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
um
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
5g
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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is
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you