“Telecoms is boring” Talking with my teenage son about my career (and his future one), he expressed what I initially thought was shocking point of view. On reflection I realised he had a point. I have spent nearly all my adult life in telecommunications and during that period have seen massive change and worldwide impact from telecommunications. However, today, for most people, Telecoms just isn’t very exciting. That doesn’t mean its not important. It is; and Covid19 has shown this. However, that importance is mostly as an unexciting utility that just works. During lockdown a lot has been made about the criticality of telecoms infrastructure, in enabling many of us to work from home. What has been said less is that our ability to WFH relied on also having reliable and increased use of water, electricity and gas 24 by 7. It relied on networks of postal delivery and couriers. All of these are utility suppliers, with some limited additional performance guarantees for the delivery services. Telecoms is different Telecoms still sees itself as something more than the utility. It has a history of: technical innovation with long distance trunk dialling, mobile, SMS, mobile money service innovation with ring tones, […]