 Welcome to a new episode of the ITU Journal webinar series, where you can find insights and forward-looking research on future and evolving technologies. The ITU Journal is an international journal providing complete coverage of all communications and networking paradigms, free of charge for both readers and authors. This publication considers yet-to-be-published papers addressing fundamental and applied research, building bridges between disciplines, connecting theory with application, and stimulating international dialogue. Its interdisciplinary approach reflects ITU's comprehensive field of interest and explores the convergence of ICT with other disciplines. We count on your support to make this webinar an interesting experience. Please submit your questions via the Q&A channel at the bottom of your screen. All questions from the audience will be taken during the Q&A session after the talk. The meeting is being recorded and the recording will be made available on the webinar website. Closed captioning is also available for this event. You can enable this by clicking on the closed caption icon at the bottom of your screen. We hope that you will enjoy the talk and we encourage you to stay connected until the end for the Wisdom Corner live life lessons. I will now give the floor to our Master of Ceremonies. Hello and welcome to the new webinar series with CTOs of the IT Journal of Future Inevolving Technologies. My name is Aleste Vallarditi from ITU, the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations Specialized Agency for Information and Communication Technologies. It is my pleasure to open the webinar today with Mr. Alex Sinclair, CTO at GSMA from UK. After the Q&A, as just announced by our avatar, I will moderate the Wisdom Corner live life lessons. So please stay online. Mr. Sinclair has agreed to a personal chat. So he will share with us some lessons learned over the years that might perhaps be useful for some of you. It is my honor now to give the floor to Mr. Seizo Onoe, Director of the ITU Telecommunications Standardization Bureau for his welcome remarks. Onoe-san, the floor is yours. Thank you, Aleste and colleagues and friends. Welcome and thank you for joining us. Academia and industry are key partners in research and development and bringing the latest innovation to market. This new series of IT webinars with CTOs is designed to support this collaboration. CTOs are sharing their insights on industry ambitions for 5G and 6G and associated innovation to boost network intelligence. Our first talk from NTT document took us through the company's research and development to advance 5G as well as the prospect for 6G to derive new improvement to our quality of life. And just last week, we heard from the Oran Alliance how machine learning can contribute to the intelligent control of 5G rate-access networks and how the automation and optimization could evolve for 6G. I will encourage you to review these talks online, recordings of all ITU webinars and workshops are available on our website creating an archive very rich in expert-oriented content. Hey, today, Alex Sinclair, CTO of GSMN will guide a global tour of 5G sharing GSMN's insight on the pace of 5G rollout around the world, the benefit that 5G is bringing to business and society, and key aspects of 5G evolution and innovation towards 6G. Alex Sinclair, thank you. Thank you very much. We highly appreciate your support. Looking ahead, we are also preparing to host talks from Ericsson and Nokia with their dates and topics soon be to be announced. These talks from CTOs are presented by the ITU journal on feature and evolving technologies. Our journal embodies ITU's commitment to the public interest. It is unique in publishing papers from world-renowned researchers at no charge to authors and readers. Our journal welcomes research on all topics all year around and I have no doubt that this CTO webinar series will inspire yet more contributions. In addition to the regular issues, our journal is currently welcoming contribution to three special issues, intelligent technologies for future networking and distribution systems, satellite constellations and connectivity from space, and next generation computer communications and networks. ITU academia membership is another key avenue for academics to engage in ITU's work. Academia and industry are reinforcing their growing collaboration by working together in ITU expert groups, responsible for radio communication, radio standardization and development. Contributions from academia bring greater strengths to our work of ITU and greater impact to research to the mutual benefit of academia and industry. We also supplement our membership driven work with open frameworks such as ITU focus group and the initiative like AI for Good, the digital currency global initiative and the United for Smart Sustainable Cities initiative. Free frameworks as well as our open workshops aims to give everyone an opportunity to influence our work. I welcome you to join us. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for your welcome remarks and now I'm very pleased to give the floor to Professor Ian Achilditz, the editor-in-chief of the ITU Journal. Ian, the floor is yours for your welcome remarks. Thank you, Alicia. