Episode 17 : Four Trends to Watch: AI Voice, EU Social Media Rules, Drones & Satellite Sovereignty

Peter Jarich (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to Intelligence and Noise, the GSMA Intelligence podcast, where we take up around 40 minutes of your time to talk about the week's news, try and lend a little bit of intelligence to your life, sort through the noise. We do it through the lens of the GSMA CEO newsletter, talking a bit about what we thought was important from the newsletter.

Digging into one of the stories and then what didn't make the cut and why we think that it's also important for you to know. We're gonna do things differently this time. We're gonna talk about all four stories. For me, the two that did make it in and the two that didn't, because although it's September, things have picked up on the news front, and there was a lot of important stuff to talk about. So it's gonna be a good episode. Hey, Tim, how you doing?

Tim Hatt (00:56)
Good, Peter. How are you?

Peter Jarich (00:57)
I am, I am good. So, as is my wont, I am gonna kick it off with a little bit of an anecdote. And I try and make the anecdotes tie into the news, but maybe this week I'm giving up on that. I recognize that I was off on holiday a few weeks ago, and I think we didn't do the podcast that week or we played a best of, and I was gone when Dolly Parton passed away. And that would have been on August 25th.

Now, unless you were probably under a rock, you probably saw lots of in memoriams and discussions, and I think lots of people have their own stories. Personally, it was about a decade ago that I was lucky enough to see her in concert, and this was on the eve of the presidential elections in the US. That would have been 2016. And I saw how deftly she managed to pass along her views, but also make sure not to alienate anyone. It was an amazing bit of work that she did. And I think that was part of the charm, right? Was the idea of how she could really bring so many different groups together, and it was amazing.

And I was reminded of that recently. There was a Policy Tracker piece that talked about back in 2008, she semi-famously filed comments with the FCC when the FCC was opening up a consultation on TV white spaces. And it's interesting. If you've got access to Policy Tracker, check it out. It's a great story, but you see that same sort of charm in terms of the way her comments were filed, in terms of, you know, I don't know all the legalese, so I've got smart people to inform me. And again, doing an incredible job there of weighing in on important topics, but also doing it in a way that could bring people together.

So that reminded me of that. I would say check out the Policy Tracker story if you have access to it. It's a great bit of history that links Dolly Parton to the telecoms world.

Separately, if you're looking for other podcasts to keep you busy, check out Dolly Parton's America. It was a podcast by Jed Abumrad, who you might know from Radiolab. If you don't know Radiolab, you should. It's a really, really good series. And it's a nice bit of why Dolly has been so beloved across the world in far-flung areas, with his own personal connection to her through his dad, who took care of her when she had a car accident. Great, great, great, great podcast series. Check it out.

So, with that, time to get into the actual news. So this was a really busy week last week, and I think the stories that did make it in, if you are lucky enough to be one of the people who are on the list to receive the CEO newsletter, you know what the two stories were that made it in. It was the fact that we have a new proposal for social media limits on kids in the EU and the resurgence of voice being cool again.

So, Tim, let's start with the EU social limits. This is the EU Kids Act. Can we start by acknowledging that we need some better branding? Kids Act. The EU Kids Act appeals—

Tim Hatt (04:51)
I'll, I'll, I'll take a note to self on that one and send Ursula von der Leyen a suggestion in my spare time. But—

Peter Jarich (04:55)
Feels—

Tim Hatt (04:56)
Von der Leyen—

Peter Jarich (04:59)
I mean, I'm sure she's—I mean, you know, she listens. I mean, she's a regular listener to the podcast. She was there from number one.

Tim Hatt (05:04)
She, she doesn't. Ursula, if you're listening out there, you're welcome anytime, but we'll, we'll give you some input on that. The—

Peter Jarich (05:11)
What, what do you mean, if? You know, you know she—I mean, I think right off the bat, I will give the EU credit for there was no ambiguity, right? I mean, you look at—and I'm just gonna read these quotes here. I mean, you look at the statements, right? No social media under the age of 13, no personal account under the age of 15. European—that's what von der Leyen was saying. Europe has the power to act. It is us who decide the rules.

Wow, that's pretty straightforward. And then we're reversing the burden of proof. Platforms will have to prove to us that they are safe. 'Cause it is not about our minors accessing social media. It's about when and how do we allow social media to access our minors.

