NETWORK PERSPECTIVE
Phil Scott’s
Network Perspective Phil Scott, Chief Sales Officer at Technetix, shares his take on the fast-changing world of telecoms and how it intersects with technology. With a wealth of industry experience, he brings fresh, insightful and humorous perspectives on the people, ideas and innovations that shape our industry.
The Kilowatt Behind the Kilobit
For all the talk in the telecom sector of bits, bytes and ever-bigger bandwidth numbers, speed is not what limits infrastructure. Power is. Every node, amplifier, terminal, exchange and data centre sits on top of the same simple requirement: power that is reliable, continuous and increasingly abundant. In that sense, electricity remains the quiet hegemon of the digital economy. For years that dependency barely registered in boardroom strategy. Energy was just another operational cost, quietly absorbed into the background while the industry focused on speed, coverage, capacity and ARPU. But as Europe accelerates into an era of AI processing and ever-expanding data consumption at all levels of the network, the electricity
As I write this article, there are thousands of people across Europe massaging sore feet after the marathon around Fira Gran Via in Barcelona. By the time you read it, those same feet may be pounding the stone-paved streets of Cologne and I look forward to seeing many of you there. Walking the halls of industry conferences like MWC and ANGA COM, the conversation naturally revolves around technology. You hear countless executives talk about faster networks and more capable devices, with a generous sprinkling of AI across the top for good measure. Take Christel Heydemann of Orange, for example, who highlighted that agentic AI “will demand more powerful, faster, and more resilient networks than
ever before.” It is refreshing to hear she believes in the importance of plumbing as much as I do; maybe she even read my previous article. After enough kilometres of conference carpet and volumes of telecom buzzwords, I can highly recommend an electric foot spa to soothe both the feet and the mind. Rooted in ancient Chinese medicine and patented in its modern form in 1984 by Tadashi Kurosawa, I imagine trying to explain its use at the time was akin to Bob Newhart’s sketch on Sir Walter Raleigh introducing tobacco back home. It serves, however, as a useful reminder that even the weirdest and most wonderful technology ultimately runs on something rather more mundane: electricity.
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MAY 2026 Volume 48 No.2
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