You Will Not Know If This Is a Human. Telcos Will. sebastianbarros.substack.com Jan. 7, 2026, 1:05 p.m.
In the near future, you will not be able to tell whether you are talking to a human or an AI. That statement is no longer speculation; it is the direct outcome of how generative systems are evolving and how rapidly the underlying economics are collapsing. Voice, video, and interactive presence are already at the point where human perception is an unreliable security control, and the remaining gaps are closing quickly.
Culture Eats Networks for Breakfast sebastianbarros.substack.com Jan. 6, 2026, 7:55 a.m.
Mature assets, strong incumbents, high technical competence, and slow decision cycles. In that environment, advantage no longer comes from owning better infrastructure. It comes from how effectively the organization coordinates what it already owns. Analysts consistently find that, after asset normalization, operating model and decision velocity account for roughly 30-40% of performance variance. Network quality explains survival but does not explain outperformance. Once technical parity is reached, internal friction becomes the dominant tax. Culture here is not about kindness or slogans. It concerns incentives, permissions, ways of working, and coherence.
๐——๐—ฒ๐˜‚๐˜๐˜€๐—ฐ๐—ต๐—ฒ ๐—ง๐—ฒ๐—น๐—ฒ๐—ธ๐—ผ๐—บ ๐—ถ๐˜€ ๐—•๐˜‚๐—ถ๐—น๐—ฑ๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ด ๐—ฎ ๐— ๐—ฎ๐˜€๐˜€๐—ถ๐˜ƒ๐—ฒ ๐—”๐—œ ๐—ช๐—ฎ๐—ฟ ๐—–๐—ต๐—ฒ๐˜€๐˜ sebastianbarros.substack.com Jan. 5, 2026, 8:50 p.m.
Over the last 24 months, Deutsche Telekom has not been experimenting with AI. It has been reallocating capital. Venture investments through T.Capital, large-scale compute commitments, and targeted acquisitions are converging into a single objective: control where AI becomes operational. In an industry with flat revenues and rising network complexity, this is a defensive move against margin erosion and an offensive attempt to turn distribution, compute, and execution into an AI advantage. This is not a technology story. It is a balance sheet story.
Telecom Built the Worldโ€™s Best Weather Network: with $1T Locked Inside sebastianbarros.substack.com Jan. 4, 2026, 10:05 a.m.
The idea that telecom networks can be used for weather sensing is not new. GNSS-based atmospheric estimation, rain attenuation on microwave links, and radio refractivity effects have been studied for more than 20 years. The physics is well understood and already embedded in network planning and synchronization systems.
Starlink to lower satellite orbits in 2026 amid space congestion interestingengineering.com Jan. 2, 2026, 11:42 a.m.
Starlinkโ€™s decision also comes after the company disclosed in December that one of its satellites suffered an in-orbit anomaly, producing a โ€œsmallโ€ amount of debris and cutting off communications with the spacecraft at an altitude of about 260 miles. The company said the satellite, one of nearly 10,000 currently in orbit for its broadband internet network, rapidly lost 2.49ย milesย in altitude, suggesting an internal explosion, in what was described as a rare kinetic accident.
La faillite de Kodak : un cas dโ€™รฉcole ? fr.linkedin.com Jan. 1, 2026, 6:23 p.m.
La faillite de Kodak est souvent prรฉsentรฉe comme lโ€™illustration parfaite de la thรฉorie de la disruption popularisรฉe par Clayton Christensen. Lโ€™รฉtude d'Albรฉric Tellier montre dโ€™abord que Kodak nโ€™a ni ignorรฉ ni sous-estimรฉ le numรฉrique. Dรจs le dรฉbut des annรฉes 2000, sous la direction de Daniel Carp, lโ€™entreprise consacre prรจs des deux tiers de sa R&D aux technologies numรฉriques et รฉlabore en 2003 un plan stratรฉgique ambitieux prรฉvoyant trois milliards de dollars dโ€™investissements. Cโ€™est prรฉcisรฉment ce plan qui se heurte ร  une opposition frontale des actionnaires.La chute de Kodak ne sโ€™explique pas uniquement par une incapacitรฉ managรฉriale face ร  la rupture technologique, mais par lโ€™impossibilitรฉ de dรฉployer une stratรฉgie de rupture dans un cadre de gouvernance dominรฉ par des investisseurs institutionnels orientรฉs vers le court terme.