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. We're all white from Atlanta with love on July 4th, which is a special day for the USA as you may know. I again welcome you all to the third season of our ITU Journal Future and Evolving Technologies webinar series. The first two seasons were dedicated to the leaders from the academia where the season had the honor to have the leaders from the industry. We had Naoki Tani-san from NTT Dokomo Japan and Alex Jinsung Choi, Deutsche Telekom Germany. And today we welcome Alex Sinclair from GSMA, United Kingdom. The objective of our journal was is to bring the academic and industrial worlds together in order to minimize the bridge between the academia and industry. Our journal ideas were incubated back in December 2019 and the inaugural issue came out in December 2020. It is an open access journal, no fees for the readers and no fees for the authors. The papers go through a review process and try to cover all forefront research activities in the world, both in the academia and industry. I will encourage you all to submit your papers and also if you have ideas for special issues, please do not hesitate to contact us. The first two seasons of our webinar series were dedicated to the leading academicians worldwide where this season has industrial leaders to present their visions. Let me express my sincere thanks to our speaker today, Alex Sinclair, for accepting our invitation and giving this webinar. Just to let you know, our season four will start in fall 2023. We lined up many leaders from the academia and we will continue the quality of our webinars. We look forward to seeing you again in the fall. Now I wish you an enjoyable and productive time with our speaker, Alex Sinclair. Thank you. Thanks a lot, Ian, for your welcome remarks. So now I'm very pleased to give the floor to Dr. Bilal Jamoussi, the Chief of ITT Study Groups for his introduction to the speaker and then Bilal will also moderate the Q&A session. Thank you. Thank you very much, Alessia. I'm very pleased to welcome our speaker, Alex Sinclair, Chief Technology Officer of the GSMA in the UK. He served as the CTO of GSMA since 2005, having joined the organization in 2003. In this role, Alex is responsible for driving the technology and strategic direction of the GSMA and working with its membership to execute key technology initiatives. With more than 30 years' experience in telecommunications in general and mobile in particular, Alex has worked for a number of companies in the UK, Germany and the United States. In the early 90s, he was part of the project team that launched T-Mobile D1 Network in Germany. In 1995, Alex helped Sinverse to launch their GSM Clearinghouse business. And prior to joining GSMA, Alex was Director of Network Engineering at ICO, a global satellite venture. Welcome, Alex. The floor is yours. Thank you very much indeed. It's an absolute honour and a pleasure to be here. Let me just share my screen with you. Bear with me. Hopefully, you can all see that. As I said, it's a pleasure to be here and a particular thanks to my old friend and way son for inviting me. Again, I'm delighted to be here. The topic for the day is transforming society in the 5G era. Now, you'll doubtless have many times over the past 10 years or more, all the key features of the technology itself, the throughput, latency, etc. The industry has done a pretty good job of marketing the technology. What's less obvious is what 5G has actually done to and for society. As expected, it really wasn't just another G with faster speeds to consumer broadband. Indeed, the true transformation has been far more important for business and ultimately society as a whole. Now, clearly, these benefits are not being felt exactly the same in all corners of the globe. And we still have another five years or more before its full global potential will be reached. But in leading markets, the progress has been quite astonishing. So let's start by taking a look at the road to 5G in the first four years. Sorry. It's been said many times that 5G has had the fastest roll out of any mobile generation and these numbers clearly demonstrate that. They show the percentage of the subscriber base using the technology over each of the quarters after launch. In the case of 5G, for example, the figure starts in Q1 2020. Now, as you can clearly see, the difference between 3G, which is in red, and 4G in black was fairly minimal, whereas 5G in blue has just powered ahead. This slide shows the forecast for the leading markets from 2023, now basically to 2030. Again, normalized as a percentage of the subscriber base. Today's numbers are in red and the forecast for 2030 is in blue. Be no surprise to see the US, China and South Korea leading the initial charge, followed by some Europeans, the rest of Asia and with Africa trailing a little bit. Now, these are, of course, percentages. So just to give a little bit more color to that, China alone has around 58% of global 5G subscribers and there's about 1.3 billion of those at this particular point in time. So the number of users is growing pretty rapidly, but what are they actually using it for? Well, let's start with consumer insights on the right-hand side of the slides. It won't come as a surprise to anyone, but 5G users are consuming more content and, of course, on a much more regular and frequent basis, particularly for things like video and gaming. 