Introducing TWIT - The Week in Telecom #1
We are all a bit sick of LinkedIn's relentless feed of AI slop and corporate BS. So, I thought I would try something different. I'm going to try to do a post here every week. Unless I am on holiday in which case instead of TWIT, we will have TWOOO (out of office).
This week has been the calm after the storm of MWC. I enjoyed the event this year but brought back a stinking cold. One week on and I'm still not right. This is the downside of such an international event. On the other hand, it is marvellous that telecom is a global business and it gives me the opportunity to meet and exchange viruses with people from all over the planet.
OpenClaw – smells fishy to me
One of the things that surprised me at MWC was the excitement about OpenClaw, particularly among Chinese companies. According to a Light Reading article, all three Chinese telecom operators have introduced OpenClaw-related services.
However, a Reddit post suggests that the high numbers of downloads of the open source agentic AI software are in fact a scam, automated by agentic AI itself.
Moreover, a paper published on Arxiv by university researchers found that "Observed behaviors include unauthorized compliance with non-owners, disclosure of sensitive information, execution of destructive system-level actions, denial-of-service conditions, uncontrolled resource consumption, identity spoofing vulnerabilities, cross-agent propagation of unsafe practices, and partial system takeover. ... Our findings establish the existence of security-, privacy-, and governance-relevant vulnerabilities in realistic deployment settings. These behaviors raise unresolved questions regarding accountability, delegated authority, and responsibility for downstream harms, and warrant urgent attention from legal scholars, policymakers, and researchers across disciplines."
I don’t think I’ll be using OpenClaw just yet.
AI Jobs Apocalypse
As we drank our cava and ate tapas in Barcelona, many of us were trying to supress our fear that agentic AI was about to make us obsolete whether we worked in marketing, industry research, or software development.
The mood had turned particularly dark in the wake of a publication by Anthropic with a radar chart that suggested that AI would be able to cover almost 100% of job tasks in management, computing, and engineering. This has taken its toll on the stock market as investors fear that if none of those jobs exist in the future there will be vast numbers of white-collar workers on the scrap heap, no longer buying stuff.
Certainly, it could lead to short-term dislocations in the job market. And as an example of a short-term dislocation I would point to the coal mining communities of Northern England whose government has failed to help them successfully transition to a post-coal economy.
McKinsey’s AI platform gets hacked
A blog by penetration testing firm CodeWall explained how they pointed their autonomous offensive agent at consulting firm McKinsey’s internal AI platform. With no credentials or insider knowledge, within two hours, the agent had full read and write access to the entire production database.
I’m no security expert but the root cause of the problem seems to be: “The agent mapped the attack surface and found the API documentation publicly exposed — over 200 endpoints, fully documented. Most required authentication. Twenty-two didn't.”
Can Britain do tech?
There was a flurry of excitement in the UK tech scene recently when UK-based startup Nscale raised $2 billion at a $14.6 billion valuation in a funding round featuring NVIDIA. To burnish its credentials as a UK company, Nscale has appointed Nick Clegg to its board of directors.
Clegg’s previous claim to fame was as the UK deputy prime minister that tripled tuition fees for students in England and Wales despite having pledged ahead of election to not increase fees. From there he went on the Meta/Facebook where he ran PR and defended the company against claims that it allowed election misinformation to proliferate.
While Nscale is headquartered in the UK it was founded by an Australian crypto miner and is backed by American companies like NVIDIA and Dell Technologies whose products it buys with the funds it receives from them.
According to the Guardian, Nscale may not be actually building any new datacentre capacity, the jobs it has promised are illusory, and its supposed supercomputer site north of London is still a scaffolding yard.
This sounds more like the next Carillion or Patisserie Valerie than ARM or DeepMind.
Government extortion racket
A small investor has sued Intel’s board for giving a 10% stake in the company to the US government to keep its leader off their backs. In August 2025, Intel agreed to give the US government a 10% stake to secure federal grants. The deal involved intense political pressure, including demands for leadership changes.
To be fair to Intel’s board, the share price has doubled since August last year which more than compensates for the 10% extortion payment. Moreover, paying ransomware criminals is not illegal in the US although payments to sanctioned entities or hostile nations (who are sometimes behind ransomware attacks) is illegal. Nonetheless, it would be nice to think board members have a little bit more backbone given their generous compensation.
Capitalising on high oil prices
The rising price of oil has provided an opportunity for Telefónica Tech to deploy its blockchain and AI technology. Not the black sticky stuff, the nice green stuff you cook with.
The digital business unit of Telefónica is helping Deoleo to develop a blockchain-based traceability system using its TrustOS platform. Although olive oil prices have come down since the peak in April 2024, they are still above long-term average. This leads to temptation to adulterate the product, particularly with premium extra virgin olive oil (EVOO).
Telefónica Tech is also helping to digitise Deoleo's production plants in Spain. And they will use AI to help master blenders to select the best raw materials and oil varieties to maintain product quality.
Spain is the world's biggest olive producing country, bigger than the next two countries (Italy and Turkey) combined.
Space junk
There were two articles on Light Reading on the same day about other companies criticising Elon Musk’s plans to put a bazillion datacentres in space.
The first article was about WISPA (Association for Broadband Without Boundaries) raising interference concerns about SpaceX's mega constellation. The second was about Amazon urging the FCC to deny SpaceX's plan to build orbital data centres comprising up to 1 million satellites, arguing that it's 'wholly unrealistic' and would give SpaceX 'near-total control' of launch insertion orbits.
This led to the FCC chair, Brendan Carr, having a pop at Amazon for objecting to SpaceX's plan, as covered by Telecoms.com. Carr and Musk share similar views about not moderating online content and Carr has publicly lauded Musk for his acquisition of Twitter.
Omdia Telecom roundup
Here’s a selection of interesting reports published by my Omdia telecom colleagues this week:
· Strategic Announcement Quadrant – Techco focus supported outperformance in 2025: During 2025, service providers in Omdia’s sample became more growth-oriented. Service providers that adopted techco strategies tended to outperform (relative to their local index) when compared to their peers in 2025.
· NVIDIA provides a $4bn affirmation of optical components’ central role in the AI ecosystem: NVIDIA’s $2bn investments in both Coherent Corporation and Lumentum will strengthen the company's AI infrastructure supply chain, adding both capacity and diversity. Additionally, the partnerships will accelerate its R&D.
· MWC 2026: Agentic AI meets network slicing. Has Nokia cracked the code or oversold the promise? After years of proofs of concept and limited trials, network slicing is finally moving into commercial territory.
· Telefónica’s autonomous network program is a blueprint for success: Telefónica’s autonomous network program represents a well-structured and holistic approach to advancing telecom processes and workflows toward higher levels of autonomy.
· Network APIs in 2026: Strategy, AI Readiness, and Pricing: Beyond direct revenue growth, network APIs represent an immense strategic value to the telecom industry.
· Key trends from the smart home market – 4Q25: The smart home market is entering a new phase defined by interoperability, partnerships, and service‑led differentiation.