And I think for me that kind of captures it, right? Because let's just go to the details, right? Under 13, no social media accounts; 13 to 14, parent-supervised mini accounts; 15-plus, independent social media.

But then the real big difference here, right, is this idea that there's sort of a push more than just setting out those limits. There's really a push on how the platforms operate. And I think this is, given all the stuff that the EU has done with working with social media companies, it makes sense.

You know, I'm still—and I'll just sort of—we've harped on this in the past. I've harped on this in the past. Right, the platforms we're talking about, online social networking services, clearly, right, which includes Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, etc.; video sharing; online games; software applications, including app stores; operating systems, which may be involved; but then, of course, the platforms themselves.

Messaging. Again, I always have an issue when we don't think of messaging as part of this, but that is what that is. As the resident parent of this podcast, your thoughts make sense?

Tim Hatt (07:16)
Well, well, I said six months ago when the UK put their proposal in, it was the best news I'd had in six months, and I'll reiterate that.

I think here what's interesting to me, and I'll build just on what you said, is the specifics of this have been very clear and they've set out a kind of phased onboarding for young people of social media. So it's an outright ban if you're under 13. If you're 13 and 14, it's sort of partial access, time limits, you know, specifications. And then beyond that, there's sort of a gradation into it.

And I think, to your point on terms of how platforms are allowed to act, this is all tied up in the same conversation around digital safety and making sure that there is control at a regulatory level as to the content that young people see.

I think the question will be, around beyond the announcement itself, is how do the member states ratify and implement it? They have to do that unanimously for this to take effect. And the other question I have, Peter, is does this get put into US-European trade frictions? Because I know the president has been pretty vocal about that. It's a real test of European solidarity to push this through. Not sure what your thoughts—

Peter Jarich (08:38)
Yeah, not only how do they ratify it, but how do they enforce it, right? I mean, because even if they all ratify it, enforcement approaches might be different. Some may seek stricter rules. I don't know.

I think it's interesting, to your point, though, around how this impacts the trade side of things or relationship between the US and EU. It does feel like this coming so closely on the Meta case, on the restrictions that are being placed on Meta. It almost feels like the EU might have been—I don't want to say emboldened, right? But when we look at the cause, this isn't just about limits, right?

You know, the stuff that we've seen to date is no social media and here's some platforms for this age group, or maybe we're gonna change the age group, or maybe we're gonna tweak some things. I mean, this is, you know, we look at the proposed restrictions on the platforms here, right? You know, bans on infinite scrolling, restrictions on engagement mechanics that are addictive, no unsolicited messages from strangers, no push notifications during sleeping hours, private accounts by default, geolocation by default, camera and microphone permissions disabled by default.

This is really, you know, I think as much as the headlines that we've seen everywhere have been around, you know, the EU gets its act together around figuring out a unified age limit, that seems to be, I think, people are missing the big part, which is this is much more around the EU saying it's not just about age limits, it's about the way that these companies engage.

And I think that's the big difference, at least for me, and it's why it's so—and again, you see again, for me, you see that from the comments, right, from von der Leyen right from the beginning, right? This is how we're going to be doing this. This is not just about, really well put together, about when they can engage our minors, but how they can engage them and how they have access to them.

So I think that's gonna be the interesting piece.

Tim Hatt (10:52)
Absolutely. And let's not forget the scale at play here. The EU has a population of around 450 million people. Estimates are that under-18s make up sort of 15 to 20% of that. So depending on where you take it, you're looking at a 70, 80, maybe 90 million cohort who are coming through the ranks when they reach that age. That's a sizable number of people.

And so if you're Meta, if you're TikTok, if you are a big social media platform whose revenues beyond the US would be number two in the EU, this is a big deal. And so it's a question, to your point, about how they engage, how they align. And do you get—we've talked about this before, Peter—it's not just one company following the rules, it's alignment across all of them. And so it's really an industry paradigm change.

Peter Jarich (11:42)
And obviously, I mean, obviously with all of this, if we do come back to the age-limit restrictions, you know, there's obviously an opportunity for the mobile industry in terms of how we can look at verifying accounts, how we can look at verifying age, you know, a huge opportunity for age verification, particularly with some of the work that's being done with the API front.

