U.S. goes all-in to dominate 6G sebastianbarros.substack.com Dec. 29, 2025, 12:26 p.m.
On Dec 19, 2025, the White House issued a national security presidential memorandum ordering federal users to begin relocating from 7.125 to 7.4 GHz to free the band for full-power, licensed commercial 6G. Agencies have 12 months to submit relocation plans with costs and timelines, while protecting national security missions and critical infrastructure operations. The memorandum also triggers immediate studies on 2.69 to 2.9 GHz and 4.4 to 4.94 GHz for potential additional full-power 6G capacity. It directs the State Department to advance US 6G positions through international engagement ahead of the next set of standards and spectrum cycles.
Expert issues warning about disturbing side effect of modern devices: 'Growing strain' www.thecooldown.com Dec. 29, 2025, 12:09 p.m.
According to new data from Eurostat in a press release from the European Environmental Bureau, the amount of electronic equipment sold in Europe in 2023 skyrocketed to almost 16 million tons, an 89% increase over the amount sold in 2012. On top of that, 5.7 million tons of e-waste were collected in 2023, and collection rates of e-waste left much to be desired. 
Surreal humanoid robots are set to begin border patrol duties between China and Vietnam www.earth.com Dec. 27, 2025, 5:04 p.m.
At the Fangchenggang project, Walker S2 units will help border staff guide passenger queues, direct vehicles, and answer simple questions from travelers. Some robots will patrol corridors and waiting areas, watching for blocked exits or crowd patterns that might require human officers to intervene. Others will move between cargo lanes to support logistics teams, checking container IDs, confirming seals, and relaying status updates to dispatch centers. Away from the border itself, the fleet is expected to inspect steel, copper, and aluminum facilities, walking structured routes through hot industrial yards.
Some humanoid robots can be hacked through voice commands, demonstration shows mashable.com Dec. 27, 2025, 5:01 p.m.
The robot in question ran off an internal AI agent. By exploiting a flaw in the software, the researchers were able to take over the robot while it was connected to a network, at which point the researchers had the robot use local wireless communication to spread the hack to another nearby robot that actually wasn't even connected to the network at the time. Spreading the hack from one robot to another only took a matter of minutes. Even worse, the researchers were able to issue a command for the robot to physically strike a mannequin on stage.
The Top 11 Telco startups to watch in 2026 sebastianbarros.substack.com Dec. 27, 2025, 3:38 p.m.
Telecom is rarely associated with startup innovation. Software, fintech, and consumer AI dominate venture narratives, while telecommunications is viewed as slow, regulated, and capital-heavy. Despite structural barriers, a non-trivial startup ecosystem has formed around telecom. Analysts identify roughly 7,000 active telecom startups globally, spanning RAN software, AI-driven operations, security, satellite systems, private networks, and connectivity platforms. This is small relative to SaaS or fintech, but large enough to bring disruption.The backdrop for this new wave of telecom startups is a mix of necessity and disruption. Operator revenues are flat, while complexity continues to rise across multi-generation networks.
Inference Is Moving Into the RAN. GPUs Are the Question. sebastianbarros.substack.com Dec. 26, 2025, 4:18 p.m.
As of today, GPUs remain appropriate for co-located edge inference where workloads are heterogeneous, and utilization can be amortized. In a commoditized, energy-constrained RAN, inline radio inference follows a different economic and physical logic. Architectures optimized for deterministic execution, integration, and cost per decision outperform throughput-oriented designs. As learned functions move deeper into the radio processing chain, hardware selection will increasingly be driven by these constraints rather than by data-center inference defaults.
Telco Freakonomics: Why the Industry Defies Gravity sebastianbarros.substack.com Dec. 25, 2025, 2:38 p.m.
In most industries, heavy usage correlates with high value. Airlines reward frequent flyers. Banks price transaction volume. Cloud providers charge per compute cycle. Telecom does the opposite.Mobile data usage follows a power law. Operator and regulator datasets consistently indicate that approximately the top 10% of users account for 40–60% of total traffic, particularly during peak hours. Under flat or unlimited pricing, users pay approximately the average price rather than a premium.This outcome is not really accidental. Usage-based pricing increases bill shock, which is a major churn trigger. To stabilize retention, operators removed usage signals entirely, accepting margin dilution in exchange for lower churn risk.In telecommunications, the customer who relies most on the network is often the one the network least wants to serve.
La menace quantique se précise, les entreprises regardent ailleurs www.capgemini.com Dec. 25, 2025, 2:01 p.m.
96 $, c’est ce que coûte aujourd’hui la minute de calcul quantique chez un grand cloud provider. Le quantique n’est plus un fantasme de laboratoire : les machines sont disponibles, les tarifs clairs, les capacités démontrées. En d’autres termes, il suffit à un acteur malveillant, étatique ou criminel, d’estimer ce qu’il lui en coûterait de déchiffrer des données en sa possession et le bénéfice qu’il pourrait en tirer.
The Nebraska Principle: Why Transformative Ideas Die in Committee Rooms ideascale.com Dec. 25, 2025, 1:54 p.m.
In 1982, Bruce Springsteen recorded a set of stark, one-take demos in his home studio. His label executives expected him to polish them in a professional studio with the E Street Band. Every instinct in the music industry said the same thing: take the raw material and improve it. Springsteen refused. He released the unrefined version as Nebraska, a haunting, minimalist album that critics later hailed as one of the most influential of the decade. Its impact came not from production quality but from preserving what made it authentic and different. Inside most organizations, that kind of protection rarely happens. Employees with their own “Nebraska moments” often see their boldest ideas diluted through layers of approval until the originality is gone.