5G users are also spending less time watching video on Wi-Fi, again, not really a surprise. But how do the users rate their actual 5G usage? On the left-hand side of the slide are some highlights from a consumer survey across eight leading markets, with 70% saying that 5G has met or exceeded their expectations. So after all that CapEx investment, increased usage and reasonably happy users, has that translated into increased revenue for mobile operators? Well, in most markets, 5G to date has had a modest positive impact on what was previously declining revenues, revenue per user or output. The most pronounced being in developed Asian markets like China, Japan and Korea. It's also positive in the US and Canada, but with Europe lagging a little behind. So in most advanced markets, it's led to a modest uplift in our boom, but not universal and with significant variances. So as I mentioned earlier, 5G really isn't just about fast consumer broadband, it's much more than that. So it's time to take a look at the enterprise sector, 5G for business or 5G to be as we call it. Let's start with China, one of the first out of the gate with not only the initial 5G deployment, but also with the standalone variant that's so important for 5G to be. Well, China's reaped the rewards of being a first mover. According to the Chinese MIIT ministry, there are over 50,000 commercial use cases already in China and over 16,000 5G private networks. The applications range from mining, manufacturing, transportation, aviation, virtually every other sector has been touched by 5G. In Fujian province, for example, China Mobile has built a maritime 5G network that stretches 50 kilometers out to sea, supporting maritime management, fishing, tourism, energy applications, and covering thousands of islands and vessels along the coastline. It generates around about 100 million won in revenue by the end of 2022. China Telecom and Sunen Group's 5G smart mining application provides remote control to 200 mining trucks, 40 electric shovels, and 1,000 auxiliary vehicles, combining unmanned driving, intelligent coal mining, and inspection to improve the safety and efficiency of open pit mines. We move on to intelligent manufacturing. China Unicom and Medea Group are using 5G AR and AI for remote high quality inspection, predicted maintenance, and remote assistance for their home appliance production lines, reducing downtime and retooling times, increasing efficiency and lowering costs. Sticking with manufacturing this time of cars in Europe, a Ford Motor Company uses a 5G mobile private network at its research facility based in Essex here in the UK, using Spectrum provided by Vodafone. This allows them to implement real-time process analysis and control the machines to continuously optimize vehicle manufacturing processes and enhance production efficiency. Switching to the US and unmanned aerial vehicles, Skydio is using 5G to enable its autonomous inspection drones to coordinate their activities and quickly and reliably relay images and scans of critical infrastructure to decision makers. Regular inspections will enable infrastructure owners to create digital twins of their assets, which can be used to guide proactive maintenance and design improvements. It's been estimated that such techniques could save infrastructure owners tens of billions of dollars a year. Staying with drones, telephonic around manned life in Europe are using 5G connected drones to conduct automated stock takes at a warehouse centre in Madrid. The drones use low-latency 5G to stream video footage to an image recognition system running at the edge of the network. They're also using drones to maintain the security of their headquarters in Madrid with automatic surveillance and anomaly detection software. In Singapore, Sintel has deployed a standalone 5G network and edge compute capacity at a construction site. It connects robots that can scan the site in 3D with CCTV cameras and they supply footage to image recognition software for augmented reality services and they estimate robots scanning construction sites could lead to between 30 and 40% improvement in productivity. Now, whilst the connected TV cameras will of course also improve safety through image recognition systems detecting potential hazards. Now, I could go on, but at the GSMA we have many more examples. Some are available, that's our 5G transformation hub on the slide, where you can also find further details on each of these cases I mentioned. So, I think it's fair to say 5G has already been good for the digital transformation of many businesses and this will only increase as the global robot continues. So, 5G has been pretty good for consumers, pretty good for business, what about society? Well, the first and most obvious development was during the recent pandemic. The arrival of COVID coincided with the deployment of 5G in a number of countries. Indeed, conspiracy theorists were quick to suggest a causal