But what's interesting there is the flip side, and I think you see this. It's just by definition how this stuff needs to work. And I—you see this reflected—is social media, right? So if you're not going out to check out what the memes have to say and what the kids are saying, I mean, if you're not checking out to see what the kids are saying about regulation that might impact them, you're not doing your job.

And so it's interesting, you just check out some of the memes that are out there, and you've got some of them that are, "Okay, dangerous for the kids, but not for you." That's a reminder. Yeah, maybe, maybe we need to be thinking about limits on everyone, or healthy use for everyone.

Just, you know, EU kids, that could require you to prove your age before playing certain games. Fair enough. But then really this broader idea, and you've gotta love it when people just leverage the same meme, right? You know, the idea of Fred from Scooby-Doo unmasking the villain, right? And this idea of, you know, "Hey, age verification app to keep kids safe." But no, it's really about a digital ID app to control Europeans. Right.

And this idea that—is this a, you know, is this an idea that this is a first step to controlling people? Which is, you're always gonna have conspiracy theorists, but let's be honest. You know, this idea that every adult in Europe might soon have to prove their age to use social media. Well, of course. I mean, you can't just say we need to prove your age if you're a kid, but you don't have to if you're an adult, because how would you know if they're an adult if they don't prove their age? Right?

So it is a bit of—it is a bit of a reality that yes, by definition, this would have to apply, or we would have to see some age verification from everyone. Again, how you do that at scale?

It's a good thing we've got ID verification and we've got some great APIs out there for you. And if you're interested in that, I know a person or two who can probably help you.

Tim is still happy for this and his kids, even though we're in the UK and not part of the EU, but it is a true voice.

Let's move to the second piece.

Voice, something the kids definitely aren't using. So we can move to the thing that kids definitely—they're not too worried about voice technology.

This was really bringing together a couple of things, kind of kicked off by the fact that Radisys was talking about its new V.ai solution, which is really about bringing together voice applications, dev tools, and speech AI tech.

It's really a solution for telcos. They can take these apps, turnkey, launch them, they can customize them. They've got a whole bunch of partners, ElevenLabs, Haya, Speechmatics, etc., etc. And of course they made a link to New Calling and the Camara work.

But this followed on—just sort of, it was, I think, maybe in the week before or before that—Mavenir launching its—Sonus partnering with Sonus, rather—launching its partnership there, which was really about bringing some voice into the Mavenir core solution.

And then, of course, Alianza buying a company called Scriber, which is really about bringing connecting more into meeting platforms.

So, a whole bunch of voice stuff, which was really sort of a—let's stop. And I think that's, for what it's worth, a bit of philosophizing. I think that's one of the values here of what the GSMA does for the CEO newsletter, maybe calling out some of these—I don't want to call them weak signals, right? But when you see across a number of weeks these sort of things, you know, it's maybe a reminder.

I'm gonna pause and say not that much of a reminder, because it was only a few months ago after MWC that in the wrap-up, Tim and I think—I think you take charge of the wrap-up—we called that out as one of the big four themes that was unexpected.

It's right there. If you've seen our wrap-up, great. If not, shout out, we'll send it to you. If you shout out, I assume it's because you're trying to prove that I'm not being dishonest. You don't really care about the analysis. You saw Peter said it was in there. Is he lying or not? And I'm not.

I don't have time—note to self, go and go and change it. No, it is right there on the unexpected trends that we thought we saw in the executive summary: the return of voice.

Why does voice matter, Tim? I mean, why are we—we like—like again, I'm sure no kids are using it. I haven't—I never get spam calls on my phone because I never use my actual—I never use it, and so I don't get spam calls.

Why are we talking about voice?

Tim Hatt (17:14)
Well, well, first of all, yay, yes for getting a prediction, right? It doesn't happen often my end, so I'm gonna—we're just gonna acknowledge that off the bat. Take the—

Peter Jarich (17:21)
Take the win, take the win.

Tim Hatt (17:23)
Take the win when you get it.

Why does voice matter? Well, I think, Peter, what's interesting about these collection of stories—and we have talked about voice to some degree on this podcast—but it's still a universal communication channel, number one.

We know from our consumer survey, 85% of people use voice every week on a mobile phone. Some countries are higher, some are lower. But I'm gonna call that pretty well ubiquitous.

I think, secondly, you now see a lot of AI companies introducing real-time translation, which plays to the fact that even though the international business language is English, the majority of people in the world are not native English speakers.

