What does the future of telecoms look like? Will progress go hand in hand with human evolution? Riccardo Delleani, CEO of Sparkle, answered these questions and more at the recent Capacity Europe conference in London.
ADVERTISEMENT**Founded in 2003 and owned by TIM Group, Sparkle has become a leading global telecommunications and internet service provider.
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The company has picked up the legacy of Italcable, founded in 1921. We caught up with the company's CEO, Riccardo Delleani, to talk about the future of telecom and how the firm is adapting to the rapid changes within the industry.
Riccardo Delleani, CEO Sparkle: « A big revolution is coming up. I think 5G is something that will definitely change our view of telecommunications. You have to imagine that now we have smartphones, tomorrow with the 5G we will have glasses that will talk with the network and will give us information. It will completely change our usage of technology ».
Everybody is investing a lot of money in this. In Italy there has been a very important bid, and all the operators has spent over 6.5 billions of euros just for having the frequencies.
We are having big plans in terms of investements, in the Mediterrean and elsewhere, and we are looking very much to the new technology that will connect the enterprises to the big cloud companies »
RACE TOWARD THE FUTURE
Delleani: « There is a kind of speed in the change of technology, which human beings are not used to. We are not used to seeing so many changes, if we think that 15 years ago, which is not so far away, smartphones did not exist. So, I am wondering what will come in the next 15 years».
DIGITAL HUMANISM
Delleani: « I think that maybe a nice exemple, which comes from Italy by the way, comes from Adriano Olivetti, who in the 50s had an incredible company producing typing machines, but he wanted to bring also a humanity to the technology, so he brought into the company philosophers, designers, architechts, to understand how the new technology could work with human beings. I think that is something we have to think about it ».
FROM THE PAST TO THE FUTURE
Delleani: « Everything started in 1921. So almost hundred years ago... when Italian immigrants in the south of America put together money to build this cable going directly to italy, in order to communicate with their relatives.
From then on, we built up an incredible company, one of the biggest and largest companies in the international telecommunications sector. We were the first to use satellite for telecommunications, we had the chance to be the first provider giving a complete IP (= Internet Protocol), so an internet based technology. A nice story, with also a new story to come... »