first? Any takers first? Yep.
Aaron Boasman-Patel, TM Forum (21:20):
Hi. Yeah, no, I can just because I dare press that naughty button, I might eject out my seat. So actually I'm seeing much more. So I run innovation for TM forum and we run our catalyst program and at DTW last year out the 58 innovations, 28 of them were on the network, just come back from Bangkok there. We had 18 catalysts and 12 were on the network. So what we're starting to see is a lot of experimentation in the network and we're starting to see some amazing results as a result of it. If you look at China mobile for example, now again it's to do with the sovereignty regions, you've got much more control. But if you look at what they've been able to do with the work we've done, they've been able to save, for example, five and a half thousand FTEs, which has made the network actually much more reliable, much safer, because actually a lot of it's being digitized, it's being automated.
(22:05):
I think that's becoming really, really important. So I think actually innovation is on the network. I think the digital twin has been really good for this. We're doing lots of data simulations and I think we're about to really see what the network can be. And it goes back to your network is your product. Everybody sees network as really expensive, which stops innovation. As soon as you see network as this platform that's archaic and it's sold, everyone's like, well, I'm not judging that. Or we still have examples where there's one person in a company that can run one part of the network, which scares me to death. But on the other side, I think we are now at the precipice of innovation and people saying, actually we can't continue building networks the way we've done it. But the most interesting question I get asked when we're showcasing innovation on the network and really moving, and we've now CM four has now certified three companies actually achieving a and level four, which really is a lot around innovation sovereignty, but the questions we have to ask is, are we building networks incrementally? And that's kind of what happens when you think of level two, level three, level four, or are we truly building networks of the future? And that's an answer. I don't have the answer to that because, and I'm doing this every single day. So are we innovating enough is what I would say as opposed to are we innovating on the network?
Aaron Partouche, Colt Technology Services (23:17):
Yeah, I don't know how, if we are enough, realizing the creativity of what we are operating today. I mean sometimes I have the impression that we are a bit, maybe not naive, but not considering the need for its sovereignty high enough. I mean, we are pushed. So what I mean here is we indeed, you're right, innovation, we can't completely afford to be two because we have so much pressure on the operator side. But it has, and this is what Aran was saying in his speech, it has to be almost a political fight. We are attacked on subic balls. We see now that we are not, I mean we see a big, big push from some actors in the satellite and the satellite is almost US versus China, even if we have still some good champions in Europe, but we are still lagging behind. So if we don't identify the critical infrastructure and start to control them, we are at risk.
(24:34):
We saw that it was for different reasons, but in April power during couple of days in Spain and Portugal. So there is a real need to consider that as a right level. And yes, and we have to be pushed in our side. We are pushed by some of our customers that are managing so much, such a sensible data that are pushing us, for instance, to already work on quantum while the computers are not yet ready, but we know that harvest now decre and so on and so on. So we are pushed to start to innovate in some space, but I think the push should be harder and we should be aware of the situation we have today.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (25:21):
Thank you very much ton that come in as
Carsten Rossenhoevel, EANTC AG (25:22):
Well regarding the fast fail. So of course there are some parts of the telecom networks which are installed and then they must stay in place because of the five nine's reliability requirements. And for example, the sub C cable is something that you install and then you leave it in place and you don't mess around. But there are many other areas where innovation needs to happen much faster. For example, in the management domain, in the security domain. And in some areas innovation helps to gain economic advantage, for example, for mobile network optimization. That was also touched upon in the first panel, how much energy does the mobile does the radio network take? And the mobile operators are all very heavily trying to reduce that. And of course the optimization basically comes in sprints of one month and they're playing around in some areas, playing in unquote.
(26:11):
Still everything works, but operators are also much more inclined to allow innovation and to fail fast in some areas and hyperscalers even more so where it's really providing a benefit. And I'm just lobbying for creating a close loop cycle, cycle circle on with sandboxes and automated testing and making sure that all of the guardrails are maintained and observed in this kind of cycle and not just say we maintain them only first time, the classic RFP work, RFP, it takes a year or two for a vendor to be accepted and then they're in and they can do whatever they want. It's like if you have a badge to the airport and then afterwards you can do whatever you want on the tarmac. And that's also not a good idea. So that's I think how this innovation can be much faster and even with a bigger ecosystem, because that's the other thing, traditionally operators in the mobile space particularly always trust their big supplier and they say, well, Ericsson and okay will not mess it up. There's too much to lose. Haha. And they don't trust the smaller ones. And that's why some of these markets don't work. A few buyers, very large leading suppliers and it's just a give and take between them and a lot of the responsibility is delegated to the vendors, which is maybe not always a good idea.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (27:37):
Great. Thanks very much Carson, thanks for those comments. Can I just bring this back to something Aaron, you mentioned on your statement just now, we know that subsea cables and terrestrial backhaul do represent critical points of failure and not just failure but surveillance threats as well. What specific technology led investments in resilience and redundancy should telecoms be prioritizing now to ensure continuous service? Because we've heard about we can't afford to go down, we cannot, and yet we do. Is there anything specific we can do or should focus on now?