Telecom Is Still Stuck in the Killer App Mentality sebastianbarros.substack.com Jan. 1, 2026, 5:13 p.m.
The killer app is one of the most persistent myths in technology. It promises salvation through brilliance. One product so compelling that customers flood in, competitors fall behind, and monetization somehow takes care of itself. History shows the opposite: killer apps are excellent at creating demand but poor at protecting value.The iPhone is the cleanest way to expose the myth, precisely because it is so often misused as proof. People talk about it as if the device itself were the business, and it never was. A smartphone is a standardized object the moment it succeeds: glass, battery, radios, silicon, and software. Once adoption explodes, expectations harden, and competitors converge. That is what killer products do: they define the reference design that others copy.What prevented the iPhone from becoming a commodity phone business was not the phone itself. It was everything built around it. App distribution, payments, identity, accessories, defaults, services. Remove those layers, and Apple would have faced the same fate as every other hardware success story. Indispensable product, shrinking margins.
Do we really need 6G? sebastianbarros.substack.com Dec. 31, 2025, 2:45 p.m.
The more realistic role of 6G is to enable an AI-driven economy without collapsing network economics. AI traffic is not primarily about terabytes but about transactions, latency variance, trust, and coordination. Supporting that efficiently requires lower control density, tighter timing, integrated compute placement, and autonomous operation. Those capabilities protect margins first and create optionality second.Standards strategy reflects this shift. The emphasis is moving from feature accumulation to architectural coherence, AI-native operation, and system-level efficiency. Success will be measured less by headline speeds and more by reduced cost per delivered service, lower energy per transaction, and fewer human interventions per network element.6G therefore carries a narrower but more complex value proposition. It does not promise revenue miracles, but it aims to stop economic deterioration while preparing networks for continuous machine interaction and AI-driven workloads. The ROI case is defensive and makes it less exciting, but far more grounded than the narratives that accompanied 5G.
Une start-up amรฉricaine veut envoyer des miroirs dans l'espace pour capter, mรชme la nuit, la lumiรจre du soleil www.franceinfo.fr Dec. 31, 2025, 2:14 p.m.
Lโ€™idรฉe, si on rรฉsume, cโ€™est un peu de traiter le soleil comme un interrupteur. Il fait nuit, mais seulement sur une partie de la Terre. Le soleil ne sโ€™arrรชte jamais de briller donc ses rayons sont toujours lร . Cโ€™est une source dโ€™รฉnergie quasiment inรฉpuisable pour encore cinq milliards dโ€™annรฉes en tout cas, ce qui laisse le temps de voir venir. Les deux jeunes fondateurs de Reflect Orbital pensent quโ€™il ne faut pas forcรฉment amรฉliorer le rendement des panneaux solaires ou concevoir des batteries pour stocker lโ€™รฉnergie. Il suffit "juste", selon eux, dโ€™allonger les journรฉes.
The role of Telecom in Robotics sebastianbarros.substack.com Dec. 30, 2025, 1:14 p.m.
From pipes to machine governance: how 5G and 6G turn the telco stack into deterministic coordination, trusted identity, and real time control for billions of robots
Revolut Mobile and the End of Telecom as a Standalone Product sebastianbarros.substack.com Dec. 30, 2025, 12:36 p.m.
Revolut has not entered mobile communications to outperform network operators on coverage or spectrum efficiency. The company has entered the market because mobile connectivity has become another digital capability that fits naturally within a platform already handling identity, payments, subscriptions, rewards, travel, and daily financial behavior. When connectivity is viewed as software rather than infrastructure by the customer, the economics shift upstream.
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.ย 
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 40โ€“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 prรฉcise, les entreprises regardent ailleurs www.capgemini.com Dec. 25, 2025, 2:01 p.m.
96 $, cโ€™est ce que coรปte aujourdโ€™hui la minute de calcul quantique chez un grand cloud provider. Le quantique nโ€™est plus un fantasme de laboratoireย : les machines sont disponibles, les tarifs clairs, les capacitรฉs dรฉmontrรฉes. En dโ€™autres termes, il suffit ร  un acteur malveillant, รฉtatique ou criminel, dโ€™estimer ce quโ€™il lui en coรปterait de dรฉchiffrer des donnรฉes en sa possession et le bรฉnรฉfice quโ€™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 โ€œNebraska momentsโ€ often see their boldest ideas diluted through layers of approval until the originality is gone.