Why Most Telcos Are Implementing AI Incorrectly sebastianbarros.substack.com Dec. 23, 2025, 6:32 p.m.
Telcos did not misunderstand the internet; instead, for many years, they treated it as an add-on rather than as a new organizing principle. They optimized existing processes rather than redesigning decision-making, pricing, and product creation to substantially reduce coordination costs.AI sits in the same category today. It reduces the cost of prediction, pattern recognition, and decision making by orders of magnitude. According to recent studies by McKinsey and Analysys Mason, more than 70% of telco AI spending between 2022 and 2024 has gone into customer care automation and network operations, with primary success metrics tied to opex reductions of 5-15%. Fewer than 20% of initiatives target pricing, revenue optimization, or new product creation, and even fewer have the authority to execute changes autonomously. AI is treated as an efficiency layer rather than an operating model.
Intelligence artificielle : les défis structurels de l’écosystème chinois www.servicesmobiles.fr Dec. 23, 2025, 10:13 a.m.
L’essor de DeepSeek redonne de l’élan à l’IA chinoise. Mais entre retard logiciel, manque d’ouverture et faiblesse du soft power, Pékin doit encore relever plusieurs défis pour s’imposer à l’échelle mondiale.
Telcos, Do You Have Sky Coverage? sebastianbarros.substack.com Dec. 21, 2025, 3:01 p.m.
Airspace activity has crossed the threshold where ignoring it becomes a strategic mistake. In 2024, commercial aviation operated approximately 40 million flights worldwide, carrying nearly 9 billion passengers. At the same time, tens of millions of drones are already active worldwide, with commercial fleets scaling at double-digit growth. Urban air mobility programs and military aviation introduce an additional layer of permanent airborne traffic. These systems require deterministic, high-availability connectivity. This could be a new trillion-dollar control-and-connectivity opportunity for Telcos.
The First AI-First Telco Will Not Be a Telco sebastianbarros.substack.com Dec. 20, 2025, 2:33 p.m.
Telcos are not greenfield software platforms. They are the accumulation of decades of design compromises. Stateful cores, batch-based charging, legacy billing, OSS stacks built around tickets and escalation trees, Several generations of radios, organizations optimized for human approval loops, and, in many cases, physical distribution and support. That baggage does not disappear because you deploy a few models. You carry it with you for decades unless you are willing to write off billions, shut things down, and accept revenue instability. No public operator will do that at scale.
Addressing the Biggest Bottleneck in the AI Semiconductor Ecosystem www.eetimes.com Dec. 19, 2025, 4:43 p.m.
Advanced packaging technology is witnessing an exploding demand, driven largely by AI semiconductors. Placing multiple chips and/or components closer together shortens the distance data travels, leading to better overall performance, faster transmission of data and lower energy consumption. It seems we have finally found the solution to all our problems: making challenges like physical limits and strained power grids a thing of the past.
Citroën et Decathlon imaginent une voiture électrique pensée pour l’évasion creapills.com Dec. 15, 2025, 10:56 a.m.
Et si la voiture redevenait un vrai lieu de vie ? Avec son concept-car ELO, Citroën propose une vision radicalement différente de la mobilité électrique, en s’éloignant des SUV pour renouer avec l’esprit des monospaces intelligents. Compact à l’extérieur mais étonnamment généreux à l’intérieur, ce véhicule électrique à six places a été conçu comme un espace modulable, capable de s’adapter aux temps de repos, de loisirs et de travail.Pour donner corps à cette idée, Citroën s’est associé à Decathlon, dont l’ADN fonctionnel et accessible irrigue tout le projet. Ensemble, ils signent un concept qui ne cherche pas à impressionner par la performance pure, mais par l’usage, la simplicité et l’ingéniosité. Un manifeste roulant qui esquisse le futur de la marque.
Tech en Europe : les raisons du retard face aux géants mondiaux www.servicesmobiles.fr Dec. 12, 2025, 5:57 a.m.
Face à une innovation freinée par la fragmentation, startups et investisseurs appellent à un cadre juridique unifié. EU–INC pourrait bien être la clé d’un vrai marché unique pour la tech européenne.
Les États-Unis veulent obliger les touristes à dévoiler leurs activités sur les réseaux sociaux www.lefigaro.fr Dec. 11, 2025, 10:53 a.m.
La proposition a pris corps mercredi avec la publication d’un avis au Federal Register, le Journal officiel américain : l’administration Trump veut désormais exiger des visiteurs bénéficiant du programme d’exemption de visa (ESTA) qu’ils fournissent l’historique de leurs comptes sur les réseaux sociaux sur cinq ans.
5G Was the Last Mobile Network Built for Humans sebastianbarros.substack.com Dec. 6, 2025, 4:31 p.m.
The next decade forces telecom to abandon human centric assumptions and design a network that can support continuous inference, real time robotics and machine generated traffic at global scale.
Anxious about retirement savings? Avoid these mistakes.  news.harvard.edu Dec. 4, 2025, 1:53 p.m.
If you feel confused and you don’t know what you’re doing, you naturally become very anxious. Unfortunately, one very natural human reaction is to ignore the problem, tell yourself you’ll deal with it later. That’s a very big mistake.
‘World’s first’ edible coffee cup replaces SUPs with natural grains packagingeurope.com Dec. 4, 2025, 10:03 a.m.
Cupffee has designed the ‘world’s first’ edible coffee cup, designed to avoid pollution and reduce CO2 emissions while performing as effectively as its single-use plastic counterparts.