When you look down the line, over a billion Mandarin, you have almost 500 million Spanish, the French diaspora across Africa, to name just a few. And then, of course, you have dialects and accents.

And the point I'm trying to make here is that you need to be able to cater for all types of conversations. When I look at the Mavenir solution you talked about, what's interesting—this is embedded in the mobile core. That means that an operator deploying this will have this as a native functionality so that people don't need to, you know, they don't need to get an app, they don't need to install anything. It's just there.

Provided there's carrier support. And that's going to ease the user experience and probably drive more loyalty in the channel.

So I think there's a lot of interesting angles, and we haven't even touched on the development angle of this, which is also relevant. But you can see that as much as AI comes into business productivity and networks and everything else, let's not forget about the fundamentals, and voice is really one of those.

Peter Jarich (19:05)
Yeah, and I think the number of times—and it I think it's sometimes hard to put these in terms or to explain to someone who's, on face value, some of this stuff is pretty opaque, right?

But I think, to your point about it being embedded in the core with the Mavenir story, right? This went back to when T-Mobile in the US launched its translation service earlier in the year, and I think was talking to someone who's like, "Yeah, but I mean, big deal. I mean, Apple, Google, they've been talking about doing that with their AirPods."

I'm like, yeah, yeah, of course. But that requires you to have that. That requires both of you to have that. And it's much more accessible if it's actually in the network for any phone. Like, okay, right?

And I think sometimes it's not—we move so quickly through these things, you can't sort of see that side of things.

I think the flip side, or the other thing that for me is particularly interesting, is that these three stories, although they're both about voice, are both so very different, right?

The Mavenir one is about putting this into the core, right? Enhancing the core with some voice capabilities. Cool.

To your point, the Radisys side of things was more broadly about development of different apps that you can offer to telcos that telcos can launch. It's really looking at the network, but then seeing that as a platform that you're adding some extra things on. You're adding the AI applications onto that network platform. The telco then becomes sort of an app provider, and it's more of a broader ecosystem play.

And then, of course, the Alianza side of things is more about meetings and more about business.

For me, I think that's interesting because although they're all very different, that shows different routes to market, different opportunities for a telco, for an operator.

Yeah, it's not just, okay, here's your role. Your role is you're gonna add some voice. Hey, look at this thing that T-Mobile US did. Add some voice into your core. This is your role. Yay, you.

It's, okay, depending upon your market, depending upon your appetite, depending upon your capabilities, here's different things you can do. And it's a broad, a broad set of opportunities.

Tim Hatt (21:18)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a really interesting point. We're gonna talk about some stories in a minute that go to the same point of all coalescing around a theme in a different way.

But I think as we—the question for me here, one of the interesting questions will be, do you start to see the other vendors embedding this on a native basis? And do you get the operators playing ball? Because once you do that, you get a virtuous circle and you get scale.

The risk here is that it doesn't—

Peter Jarich (21:44)
I mean, I'm nearly—

Tim Hatt (21:46)
—and it kind of gets fragmented.

Peter Jarich (21:48)
I'm nearly positive other vendors have done this, whether or not they're playing it up. You know, my—I guess if you go to any core vendor and say, "Hey, can I have this?" And, you know, you know from some of the work that we've done and the work that we did around the agenda core earlier in the year and some of the work I've known, you know, the vendors are rolling that stuff out.

I think it's just a question of how much they play that up versus how interesting do they think it is.

I will say the angle that I didn't see played here, and maybe it's probably more of an angle for the Radisys story than anything else, is the potential role that voice solutions can play in emerging markets, about allowing access to AI services to a broader set of folks.

Yes, they've all got smartphones, so it's not like saying that they're all accessing this on feature phones, but I think that could open up some interesting opportunities. We don't see it played out here, but maybe we'll hear more about this.

It is worth noting that the Radisys announcement was to some extent, timing-wise, triggered by C-CAS 26. So C-CAS 26 kicks off. I think it will have taken place earlier in the week. That's an event in Amsterdam. The tagline is "brings together telco, CPaaS, AI, cloud and ecosystem leaders."

You don't see CPaaS called out very often in a list of different companies, which gives you a hint of who's driving it. It's largely driven by the CPaaS community and the CPaaS Association, Alliance, Rob Kerver and those guys.