Aaron Partouche, Colt Technology Services (28:25):
Yeah, I mean I think it's a big focus from a lot of countries including UK because we are in an iron, but so we own some subs and indeed we are more and more trying to monitor what's happened and to try to predict, but if there's an attack, there is an attack too. You can't predict an attack. So indeed adding more route, this is also what we're doing and if we, beyond the subic cables so far, the technology that start to try to compensate or at least to provide this reach is mainly satellite. The issue, and it was shown in my slide, is in term of capacity, we don't have the same thing with them. So we could just manage critical data with satellite, it'll improve because we see that we will have satellite links that will be more and more developed, we'll have more and more low actors. But again, we have to potentially to get more European champions that are developed here because Stalin is very strong and China would be also very strong. So yeah, I satellite as today as a main T option.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (29:45):
Great. More comments on this one Warren?
Warren Bayek, Wind River (29:47):
It's a quick one, but obviously having multiple routes is the critical piece as you mentioned, right? But even then, as you said, the backup routes will never have the bandwidth that the primary, of course we don't have the capacity or the money to create completely redundant networks all over the world. So with that in mind, and I'm with you, Beth, one of my biggest fears growing up in this industry was sitting before the Senate subcommittee explaining why 9 1 1 calls were down and people were dying. If our services go down. It's not like if Google goes down where I can't use my phone, people die literally. So to be able to differentiate the important traffic, when we do a lot of red team testing, we're like plugs are pulled and servers are killed. So to be able to differentiate traffic and make sure the critical traffic is somehow separated and understood so that we have redundant paths for at least the critical parts is part of what it's built into telecom a lot now, but we have to keep that in mind and make sure we go forward. It's a financial problem, of course, it's always going to be an economic issue, but that's the critical piece that we keep the ability to separate the AI workloads that we're looking at that do cool things. While those are important, what we really need to keep up is the RAN service that's doing critical jobs. So to be able to differentiate that going forward, especially as we virtualize these environments, there's going to be a really interesting attack that we have to make sure we take care of.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (31:21):
Thanks very. We've just got a cast and we'll come back to Aaron.
Carsten Rossenhoevel, EANTC AG (31:24):
Yeah, I think resiliency and high availability is not magic. So in principle, technically we know how to achieve it and we know how to be sovereign in that regard, but it costs money and it costs extra effort. And so maybe regulation needs to push a little bit there. And it also, as Sophie has said in the previous panel, a risk-based approach is important. So for example, sub C cables, you need diversity on the routes, but you don't need diversity on the equipment vendors. You don't need to buy two different endpoints, I dunno how to call these from different vendors I think. But for example, thinking about the AWS audit recently, if you are relying on a hyperscaler, it's very, very helpful to focus on a multi-cloud deployment and not only rely on AWS or if you think that you are a core fixed core network operator, you should not only rely on one vendor and if this vendor has a bug, everything goes down. So this kind of risk based approach I think is hard to specify concretely in legislation, but somehow should be taken into account in the approach from my point of view. Thanks
(32:31):
Carsten. Aaron?
Aaron Boasman-Patel, TM Forum (32:32):
Yeah, just a point on that, it's also what Warren was saying about, it just reminded me this week, Virgin Media here in the UK have been find an absolute fortune because they don't have the right governance in place for their digital switchover. So they're critical care lines for elderly people or people with severe medical needs. You read the button around your neck, you press it, but they forgot to. And a lot of that lines relies on analog, right? That actually when they did a switchover, they didn't do it properly and lots of people were left without 9, 9, 9 that we have here ability. So you then can extend that to digital sovereignty and all the work that we're doing. So I think all of us in this room can build beautiful infrastructures. I think we can all work on that, but if we don't, and there is a difference between regulation and governance and I think that's the key point I think in this discussion. We haven't thought enough about what the governance is to maintain sovereignty on the network.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (33:19):
Thanks very much, Aaron. I've got a couple more questions here, but I do want to go across to Ray because he's been sitting patiently there and I think we should bring Ray into this.
Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (33:26):
Thank you. So very quickly, I'm wondering if the panel thinks that with networks being so important and with network or communication service providers being trusted suppliers of the services and being trusted to run networks, will we start to see the emergence of new international alliances between network operators so that for example, a multinational enterprise could go to one operator and have that kind of sovereign, secure guarantee across multiple domains? Or is that already in place? Who wants to
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (34:08):
Take this on please?
Aaron Partouche, Colt Technology Services (34:11):
As far as I know, it's not yet in place, but indeed we are more and more, at least in our side, trying to build a federation of operators. And it's a very, very good point because indeed you are always looking for simplicity. I mean we have, I mean we should just rely on you because you have the right partners and you can reach everywhere. And we never, I mean in all our project, in most of our project, we are always relying on partners. It's very rare that it's only in our own asset even if we have a global reach. So it's a very good point we have, it's part of the discussion we had with several operators because we are trying to look at a federation of operators to have this global reach, but as far as I know it's not yet done. But I think it's a very, very good point.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (35:03):
Thanks very much Aaron.
Aaron Boasman-Patel, TM Forum (35:04):
Aaron, it's a brilliant question Ray, and I think I'm smiling because we see these kind of, I dunno, confederations partnerships put together even for ai, we've seen that it just doesn't work. We are really bad as an industry at multi-sided business models to be able to understand what it looks like to have those kind of partnerships. So I think the answer is we should do it, but I just don't think there is the willing to actually to make it work. It's not impossible. And we've had this since the early nineties, was it BT and Verizon had a deal that all one founded was very, very difficult. I know people I worked with, George Glassy was sent to America to undo a lot of that work and try and make it work. So I just don't see it happening, which I think it's a shame. I think what we'll see instead, which is what I'm currently got one eye open on, is where this will work with people like satellite companies where there's a bit less competition for now.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (35:58):
Thanks very much. Unless any more comments, we'll move on. I've got another question here before we go back to the audience. And again, it's building on what you've been saying. This session's all about networks as the backbone of digital sovereignty and it's been mentioned a couple of times or alluded to, is the sovereign or the sovereignty imperative going to change what it means to be a telco? I mean Aaron, you mentioned this in your opening statement and Aaron, I think you and I have had a chat in the past about what does the move towards a TechCo mean and what are the implications there? Is it going to change over the next decade? Fundamentally what it means to be a CSP or DSP is a sovereignty pressure that big. Any thoughts from anyone, Aaron?
Aaron Partouche, Colt Technology Services (36:46):
Yeah, I mean Aaron was mentioning that networks become more complex. Innovation also brings also complexity and it's even more difficult for us to manage. We have this virtualization of all the telco stack that we are seeing with SD one with 5G and so on. So indeed and the new consumers will be machines will be algorithms. So indeed I think we will operate differently. We will have to control much more the technology that we are deploying and so becomes a bit more a TechCo it. It'll be almost mandatory if we want to be a trusted partner.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (37:33):
Great, thanks Aaron. Aaron, did you want to pick up as well? Yeah,
Aaron Boasman-Patel, TM Forum (37:38):
It's really interesting. I was just thinking, and I wrote a white paper six years ago on that actually how have you come a TechCo and we're still not there yet. So I was thinking my mind God, in 10 years, is that white paper really going to be dusty or am I going to do version six of it? And I think Aron is absolutely right and I do think that there'll be an evolution of it. But again, we are just not good industry, these multi-sided business models. And when we think of TechCo, I think this is about Telco being able to really start to leverage their network as a platform, which becomes really important. Look at what types of services that they can sell and then also which types of services they can resell. And this is something, I don't know who it's going to take, I dunno, billions of pounds spent on consultancies that go into Teleco and tell 'em to do this doesn't happen.
(38:29):
But I think there is the need there required. I don't think it's because of digital sovereignty, I think it's because we are a digital society. Society has changed. We need everything to have a different ecosystem. We can't carry on the way we're doing it. We've got to have much more resilience in there. Yes, security comes there, but also observability, all those things we talk about. So the opportunity is massive for telco. We've got so many abilities coming in. The challenge is though is what Alan said, which is now it's to the tipping point. If our industry doesn't change, somebody else will do it. And AI and robotics will take over that space. Amazon is a great example. Telcos could have gone in and powered those warehouses and taken those. In fact, Jeff Bezos has done it himself. So we've got to move fast.
Warren Bayek, Wind River (39:12):
In fact, I think there's a whole session tomorrow on this, but I'll try not to stomp too hard on that. But I agree completely Aaron, and we're at the precipice of the next revolution. And telcos can be a big part of that or they can choose not to be. And I think it is a choice, but it's a very difficult choice because it's economically difficult for them, for telcos especially to spend what it's going to take to be more than just a provider of the bits and bytes. And if this industry is going to move to where it can become a major player in the new world economy, we're going to have to figure out how to economically make it make sense. And I don't think anyone's answered that question yet. And that's the $500 million billion, trillion dollar question that telcos have to figure out.