link between the two. They even started attacking cell sites and maintenance engineers. But the many lockdowns around the globe caused seismic shifts in societal behavior out of sheer necessity. People were working from home, educating their children from home, receiving medical care from home, ultimately accelerating the digital transformation of society itself. The rapid rise in mobile health, mobile education and mobile banking are just obvious examples. Now, you don't always need 5G to do this. Other G's were also used, but it has provided a glimpse of the future. And 5G, of course, helped to shoulder that sudden change in traffic loading really well. Indeed, many of the things that we as an association have been talking about for decades became a reality almost overnight. Now that we're out of the pandemic, 5G continues to transform society. In many countries, an aging population means healthcare systems are under strain and resources are very unevenly distributed. If we take true in Thailand, they've worked with Syria Ranch Hospital in Bangkok to allow 5G connectivity to relay information about patients traveling in an ambulance to the medics waiting in the hospital so that they can prepare ahead of the patient's arrival at the emergency room. Since its introduction in late 2021, the survival rate of emergency patients has been greatly improved. Now pollution and air quality are also big issues for most cities around the globe. Well, in South Korea, Motov, along with the Korean operators, is testing how 5G connectivity supplemented by mobile-age computing can help identify and predict traffic hazards and air pollution in the city of Incheon. More than 50 types of data are collected by cameras, microphones and other sensors in a 5G-connected unit mounted on the rooftop of taxis. Motov plans to use 5G to underpin its urban road safety management system in other cities from 2023 onwards. Now road safety is, of course, another very important issue in cities worldwide. Telefonica and its partners are trialling a new system in Spain. It's a secure 5G connection that will inform drivers when another vehicle suddenly breaks or is stopped on the road or just when traffic lights are about to turn red. The system has a latency of milliseconds for millions of connected vehicles, and drivers will receive instant information to avoid dangerous situations. This, of course, will reduce injuries and lives lost in road accidents. These are just a sample of the different ways that 5G is transforming the society we live in, but there are many, many more. So, 5G good for business, good for society, what about the planet? Well, energy has always been important in our sector as it represents quite a significant part of the network optics. But the advent of the war in the Ukraine and the subsequent rise in energy costs has also highlighted the importance of another key 5G feature, energy efficiency. 5G was designed to be and is much more energy efficient than previous generations, adding to the desire to retire those older generations. Indeed, many operators are now running 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G in parallel. This is very costly and also very inefficient. So, the most developed markets have started to shut down or are in the process of sunset in 2G and 3G, and that brings significant energy savings. If you look at the telecom sector as a whole, it only contributes less than 1% of carbon emissions worldwide, and that stayed broadly flat despite the end-fold increase in data traffic carried every year. But 5G can also help reduce the carbon footprint of other sectors too. But it's not just about energy efficiency and carbon emissions. For example, 5G deployments are also being used in an agricultural sector to improve crop yields. China Mobile are using 5G to fully automate rice production on 12,000 acres of marginal land near Daya City, Jidin Province. It's a smart irrigation system that's helping to make the once depleted soil fertile again. It uses remote control machinery and drones, and it's made the farm operations much more efficient, productive, and sustainable. So, 5G has been good for people, business, society, and planet, but we're only halfway through the 5G era. 5G advanced or 5.5G, if you will, should be finalized next year, and products will follow shortly after. A number of operators have already announced their intent to launch. Indeed, I've just come back from Shanghai, where we had a first adopters event. In September, GSMA launched a white paper called Advancing the 5G Era. Looking at the benefits and opportunities for 3GPP release 18, 5G advanced. Now, there are a lot of improvements and features, so we grouped them into three board categories. There's the usual performance improvements, things like advanced downlink and uplink MIMO, improved management and efficiency, OSS functions, for example, and then enhancements for specific use cases like extended reality, URLLC, etc. Bear with me. So, what will 5G advanced actually be useful? These are three further case studies from our own again 5G transformation hub. According to China Mobile and Huawei, the cross-layer collaboration features for XR could enable a five-fold