Mark England - Associate Director, Cambridge Consultants

Mark England has spent three decades architecting, designing, and implementing a wide variety of wired and wireless communications products, services, systems and protocols; from short range point to point systems to those which operate on a global scale. Mark joined Cambridge Consultants in 2000, and for the past 20+ years he has been providing leading edge design, development and consultancy services to wide range of clients. 

Tadhg Kenny - SVP Vertical Solutions, Druid Software Ltd

Tadhg joined Druid in mid 2013 bringing with him over 20 years of international sales & marketing experience in various commercial roles. He has helped many start ups with their Go-to-Market strategies in B2B & B2C environments. He has been instrumental in developing markets for Druids private networks in the US and EMEA. He works closely with Druids small cell partners and 3rd party application providers to help their channels deliver the latest mission critical use cases over their private networks. Tadhg's latest projects include some of the Industry's first 5G & 4G solutions for Energy Providers, Healthcare and Industry 4.0 Applications. After being shortlisted in 2017, he was a member of the team that won the Small Cell Forum Award in 2019, and again in 2020 for Software & Services for Management, Automation and Orchestration and Excellence in Enterprise Deployments.

Ignacio Más - Senior Expert and Head of Technology Innovation in OSS, Ericsson

Doctor Ignacio Más acts as Senior Expert and Head of Technology Strategy in OSS in Ericsson Business Unit Digital Systems. Previously he was one of the top System Architects in Ericsson Group Function Technology holding the tittle of Senior Expert in Programmable Network Architecture.  Ignacio is an Ericsson representative in the LFN Board of Directors as well as in the TMF collaboration subcommittee. He obtained a PhD in Telecommunications from the Royal Institute of Technology, (KTH, Sweden). In his current role as Senior Expert in OSS he oversees the overall evolution of network management and control (OSS) towards a model-based horizontal management paradigm, including the open source and standardization strategy in the OSS portfolio.

Nanda Menon - Director of Corporate Development, Athonet, CEO, Athonet UK Ltd

Nanda is Director of Corporate Development at Athonet Srl and CEO of Athonet UK Limited. He joined Athonet in 2015 and is responsible for Athonet’s global relationships with leading mobile operators, hyperscalers and system integrators as well as having specific responsibility for the UK market. He has over 30 years experience working with the mobile industry since first advising clients such as BT and AT&T on their international expansion in the early 1990s. He holds an M.Eng (Mech) from Kings College London and also qualified as a Chartered Accountant at Arthur Andersen, London.

Graham Wilde - Head of 5G Business Development, CKH Innovations Opportunities Development

In 1987 Graham Wilde left Oxford University with a full head of hair and a degree in Psychology. His first job was to play the drums on a tour for Curtis Mayfield. Some months later, having drunk his wages, he took the first serious job he was offered, with Logica Consultancy. After 34 years in telecoms, working with CIT Research, Nortel, NTT, UK Broadband, Three UK, and now the Hutchison Group, he has lost most of his hair. Along the way, he has worked on the creation of China Unicom, J:Com in Japan, the Tokyo Olympics, launched an FWA broadband service in London, and led the team that built some of the world’s first private LTE networks. His hobbies include concealing his gambling habits from his family. Being raised in Wolverhampton, he is a keen supporter of Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Julie Bradford - Head of techno-economic analysis, Real Wireless

Julie has worked in the wireless industry for over 15 years. At Real Wireless, she is a thought leader in 5G business case analysis including understanding 5G use cases, quantifying (in financial terms) the operational and socio-economic benefits of 5G services and understanding network dimensioning and cost implications under 5G virtualised networks.

She has most recently been working with city councils around their wireless strategy and related Green Book outline business case development. She also led Real Wireless’ techno-economic analysis on the EC Horizon 2020 5G-MoNArch project. Inspired by the project’s smart sea port testbed constructed by HPA, Nokia and DT in the Port of Hamburg, this analysis included quantifying the operational benefits of 5G to port authorities and other port users and the cost implications of delivering these industrial grade wireless services from existing mobile infrastructure via network slicing supported via the virtualised 5G-MoNArch network architecture.

Previously, Julie was Communications Engineer at QinetiQ UK, consultant at PA Consulting UK, and Senior Systems Engineer for Airvana UK. In addition to working at Real Wireless, Julie is a CW board member and champion for the CW Virtual Networks Special Interest Group (SIG).

Andrew Palmer - Consulting Director, CGI

Andrew has more than 33 years of experience in IT, Telecoms and TV and Media, having worked in various roles for IBM, AT&T, Ericsson, Motorola and Arris. Andrew's present role is to leverage existing CGI capabilities that match the needs of our clients in the Space, Defence and Intelligence sectors, as well as building new capabilities that will support the emerging and changing needs of our client base. Andrew has proven experience in developing and delivering complex SI and Services solutions that meet both business and technology needs.

Andrew has co-authored "UK Telecoms For Dummies", an essential guide to the complicated UK Telecoms sector as well as articles for publications such as the Cambridge Wireless Journal including "How do we build the new world of 5g?". He frequently speaks at conferences and provides media commentary on industry topics like 5G, IoT and Smart Cities, as well as being a member of the techUK Spectrum Policy Forum and the Cambridge Wireless Virtual Networks Special Interest Group.

Paul Rhodes - Director of OpenRAN, AtlasEdge Data Centres

Paul has a B Eng in Communications Engineering from University of Hull and worked in the wireless industry internationally for over 30 years.

At AtlasEdge he is responsible for RAN and Open vRAN Public and Private network architecture, strategy. He has deployed 4G and 5G small cell networks in both classical architecture and as dark-fibre disaggregated RAN networks and is currently refining the technical and cost implications of centralised classic and virtualised networks.

During his career Paul has worked in Telco Vendors and Infrastructure Providers, significantly for Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, CityFibre and World Wide Technology in Technical and Commercial roles in both Europe and North America. He is also an Expert Working Group Member in Wireless Networking at UKTIN.