On Overcoming Challenges

welcome to our

tedx talk on rising to the challenge

and the challenge we’re rising to you is

to build the world’s first 5g

concert what could possibly have gone

wrong

and we will expose a lot of the

background

stories which happened on the day and

the days before

and to this end i have with me here

noah my older daughter and my older

father misha

well and today the challenges we thought

of talking about

are free challenges the first challenge

is really a technology challenge

5g we were the first ones at king’s

college to build a fully functioning 5g

system in the uk

and building a 5g system is a bit like

building a you know a rocket for mars

it’s so

complex and complicated technology

there’s hardware

software there people teams to manage so

loads of challenges we really have

encountered to make it happen and it

took us

nine months to do it yes nine months it

was a bit like

giving birth to a system and birth we

gave

and it was called you know the uk’s

first 5g

system so i remember my dad came home

every day exhausted

and you know i loved the concept of 5g

and the thought that i could feel like

my dad was with me

because he travels a lot and you know i

miss him a lot

so i loved that idea great so you know

we we we build that technology

specifically for noah

to be with me and on we went you know

the other challenge we really

encountered is that uh challenge around

the narrative

and we as engineers forget about this

very very often and you know you you

need to have a narrative

because we’re very good in you know

building boxes and

you know writing software and you know

having lines of codes

but the majority of the people the

society out there do not understand

what is this for so we really sat down

and i hired

ali hosseini as they’ll become a really

good friend of mine to build a narrative

around this and

i call this now giving technology a soul

and we were really brainstorming and ali

was telling me misha you know if you

really want to bring this 5g tech with

the big advantage of having high data

rate

and very low latency to life you need to

do something substantial something

emotional

and he said you need to fly to berlin

and perform piano there

and then have you know your daughter uh

sing in london i was like yeah nah dally

i don’t want to do that you know i want

to be

um you know with my team when we

launched the 5g system in uk said no

misha

you need to fly to berlin and make it

happen

so i went home yeah and that’s

the one day i remember very fondly

because he um

told me to write a whole song in three

days three days before okay

i was just like no that’s not gonna

happen so

at the end we decided to sing maria mena

i was made for loving you yeah a

beautiful song you will hear later so

the

the we got the piece and then the actual

day came so the challenge the third

challenge

was all around performance so we had

then

you know the the the big issue was

really for me to be in berlin

and have noah in london and i was under

the brunburger tour so a very historic

place really and uh i had a piano

beautiful piano there

and noah was in the guild hall which is

uh uk’s oldest entertainment venue so

the romans brought that venue

you know 2 000 years back and we thought

let’s marry a very historic place

with uh you know very very modern

technology

so i was in berlin and true truthfully

as very nervous

very nervous because you know 5g tech

wasn’t really stable

the audio codecs you know sometimes

wouldn’t work

connectivity wasn’t always very reliable

you know we haven’t we haven’t even been

able to rehearse and really make this

piece

uh you know play from from the beginning

to the very end

and uh you know i i then remember trying

to connect to london

and and and there was noah and maybe

noah you can explain

what happened to you on that day on the

performance day yeah

it was a very chaotic day um my mom and

me we went to london and we were at

least

30 minutes going round through london

trying to find the venue

and then on top of that the technology

wasn’t working so everyone was very

stressed

i had no food because my sister at all

she was extremely hungry

and you know we had no time to rehearse

it was quite tense and when the moment

came

um i was extremely nervous probably one

of the most

nerve-wracking moments and

i told myself i was gonna get through

this and i did and

it was very like fun too yeah so

you know i was so proud of noah really

because i

yeah it’s a how old were you 11 maybe 10

10 10 years old right you’ve been told

by your daddy to really go on stage in

front of all these

vips in london and in berlin

using a technology which you know was

uh very new had quite a few quirks from

time to time

we wouldn’t know whether it would

actually last for the whole performance

she was on the spotlight you know

everybody watching her

and she kept the nerves and i was it was

so emotional for me because

i was in berlin 1 000 kilometers from

her

and yet it felt as if she was with me

and this is where i

really have seen firsthand that power of

5g technology

very low latency gives you that feeling

of immediacy gave me that feeling of

being with

noah with you know my daughter even

though we were so far apart

and i tried you know very hard not to

cry that night and if you look at the

video you know my head is down because

tears were coming out

and i suddenly forgot of all these vips

around

me of the gravity of us pioneering this

technology with this amazing concert and

it was a truly truly emotional night um

and then it has set off now anything

else loads of people have tried ever

since

to use that technology famous musicians

have

now been using this technology to

actually perform remotely jam remotely

teach remotely

and the very very beginning this world’s

first

was actually with noah and myself

okay thanks a lot for listening and uh

listening to the

into the video and uh enjoy enjoy the

music and the rest of the day

bye bye

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[Applause]

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you