increase in XR users and reduce network cost by up to 80% at the same time. The second example is uplink-centric broadband communication technology. Prototype field test by China Mobile and Huawei achieved uplink speeds of more than 1 gigabit per second for a single user, and this could turbocharge HD video uploads. The third example is self-powered sensors, so-called passive IoT devices. Prototype field test suggests that this could provide a 10 fold coverage improvement compared to traditional RFID devices. That's just three simple examples of what we might see in the coming years. Now, despite all this great technology, there's still one part of the puzzle required to complete the 5G era promise. That's spectrum, and we're going to need a lot more of it. Bear with me a second. Lost the actual presentation? Sorry, keep clicking in the wrong place. Bear with me. There we go. So, let's start with the current spectrum status quo. This slide gives an overview of where 5G spectrum has already been assigned by local regulators, so the countries in green have completed their initial assignments and have more planned. The countries in red have also concluded initial assignments, and those in black have assignments planned but not yet completed. So which bands have dominated the 5G rollout so far? Well, the graphic on the right shows the 3.5GHz band is the clear winner and by some considerable margin. As a result, it's mid-band spectrum in the range 1 to 7GHz that dominates with around 73% of current deployments. Next, rather unsurprisingly, is low-band, below 1GHz. That accounts for around 20% of deployments. And then finally, we have the relatively new high-band spectrum above 24GHz in the millimeter waveband. Currently, it only makes up 7%, but that's something that will increase over time. Now, at the end of the year, we have the World Radio Conference in Dubai. At the GSMA, we have a vision for WRC23 as an enabling event for good for the benefits of billions. And it's important to stress that in a world where lots of organizations are competing for spectrum assignments, our industry serves more than any other with more than five and a half billion unique users, and countless others who benefit indirectly from the services we provide. So additional spectrum from mobile is for the benefit of billions. The decisions taken at this year's conference can increase harmonization, improve digital equality, and provide the capacity to expand 5G up to the end of this decade. Our vision of a successful WRC23 is one that's truly aimed at the whole world, bringing everybody on a journey towards a better and more prosperous future. So we're looking for spectrum, of course, in three more bands. We need more low-band spectrum to continue to drive the digital equality in our markets. As you know, the propagation characteristics in this band allow for much greater reach, providing more rural connectivity that will in turn provide more economic growth in those areas. Mid-band spectrum around the three and a half gigahertz mark has already been pivotal to 5G rollout in more than 70% of launches. And with a good WRC outcome, we can harmonize bands across the Americas and the Mayer region just as an example, providing economies of scale that will lower cost of ownership and lower the usage gap. And then finally, moving on to the six gigahertz band, this is the best opportunity to expand 5G spectrum, providing capacity where it's needed to keep up with the ever-increasing demand. It can, of course, also lead to lower network density and in turn lower carbon emissions. As always, the GSMAY is hopeful of a good outcome from this most important spectrum events. So to conclude, at a time where we're only roughly halfway through the 5G era, we can be pretty proud as an industry about what 5G has delivered. For the benefits delivered to people, business and society as a whole. That's not the end of the 5G story, as 5G will continue to shape the future and deliver those benefits and to all regions of the world, provided, of course, that enough affordable spectrum can be made available. A GSM, as I said, we are as ever hopeful of a positive outcome for WRC23 and that we will see 5G deliver its full potential by around 2030. So that concludes my talk. Many thanks to all of you for your time today. Thank you very much, Alex, for a very clear presentation. I would like now to open the floor for Q&A, and I invite the participants to type their question using the Q&A button. I've seen a couple of questions on the chat, so I will use those, but then I hope to move to the Q&A. So the first question, Alex, is UK specific? In the UK, operators are saying 5G essay rollout will not be completed till 2028. Why do you think rollout is taking so long? If 5G really does allow new revenues, and also do we need much better in building coverage for commercial applications to be enabled? Okay, well, let's take the first one first. As I pointed out in the slide, obviously, development and deployment of 5G is progressing at different speeds around the world. Actually, for Europe, or by European standards, the UK is not doing too badly, but of course, it's a question of business priorities. At the same