Too late if you're listening to this to probably attend, but if you check it out, it's a set of analysts and folks that we all know really well. So it should be a good—good.

Hopefully they had a whole bunch of good conversations there and enjoyed Amsterdam while the rest of us are not there. And the GSMA—

Tim Hatt (23:50)
Yeah, yeah.

Peter Jarich (23:52)
—is there, right? So we've got colleagues who are there, or who—

You said we're gonna move on to some other stories, talking about different angles and the same theme. Which one do we wanna kick off with?

Tim Hatt (24:06)
Let's do that. Let's switch gears.

So I wanna move to a story in the UK on drones, first of all. And the news here is BT has announced some deployments of its drone-in-a-box solution with the British Transport Police. They have seven currently deployed drone-in-a-box locations, and they plan to expand to 14 over the next two years.

Just for our viewers who are non-UK residents, the British Transport Police manage the country's rail infrastructure and other transport infrastructure and keep us all safe on that.

And I think what's interesting here, Peter, is the angle that BT has been able to use mobile connectivity for these drones. And two, it's been able to go beyond the visual line of sight, which is there's an acronym called BVLOS. And why that matters is that has been one of the fundamental factors for drone commercialization so far.

And there are now regulatory moves to ease the restrictions on that, which means that if you're a British Transport Police or a mining company or an energy operator, you can use drones for very remote site selection. And that allows you to get to those.

It also is a very useful way of monetizing network infrastructure for BT and other operators.

And I think this is an interesting story to look at progress that we've seen on this front.

Peter Jarich (25:35)
Yeah, I'd say, one, it's a drone story, right? Good to see, like, tick, shows stuff's going on with drones.

Two, it's a good example of monetization, B2B as the monetization angle for 5G and networks, tick, right?

I think the parts for me that, again, are maybe a little bit under the radar, but I think that are the things worth paying attention to are, you know, you called it out, right? So much of this is about regulatory enablement, being able to actually do these things, right? Being able to support beyond visual line of sight, right?

And I say that in part because, you know, you called it out. It's part of the story, but also because we've done some work in that, right? We've done some work a number of years ago to call out sort of the role of regulation in supporting the drone economy.

Did some benchmarking there, updated those benchmarks. Was it last year? Last year that we updated—

Tim Hatt (26:39)
It was. It was last year. Yeah.

Peter Jarich (26:40)
Updated those benchmarks. And that's really, again, it’s an important reminder that these business models are enabled by a regulatory environment that allows things to happen, right?

And we're seeing that all the time now, right? On a different side of things with network slicing, right? You hear network slicing all the time. People are afraid to do it. People are afraid to do it. They don't know what the rules are.

It's a reminder that if you have that certainty, you can open up these business models. And this is just a good example of that.

But then the last one for me is that—and we've said this and we saw MWC. We're going to see it MWC next year. We're going to see it at NOVA in just a bit. You know, the role of critical communications and mission-critical industries, industries with those requirements, in driving this stuff, right?

That I think we went into this early on going, hey, everyone and his brother's gonna get value from 5G and they're all going to require all of these apps, and maybe that's still coming, right?

But the recognition that the industries that are going to drive this are the ones with real height requirements, right? Strict requirements where it needs to work.

And so, go figure, right? The first thing that you see for BT is with the British Transport Police. I think it's a reminder that we're gonna continue, at least in the near term, to see military, defense, public safety, other things that are critical, but maybe you don't think of them like utilities, like healthcare.

It's a great example.

Tim Hatt (28:22)
Yep.

And then, just building on what you said before we go into the final story, you know, I think the UK is a good example here of industry and government working together for a common aim.

The reason I say that, when we did the rankings for countries on their regulatory readiness for drones in 2023, you know, we looked at the G7, we looked at a basket of other countries. The UK was kind of mid-table in that. Scored 70.

When we refreshed it last year, it bumped up to 76 and it was third. The big reason for that is there had been easements on spectrum liberalization and the ability now to look at BVLOS.

So that's a good example of somebody going directly through. And when you look at our enterprise survey data, you look at the range of verticals that are interested in using connectivity through drones, you know, you've got energy sectors 80%, oil and gas around 80%, transport and logistics 75%.

So there is demand there if you get the right alone—

Peter Jarich (29:24)
And for those folks who aren't in the UK, or maybe you are in the UK and you're wondering what does the British Transport Police do? Those are the folks that, at least as I read this, they're working across the UK rail network, checking in things like trespass, welfare, operational disruptions.

