We are delighted to announce Nick Johnson today joins us as the Director of UKTIN. Johnson brings a wealth of telecom experience, and strong engineering and commercial expertise to the UKTIN team.
He is well known and respected across the industry, holding a number of patents and having previously held chair positions for the Small Cell Forum. In recognition of his work, he was most recently awarded Cambridge Wireless’ Lifetime Achievement in the Wireless Sector award in 2021.
Johnson will be taking over from Bob Driver, who is assisting with the transition as he continues to support UKTIN.
Read our interview with Johnson below.
1/ Please tell UKTIN about your background.
My background is in cellular infrastructure for small cells. I was the founder and CTO of ip.access until it was acquired by Mavenir in the autumn of 2020. Over our 20-year history, we introduced the first GSM over IP small cell for T-Mobile in the US and created, what was then, the world’s biggest W-CDMA small-cell network in partnership with Cisco for AT&T. Our kit also led the market in cellular coverage on long-haul aircraft (for which I apologise to everyone!).
I’ve had the privilege of experiencing the full life-cycle of a start-up from inception, growth, venture capital investment and eventual acquisition, and the full business cycle of the telecoms industry from the boom years of the late nineties, the telecom winter of the early noughties through to the mature and thriving industry we see today.
2/ Where do the UK’s strengths lie in telecoms?
Telecoms is a broad church: mobile, fixed and satellite. My generation of start-ups that began to work with cellular in the 2000s largely ended up being acquired by US suppliers, in one way or another. I would class that as a strength. How did we gain attraction from MNOs such as AT&T? It’s because of that innovative spark. We could conceive, develop and deploy working systems with real benefits.
3/ What attracted you to the role at UKTIN?
Telecoms, globally, is currently in a consolidation strategy. It’s fairly mature and as the industry refreshes itself technically with 5G, it’s been assumed that there’s no room left for innovation in telecoms networks—that it’s all been done and we should move on to the new.
Indeed, I have been guilty of such a statement myself, declaring at a Small Cell Conference some time ago that LTE was the last generation of the air interface and there was nothing left to do. (Though, I would like to add that Lord Kelvin also announced “the End of Physics” only a few years before relativity and quantum physics upended the late Victorian scientific consensus…)
Talking to you today it’s clear; while we’ve made a strong start, we are by no means at the end of innovation. One look at any telco’s electricity bill shows there is work to be done to increase its efficiency. One look at the rural coverage numbers worldwide shows there is work to be done to connect the unconnected. One look at the call drop rates in the urban environment shows there’s work to be done to improve the quality of coverage up to our customers’ expectations. One look at the emerging high throughput mass market applications shows there is still more work to be done to bring that performance right to the edge of the network. One look at the velocity of deployment worldwide shows there is work to be done in enhancing the skills and automation required to bring networks to that next level.
UKTIN’s role touches on all those aspects. We are here to join the dots between both established and challenger operators, and their suppliers in the broadest sense. We provide guidance, skywriting the big targets for the UK and global innovation communities to navigate towards them painlessly. Our objectives are to signpost and orient the common goals of universities, corporations, new entrants, investors, and the operators themselves. This will have a multiplicative effect on individual efforts, making the whole many times greater - and smarter - than the sum of its parts.
4/ Why is a thriving telecoms sector essential for the UK?
Is that a trick question?! Every major economy needs a thriving ecosystem and given our background in telecoms, accelerating the sector is a natural thing to do. The government, for example, is seeking to introduce a level of diversity in the supply chain, in the UK as well as globally.
That’s what makes the mission of UKTIN so exciting. It’s about aligning the R&D and Deployment activities in the UK to bring the next generation of innovation to fruition on a global stage. We want to exploit the innate strengths of our innovative nature to take the next big leap in telecoms network performance, economics and environmental impact. What could be more exciting than that?