time, we're still strengthening all of the 4G networks as well. So it comes down really to commercial viability. It will happen. It's happening, as I mentioned earlier, a slightly slower pace than, say, Asia or the United States. But it is inevitable. It will happen. The second question I think was around in building coverage. Well, that's always been a problem, and there are many interesting solutions that are being developed. As you move up the spectrum to a millimeter wave, it becomes even more acute. That's where things like reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, like materials, new materials, are coming into play to redirect energy, redirect the beings where they need to go. So there are some very interesting solutions out there already, and of course, that's already expected to be quite a key part of 6G as well. Great. Thank you. A follow-on question perhaps from Alex Lawrence. It's about 5G use cases in the enterprise. How many of these use cases are by existing MNOs versus private networks, private 5G networks? That's a great question. I would say at the moment, the majority are existing MNOs, and that's partially down to the spectrum allocation policy. If you go to countries like Germany, it's quite possible for, say, Bosch and Stuttgart to get spectrum directly from the government. Normally, they would have to partner in most other markets to do that. I don't really have the global statistics. I did mention briefly what the MIIT ministry in China had said. Over 16,000 private networks in China alone. I do know of quite a few 5G private network deployments in many different sectors, and we're expecting that to increase. But clearly, a number of them will be private. They'll be in partnership with perhaps suppliers rather than operators. Or if you can get the skill set yourself, and if you're lucky enough to get your hands on some, for example, open-run equipment that Alex Joy was talking about last week, I think, then with the right expertise or with the right partners, maybe an integrator, you could potentially do it yourself. The key point here is most other sectors are not experts in running 5G networks. It's far easier to partner with an operator. Clearly, I would say that. But if it's not an operator, then it's typically going to be somebody else that has a deep knowledge of 5G. To go it alone from the offset is going to be quite difficult. Great. Thanks. Question about frequencies on your slide 10. We had about 10 or so bands that have been used to juggle between 5G spectrum, assigned and not assigned. So can you talk to that juggling between the assigned and not assigned? Well, it basically comes down to the fact, as you know, that although the spectrum is made available for mobile usage by the UN, it has to be ratified on an individual market or country level. Each country, of course, makes its own mind up. That's also true in the European Union. It's not a matter for the Union itself. It's the member states. So it comes down to government policy. Some are very forward-leaning and actually make the spectrum available without going through an auction process. Auctions are fine. We have auctions in many countries as well. But it's really quite complicated to try and describe the motivations of each of the different countries around the world. Obviously, we would strongly advocate for allocating as much of the spectrum as already being put aside for mobile as possible. But inevitably, it takes time in different markets. So they have, again, different priorities. So many of the markets where spectrum is available are, of course, the more developed markets. But even in some of those, take China, for example, a millimeter wave spectrum has yet to be allocated to the best of my knowledge in China. So it's down to each country to decide its policy. Great. Thanks. So in your presentation, you talked about the additional bandwidth that users are benefiting from in terms of content viewing and so on. You mentioned the industrial applications with remote control and massive connectivity. There is a question in terms of cross-continental surgical operations. Is the latency there and is 5G serving those use cases? So I'm going to go out in the limb here and be rather blunt. It's very sexy to demonstrate a cross-continental sort of surgery. In practice, that's always going to be niche. I've actually witnessed one myself. I was in an operating theatre in Barcelona. But what was actually happening was that if you like, the mentor surgeon was monitoring the operation quite carefully so they could help the actual surgeon that was performing the operation rather than it being a truly remote surgery. As I said, I know it's great for marketing. I know it gets all of the headlines of the attentions. But to me, that's going to be niche at best. The more practical applications where you've got people helping to train surgeons remotely, helping to monitor them and basically sort of hold their hands if you like through the first couple of surgeries. And there are quite a few leading surgeons that are doing just that. Great. Thank you. You recall, Alex, a few years ago, there was a lot of discussion about EMF, electromagnetic field and impact on