Quickly: this is your last chance to join Quantum Safe Networks Forum – which is live online tomorrow (July 14) from 6am PT / 9am ET / 2pm BST / 3pm CEST etc – to discuss PQC and QKD in telco networks, plus hybrid versions of both. Cisco and Palo Alto Networks have joined the speaker faculty – alongside AT&T, MetTel, Orange, Singtel, Telefonica, others. Quantum might be overshadowed by AI right now (so is everything), but it is no less urgent. Enterprises need quantum-safe strategies today to protect critical data and infrastructure against tomorrow’s cryptographic threats, while AI simultaneously raises the stakes by making cyberattacks faster, cheaper, and more sophisticated. For telcos, trusted with society’s most critical comms, resilience and security have never mattered more.

Besides, today (July 13) might as well be IoT day – like every day, actually – on the grounds that’s what most of the news is about. Indeed, at writing – and having just written that Wireless Logic, which has purchased US-based SIMETRY (its 10th acquisition in four years), is the only IoT MVNO that is properly forcing consolidation in a fragmented market that needs to shrink to scale – the word across the wires is that CSL Group has acquired IoTM Solutions to create a platform for IoT connectivity management and eSIM orchestration. As the industry preps for the SGP.32 specification, the value is shifting beyond connectivity towards orchestration, automation, lifecycle management – as we know. Wireless Logic is buying scale; CSL is buying software.

But either way, the market is consolidating, even despite the real reservations IoT firms have about VC-hiked valuations, around IoT platforms, and not just SIM cards. And today, it doesn’t stop there. Thales, Singtel, and Bridge Alliance have a new multi-operator eSIM orchestration platform – the world’s first, they reckon – which allows firms to provision and manage IoT devices across multiple carriers using the SGP.32 standard. Last week, Telefónica launched a similar proposition – with Thales, presumably akin. Again, global IoT is increasingly a software orchestration business; telcos have to cooperate if they want to compete.

Meanwhile, if everything’s a thing, then new big-thing drone demos by AT&T and Ericsson on a live 5G network in the US tell us, maybe, where we’re heading at the top end, with souped-up IoT on 6G. The setup at AT&T Stadium in Texas provided a glimpse of 6G-era integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) to detect and track drones. Again, it’s just another IoT story: where the mobile network becomes like a distributed sensor, turning connected infrastructure into a real-time awareness platform for sports venues, and all sorts of industrial climes. But the research community has already moved on: a new €7.76m EU-backed 6G ‘pilot for resilient industrial manufacturing environments’ (PRIME-6G) seeks to develop a platform (again) for real-time AI robotics and sensing.

And there’s a real-world proof point for such Industry 4.0 pyrotechnics, as well – in waiting, somewhere in east London: Thames Freeport, with a private 5G network from Verizon and Nokia, has launched a new port innovation lab to find deployable tech for DP World London Gateway, the Port of Tilbury, and Ford’s Dagenham. Customers are lining up – if only the tech wasn’t so messy, the vendors so tribal, the ROI so inscrutable, the language so arcane, the valuations so screwy, the platforms so untested. If only everyone would just hurry up.

Finally, today is not really IoT today, clearly; there is one (April 9), and it is a daft thing. Worse, according to emails in my inbox, Thursday is ‘AI Appreciation Day’. Who knew? And also: WTF!