You know, I will say, as someone who rides the train, when you're on the train and you get home two hours later because there was a trespasser on the tracks, had to go and drag them off the tracks, it is—it is. I assume these drones will be picking those people up and taking them—we'll be like picking the trespassers up and taking them off the track.

I also hope that we're gonna get a new BBC reality TV series about British Transport Police. It feels like the exciting world of keeping trespassers off the lines would be—I'm pitching that. I'm picturing that. What is the other story—

Tim Hatt (30:22)
Coming, coming, coming to a screen near you.

Peter Jarich (30:25)
So, so you said we were gonna come back to a story that had multiple—

Tim Hatt (30:28)
Yeah.

Peter Jarich (30:28)
different angles. What's the different angle story?

Tim Hatt (30:30)
I did.

I did. So rarely does a week go by where we don't talk about satellite and NTN in some way, shape, or form. But there are three stories here that kind of coalesce around the satellite and sovereignty conversation.

So one of them is—and we're gonna go to three countries. We're gonna go to Senegal, we're gonna go to the EU as a region, we're gonna go to Saudi Arabia. Why am I talking about those three countries? Very random. It'll make sense in a minute.

Peter Jarich (30:55)
Different regions, not just different—not just different, like, completely different regions.

Tim Hatt (30:59)
So, Senegal—

Peter Jarich (31:01)
You couldn't—you couldn't—

Tim Hatt (31:01)
—

Peter Jarich (31:01)
find—you couldn't find Latin America or the US. Come on.

Tim Hatt (31:05)
Not—I'm sure we can work them in somehow. I'm gonna start with three.

Peter Jarich (31:07)
Why they hate—

Tim Hatt (31:10)
It's—

Peter Jarich (31:10)
It's why Trump hates you Canadians, man. I mean, it's—

Tim Hatt (31:10)
It's true. We're too inward-looking.

Now, Senegal. We had the news that Sonatel, the country's one of the country's major mobile operators, achieved an injunction through the courts on Starlink's broadband service temporarily.

The news there means that Starlink is not permitted to operate whilst the injunction is being reviewed. And the contestation is around the rules of the license granted Starlink.

Okay, same rules, same script. Second—

Peter Jarich (31:43)
Same rule, same service, right? Basic.

Tim Hatt (31:46)
One, EU: SES, and its newly created or invested partnership with Omnispace and Lynk, called ELO, announced a new European manufacturing chain and supply chain for its satellites.

They're gonna operate at multi-orbit, GEO, MEO, and LEO. Significant operator partnerships, but key news here is announcing a kind of European-based manufacturing footprint.

Third story: Saudi Arabia, moving eastwards now. STC announced a partnership with Astranis to launch a dedicated satellite for use in Saudi Arabia, where, critically, it'll launch in '27. The data is retained, meaning you have an enterprise-grade connectivity service where there are strict controls around the data usage.

I bring these up, Peter, to make the point that whilst they're different, they're all playing at how countries regulate satellite and how you, as either a mobile operator or satellite operator, need to think about business operations aligning with national regulations and priorities there.

And I think we've seen this conversation before, we're gonna see it again. It's just adding more momentum to this discussion because there are still a lot of open questions around same rules, same service.

But as we see more of these, we might start to see spillover or read-across to other countries.

Peter Jarich (33:19)
No, and then we call—and I, you know, I'd say it's interesting because for me this is important.

When we called out originally some of the work we're doing around sovereignty, you know, all the sovereign discussion and how telcos were supporting it, or sovereign digital services was all around compute models, applications.

And it took a bit of a while when, as we defined the various options out there and the various opportunities for services, that we called out connectivity.

Right? I think it was a bit of a, "Wait, what? We're talking about sovereign digital services, like, not connect—what's the connectivity role?"

And I think, you know, the work that Vodafone was doing was a good example in the EU, but then expanding that to say, okay, well, the sovereign discussion's even broader, and especially around satellite, right?

So to your point, it's around having a supply chain, making sure that you control it, you know, having that sovereign for a—sovereign connectivity for a given country, as you mentioned in Saudi.

But then, of course, exerting some control like you're seeing in Senegal. Exerting some control and saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we need to hold back here, which is impressive.