human health and GSMA, ITU, WHO and various organizations, ICNIR, etc. updated some of the limits and the measurement standards. There is a question sort of related to that. If you could speak to that and maybe also address the question about how have we done any studies on the effect on wildlife, especially on birds on a 5G deployment? Okay. Again, great question. I'll take the first one first. In terms of EMF and 5G, many of you will know that we have this festival called Glastonbury in the UK. Well, a couple of years ago, BT was covering that with millimeter wave and protesters were handing out full-page flyers saying that they'd weaponized death rates. Suffice to say that is not the case. Our industry has a very long track record in carrying out exactly the studies you were referring to. And obviously, because things like millimeter wave are relatively new, that's something that has garnered attention as well. But we have actually carried out studies there as well. And I would actually single out our Australian colleagues in particular, because Telstra and others, they've done a really good job of making sure that not just the test room, but the test is still applicable at those kind of frequencies because obviously, lots of the tests we do have to do with warming of the head and things like that. So you've got to understand some of the physics if you like, the processes. In terms of studies about wildlife, I have to say I am completely ignorant. I don't know if there have been any studies on the impact on birds. There may well have been, but it's not something that I'm knowledgeable about. Thank you very much. I think that covers all the questions we have received. I would like to thank you for the excellent presentation and also for addressing all the questions. I'll also thank the participants for their engagement and the questions and turn it back over to Alessia. Thank you so much, Bilal, for moderating this Q&A session. And thank you, Alex Sinclair, for your very interesting presentation. So now it's time to move to the wisdom corner, live life lessons, which is based upon the idea to give a unique, you know, a special angle to these series of webinars, adding a personal touch. So our speaker will guide students and also young researchers in the field of current ICT. And he will also share some impactful life lessons, I'm sure. So if you agree, I would start with my first question. Could you tell us which is your hard-earned life lessons that you would like to share with us that might perhaps help somebody attending the webinar today? We also call it failure if we can, if we may. It may be as good as long as it's fast failure, I think that's university accepted. But in terms of life lessons, you know, being an engineer, I like to plan things. So planning your future career is always a good idea. But in reality, many of the best opportunities you're going to meet are rather unexpected. And it's very important that you're willing and open to those ideas to seize the opportunities, even if they weren't originally part of your master plan. For example, in my early 20s, I just purely, by random, I answered an advert in the trade press for a job in software development. Didn't really expect to get the job. And they initially told me I didn't have enough experience. But they came back in six months, offered me the job. And as a result, I spent 10 happy years in Germany, working in three different German cities, none of which was planned. So I do think it's important when you're starting out as well. By all means, have a plan and a sort of direction of travel, where you think you might go. But it's important to be open for opportunities as well. And don't be too afraid of taking them. Excellent. Yeah, definitely. Excellent suggestion. Thank you. And let's go to the fields, maybe on topics that you would recommend students to study today. Maybe you could perhaps highlight emerging technologies or ICT trends that you find particularly promising for future research. We are sure that your advice could guide students who are just starting their careers. So again, that one's quite easy. I'm going to cheat because the first one's pretty obvious. It's AI, or to be more accurate, machine learning. I mean, it's already starting to touch every aspect of our lives. You don't need to be a deep data scientist or machine learning expert. But it's very important to understand the basics, what it can do and what it can't. So you can understand how it fits in with what you're doing and the tasks that you have to complete. And similarly, I think quantum computing is another one, much hyped, very poorly understood in general. So it's great. If again, you can understand the fundamentals. You don't need to be a deep expert. But if you can understand again, what it can do and what it can't do, I think that will stand you in very good stead. Those are the obvious ones that spring to mind. I'm sure there's a dozen more. Excellent. Sure. Of course, AI machine learning quantum. And the fundamentals, always the fundamentals. Sure. And then let's let me ask you how will in your opinion, chat GPT impact the future of research, but also everyone's life in general? Well, you know, I'd