Event round up: Advanced Connectivity Tech Forum

The UK is at an inflection point in connectivity, so the decisions made now will define the country's digital infrastructure for the next decade. Advanced 5G, Open RAN, non-terrestrial networks, optical and photonic systems, AI-native communications, quantum-secured connectivity are all live fields of global competition, and the UK has both the capability and the ambition to lead.  

The technologies being pursued span an impressive range. Therefore, the ambition has to be in identifying the areas of potential success through a clear-eyed assessment of where commercial opportunity intersects with national need, and a willingness to track emerging areas before the funding follows.  

With that in mind, grand challenges for ACT do more than direct funding, they give organisations the internal justification to explore new areas, the collaborative structures to work with universities and peers, and the strategic clarity to make long-term R&D commitments that would otherwise be difficult to sustain. 

The first panel discussion addressed the absence of generic standards for timing and positioning in complex multi-network environments is a genuine gap with real consequences for security and the ability to build integrated systems that can be trusted at scale. The challenge of harmonising network selection across terrestrial and non-terrestrial systems is equally live, with significant work underway in standards bodies that the UK needs to be actively shaping rather than passively receiving. 

For instance, the economic cost of GNSS denial is estimated in authoritative analysis at over £1 billion per day to the UK economy. The systemic interdependencies that make this risk so acute are precisely the reason that resilience cannot be an afterthought in network design. It must be a founding principle. 

The discussion also tackled the role of AI in network orchestration, the practical implications of quantum technologies for security and positioning, and the trust and transparency challenges that arise when network intelligence becomes distributed and autonomous. None of these conversations reached a neat conclusion, which is exactly as it should be. These are open questions, and the forum exists precisely to keep them on the table. 

On the regulatory side, the framing of AI as both a tool for networks and a demand on networks was particularly useful. This distinction will matter enormously as AI workloads scale and the latency and capacity requirements of different applications become clearer. The commitment to evidence-based policy development in this area, rather than reactive rule-making, is the right approach and one techUK will continue to support and inform. 

This is also reflected on spectrum, where the work on upper 6 GHz sharing and the integration of non-terrestrial networks into the UK's spectrum framework reflects the complexity of managing a finite resource in an era of rapidly multiplying use cases. The preparation for WRC 27 is a reminder that these decisions are made internationally, and that UK influence depends on being organised, resourced, and present in the right conversations. 

The final panel of the day tackled one of the most pressing long-term challenges in connectivity: how to scale network capability without scaling energy consumption at the same rate. The discussion was honest about the scale of the challenge considering the rising demand from AI workloads, the proliferation of always-on connectivity, and the expansion of digitalisation across sectors are all pushing in the same direction. 

But the solutions are emerging. Network consolidation can deliver dramatic reductions in energy use when done well. Hardware innovation is reshaping what is possible in data centres, particularly in optical interconnects and co-packaged photonics. And the transition to new cooling architectures is beginning to address the thermal challenges that come with increasing compute density. 

What was clear is that sustainability in connectivity is a design requirement. The networks of the 2030s will need to be simultaneously more capable, more resilient, and more efficient than what we have today. The research and industry communities in this room are working on all three.