(40:08):
And hey, if they want to just stay, if we all want to just stay with our 2%, 3% growth rates and make a ton of profit and just do what we're doing today and have done for 20 years and be a pipe provider and let Amazon take over and let the other companies take the biggest chunk of the new digital economy that's coming, that could be fine. But we have to recognize that as an industry, that's a choice we're making. If we choose not to be a part of this new services or industry and this new services economy, we're going to settle for the status quo that we've been living with for so long.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (40:40):
Thanks Aaron. Carsten, the billion dollar question here.
Carsten Rossenhoevel, EANTC AG (40:44):
Yeah, it triggered me because I see the billion dollar question a little bit the other way around. I see big dollar signs in the eyes of some manufacturers and some operators saying like, oh, now this is the chance for us to create an important project of common European interest and really yield like billions of euros from the governments in Europe. Just saying we need to be digitally sovereign and the only thing that we do is we build a new data center at a different location with the same architecture and the same software. And after four years when the money is gone, what Nokia is doing right now is saying like, oh, by the way, now we get more money from the US and now we do the same thing in the US again, same solution, different location for many manufacturing, new government money. So that is the business case to be honest. And we need to be very careful that the business case is still in favor of providing a good service for the consumers and the taxpayers.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (41:37):
Great input as always. Carson, thank you very much for that. Any question? We've got time for one more question. I'm sure who's going to? Mike, please. Over to you.
Michael John Short CBE FREng FIET (41:46):
Assuming networks are the backbone of digital sovereignty, how should we test them? Is it done on a multi-country level? So as defined by the EU, the EU toolbox, what is the testing methodology that you are recommending if the networks are the digital backbone?
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (42:07):
Mike, thank you very much Carsten to you from your position and sorry, and your wonderful statement so far. Dive into this one.
Carsten Rossenhoevel, EANTC AG (42:17):
Okay, so I think first it starts with the SDOs, right? So the SDOs need to standardize together with the whole ecosystem. What are really the goals, what are the risks that need to be validated, what are the goals? And testing cannot stop at functional evaluation. That's how it often stops. And then it continues with this kind of consumer reports. Like in Germany we have this infamous connect report where dots telecom always comes out saying we are the best mobile network because we get 5% more throughput. But it doesn't say at all what happens in terms of resiliency. And in my home city, I don't know why, but my administration runs field tests and recently they created an power outage in one of the districts in Berlin for 28 hours it lasted. And so it was a nice field test alone, unplanned one of the mobile network resilience and Telefonica's network continued Vodafone network continued.
(43:11):
T-Mobile was out after four hours, even the micro cells. And this is the kind of stuff that needs to be taken into account account more like a risk-based approach and continuous testing. And for that we need sanitization because I, as a test lab, I always come across this resistance because if I try to do something really meaningful, and for example, AWS had exactly this problem recently that we like to do. We like to say what happens if everything is down and now every customer suddenly wants to start. And many vendors told me, you're ridiculous, Carsten, this doesn't ever happen because everything is always on and never everything completely falls down. And that's exactly why AWS took so much time to recover because their DSP service got so many requests that it constantly failed and started again in waves and they had to manually stop it. And okay, let's not get into details, but that's the problem. And these are the kind of requirements that I need as a lab from the SEOs, from the society, from the regulators to select I have a right to test these and the vendors cannot object. And that is the kind of mindset that we need.
Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (44:21):
Great. We've got to work. Cut out there, Carsten, thank you very much. Any other quick comments from our guests on this one? Otherwise it looks like we are just about out of time. Thank you very much. Thanks to all our guests. Thanks for your attention during this and participation during this session. We're going to break there now. We've got another coffee and snack break next door for about 20 minutes. That's all 20 minutes. And then we come back for our third session, which is the final session of the morning. So please thank our guests very much.
Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.
Panel Discussion
This panel focuses on the critical role of telecom infrastructure – from fixed and mobile networks to subsea cables and edge deployments – in enabling sovereign control over data, services and national capabilities.
Recorded December 2025
Participants
Aaron Boasman-Patel
Vice President, Innovation, TM Forum
Aaron Partouche
Innovation Director, Colt Technology Services
Carsten Rossenhoevel
Co-Founder & CTO, EANTC AG
Warren Bayek
Vice President, Technology Office, Wind River