argue that large language models and chat GPT is just one of them are already doing precisely that. I mean, if you haven't played with one of them, like chat GPT, you probably really should. Again, it's more to understand the capabilities, but also the limitations. At the moment, I think the largest single usage is for efficiency gains. There are many routine tasks that you do. And you could ask chat GPT to produce a version for you. That's probably 80% of the world. But you're still going to have to check it. I mean, just for fun. I actually asked chat GPT to write me a speech for this webinar. It was quite good, but it also highlighted the relative weakness because the training data that chat GPT has used, it's more of what you might call an expert generalist. It doesn't do so well where domain specific knowledge is required, whether it's telecoms or car engines, for example. The other thing you need to be wary of is bias in the training data because obviously a lot of it has just come from the open internet. And even what they call hallucination results that the model thinks are fine, but are actually just crazy. So it's always very worthwhile checking the results to be sure. As of this point in time, and I may be proven wrong in the next few years, I think it's more of a help and an efficiency game than something to worry about. Okay, good. So you use it often and you encourage also your collaborator to use it? Absolutely. Okay, that's the future I see and the present actually currently. All right. I have another question. How do you stay up to date with the latest advancements and research in the ICT field? Is there any specific resources or journals, conferences, maybe a book that you have read recently, or maybe communities that you would recommend researchers to engage with? Now this one's my Achilles heel because I think I should invest more time in this than I do. But it is kind of important. It doesn't matter how busy you are. You should try and set aside some time where you're doing precisely that, particularly as a technocrat. You have to stay on top of what's going on. But I'm one of the worst offenders. Firstly, I get most of my ideas from just the newsfeed and tech journals, et cetera, that I subscribe to. But then I will tend to follow up with online courses and material if there's any area of specific interest. Last summer, for example, I decided to do a quantum course, quantum computing course, because I felt that was something that I needed to do. The most important thing is there's a wealth of training videos out there, including quite a lot from top academic institutions like MIT. I'm also kind of fortunate because we have our own in-house GSMA Intelligence Analyst Unit. They're in my department, so I tend to get a lot of, if you like, tip-ops internally from them. They produce quite a lot of good papers, generally about the near future. Not the really wacky stuff. But can you access those tools from GSMA? Some of them are, but there's also a paywall as well as a subscription. So some are, some are. All right. Thank you. Thanks. Is there any question that maybe Vilella or Noe-san, Ian, would like to ask our speaker or the audience before we conclude? Just a quick question, Alex. How is it being a CTO for GSMA versus a CTO in the private sector? Well, Noe-san will appreciate this because he's been the real thing for many, many years. I would say the advantage is that I don't get a call from my CEO every time part of the network goes down. In other words, I don't have to concern myself about keeping a network up and running in fires, floods, and all sorts of very adverse conditions. It's a very different job because what we do is all about effectively consensus building. It's trying to bring people together. In my experience, they tend to focus on their differences, even if it's only 5%. If they agree on 95%, they'll argue to death about the 5%. Our job is to try and get them to realize, you agree on nearly everything? Maybe with a little bit of compromise, you can do the other 5% as well. The other thing I would say is, unless you're in one of the largest groups in the world, the sheer breadth of technology and solutions that I get to see sitting at the GSMA is absolutely mind-boggling. I have seen what some people regard as low-tech solutions in, say, Africa that, to me, are just technically brilliant and get the job done. That's something that I wouldn't have seen, for example, had I been a CTO of a UK operator, for example. There are quite a few differences, but luckily for me, I don't have the kind of pressure when the network goes down and everybody starts calling me up. I know he-san knows all about that. Alex, anyway, I very much appreciate your participation today. Actually, you are the representative of the whole mobile industry, so you have a great role, not just one company, the CTO, but you are CTO of the whole industry. Yeah, so I very much appreciate your contributions and your effort. Thank you. Thank you very much for this interesting webinar and so thank you to all the participants. So we look forward to seeing you all again next fall. And with this, we conclude today's webinar. Thank you so much. Bye. Bye. Bye.