I think right now, in a world where everyone's rushing to build these partnerships, sort of the taking a step back to sort of say, okay, let's look at this.

Gotta give—I gotta give those folks a bunch of credit to say, you know, maybe we want to actually take a look at how this impacts things and if we're allowing a new competitor to come in and operate under a different sort of set of rules.

Yeah, but it's all about control, right?

Tim Hatt (35:08)
It is all about control. And just going back to that Senegal story, I think to your point, the other interesting angle here is whether regulators start to impose same rules, same service before license decisions.

Because here, this injunction wouldn't have happened had Sonatel not pushed it. It was not a government-initiated investigation. This was Sonatel claiming that they had paid a lot of money, close to $200 million, for licenses and having to be subject to USF—that's universal service funds for our listeners—coverage requirements on a national level, and that those rules were simply not expected of SpaceX, Starlink.

And so the question then becomes: well, how does that work in other countries? So I think we are gonna see a lot more of this kind of conversation.

And—

Peter Jarich (35:58)
Agreed. Agreed.

Tim Hatt (36:00)
Last thing I would say on that, to your point on the sovereignty, if for our listeners, we do have a sovereignty tracker on our website. Encourage you guys to go and check that out. It's got really good detail on a country level about different sovereign deployments and how they split out, and do take a look at that because it's really useful context.

Peter Jarich (36:18)
It's—and it's broad.

No, it's broad, as well as the review that we did from MWC about the big news from MWC. We'll link to that in the notes, so go check it out.

We usually use this time to talk about other news. There is none because we've covered four things or events that we're going to.

I know Tim and I, in a bit, will be at IMC, but before that, I just wanted to give a shout-out. Next week is NOVA.

I know I talked about NOVA a while ago. This is the inaugural edition of the GSMA's event in Napa. So it's a chance to engage with the Silicon Valley crew. It's September 28th to the 30th.

It's a really interesting format. So it starts on, like, the evening, late afternoon, evening of the 28th, all day on the 29th, and then morning of the 30th. So keeps it short.

Series of keynotes and then boardrooms where it's sort of smaller conversations. You can guess the topics: connectivity, 6G. We're gonna have all, you know, the Valley folks there. So capital trends, of course AI is going to be everywhere.

Chatham House Rules. There'll be some folks from the media, I believe, moderating some sessions, some analysts, myself included. But it's Chatham House Rule, so don't expect to see any names named.

I would just say, in terms of names being named, it's a great lineup. I mean, we've got Bret Taylor from IES, the Chairman of OpenAI. We've got Samir, President of Android Ecosystem, Samir Samat. I guess you folks would know him.

Other names. We've got Shekhar Ayer from Arqis. It's good because I invited him, so I'm glad to see that he's there. You'll see some names from the telco space. Pietro from Telecom Italia, which is gonna be fun just because of the recent change of ownership, takeover from Poste Italiane, will be interesting. So he's always great.

A bunch of the folks from Wing Venture Capital—we're running this event with them. Scott from AST SpaceMobile. I think you invited him, Tim. I think you invited. So it's good to see—

Tim Hatt (38:31)
That's right. Yeah. The same air.

Peter Jarich (38:33)
Good to see Scott there.

Folks that we've talked a bit before, Tom Rondo from the US Department of Defense on the topic of mission-critical comms. Pardeep Kohli from Mavenir, good friend of GSMA Intelligence. So it'll be great to see him.

NVIDIA, Ronnie's gonna be there, Ronnie Vashishta, and then last I'm gonna name Scott—Scott Lawrence from Verizon Business. He's the CPO.

I'll be actually doing a chat with him, so I'm excited for that.

We will be filming the next of these, I think, from around there. So I'll be coming live from Napa, where it looks like the weather should be good. Fingers crossed.

And unfortunately, it's such a short event, probably won't have much time for wine tasting, but that's okay.

Anyways, thank you, Tim, as always.

It's been a great conversation. And—

Tim Hatt (39:31)
Pleasure, my pleasure.

Peter Jarich (39:32)
I like to remind everyone that in order to seek out the intelligence, you need to make sure you embrace some noise.

With that, I think I've settled on an outro. I'm gonna try and keep to that one, and hopefully we'll see you all again next week.

Thanks, everyone.

Tim Hatt (39:48)
Thanks, guys.