Wise words and waggishness… September 2026

“We’ve moved well beyond laying the foundations. Over the past year we’ve established 15 nodes on the platform and, more importantly, we’ve started bringing researchers, industry, and government together around it.”

Peter Marshall, JOINER’s industry lead, on how the platform has evolved in 12 months to enable experimentation and collaboration.

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“It’s a sovereign capability and the value should be captured in UK plc as much as possible. That’s the direction from the Research Council and from ministers.”

Simon Fletcher, CEO of Real Wireless, in our article Is JOINER a model for UK collaboration and innovation?

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“JOINER is exactly the kind of thing that aligns to national ambition, and by building UK-wide capabilities and connections it is helping sovereignty.”

Rupert Baines, a non-executive director at CSA Catapult, on JOINER’s role in building sovereign capability in AI-driven and quantum-secure telecoms.

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“If you have an arena where you’re showing things, building things, measuring on them, and interacting with partners, that’s generally a very good idea.”

Magnus Frodigh, senior advisor, CTO office at Ericsson Research, talking about JOINER’s ambition to provide a platform for UK collaboration.

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“We come up short across the stack.”

George Balston, strategy adviser at the Alan Turing Institute and co-founder of frontier AI safety organisation AVERI, on the UK’s relatively limited inference capacity, high energy costs and dependence on overseas infrastructure.

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“We have a much stronger grip on the quantum stack.”

Dr Michael Cuthbert, director of the National Quantum Computing Centre, talking to the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, but also adding that this position is fragile and needs to be maintained.

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“6G must not be 5G with a new label.”

John Harrington, senior vice president and head of Europe, Global Sales & Customer Operations at Nokia, talking about the history of networks and expectations around new generations.

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“If 6G enables new, more granular services, billing and charging systems will need to handle a level of complexity we haven’t seen before.”

Ross Devereux of Lifecycle Software claiming that 6G will make charging and billing for services worse before it makes it better, in our article 3G promised video calls. 5G promised remote surgery. What does that tell us about 6G?