On 15 November 2024, TITAN co-hosted a symposium with the Federated Telecoms Hubs (FTH) in London, bringing together academia and industry to discuss the future of telecoms R&D and commercialisation.

Proceedings began with keynote speeches from Catherine Page OBE, Deputy Director of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), and Glenn Goodall, Head of the Information Communications Technology (ICT) Research Portfolio at UKRI EPSRC.

Page remarked that “telecoms is of foundational importance for the growth of the future economy”, saying that being an early mover and seizing the opportunities while avoiding and mitigating risks was key. She observed that the discussions around 6G are already underway in standards bodies and the UK has been active in trying to make its voice heard internationally and advocating for priorities like interoperability and plugging the digital divide. “The technical blueprints are going to be set in industry-led standards bodies. We need R&D underway in our universities and industry to feed into them,” she said.

Key areas for the FTH

In her keynote, Page identified four things she’s particularly excited to see emerging from the FTH:

1. Collaboration – it was noted that FTH has already brought together so many universities and is working closely as a network, looking to build synergies with groups working on other technologies such as the quantum hubs. Continuing this approach will avoid siloes and ensure FTH has an even greater impact.
2. Commercialisation – translating research is key. While the UK is a world leader in academic research, it increasingly falls away as businesses grow and scale. There is a strong desire therefore to see the fruits of the FTH research pulled through into the technologies that form our future networks.
3. Skills – having the people who can develop, operate and innovate in telecoms is crucial to the UK as a country and Page expressed her hope that the hubs will play an important role not just in developing the next generation of technologies, but the next generation of engineers.
4. Real-world benefits – the strong focus on how these advancements in technologies can deliver genuine impact, for instance by driving collaboration and innovation, achieving better energy efficiency, or delivering more resilient services. Integration of terrestrial and NTN for instance – can we deliver more resilient services?

Delivering impact

The hub director of TITAN, Prof. Harald Haas from the University of Cambridge, then took to the stage to explain how at its core, FTH is about delivering impact. “Doing well in our research is not good enough for societal value”, he explained. “We want to do more and have established seven missions which go far beyond research and set out a ten-year vision”.

Haas outlined the matrix governance structure of the FTH with TITAN, led by the University of Cambridge, acting as the conduit. The TITAN Leadership team comprising a CTO, standards director, skills and training director, and marketing director will form the Federated Hubs governance board alongside the hub directors, EPSRC and DSIT representatives. The focus of the governance board in the short term is to facilitate the transition of research from low TRLs to high TRLs, and in the longer term, to achieve the objectives laid out by the management boards.

The four directors introduced the research of their hubs. Each of the hubs is focused on a different element of the telecoms ecosystem, coming together to represent the very best and brightest of UK telecoms R&D.