Interview with Ben Wood

Ben Wood was born in Bath in 1972. He says of his family life: “My success today has been built a lot on the great start in life I had from my parents.  I have a sister as well. My mother was a tremendous influence in terms of academically helping me along because I didn’t find studying that easy.  My father is an incredibly talented individual, he can make anything out of wood; he can fix anything. He worked for an American company called Herman Miller who are renowned for their design of office furniture. I grew up in a household surrounded by beautifully designed furniture from iconic designers, such as Charles Eames, which I think really did set me on a path to have a tremendous appreciation for the challenges it takes to make any product.”

Of his awareness of technology while growing up, he says: “We had a BBC Computer, which has gone on to be one of those really iconic devices, so, I was aware of technology.  I was interested in technology, but it certainly wasn’t a career trajectory at that point.”

Ben went to a private school in Bath, he says it was not the happiest of experiences, although he was a bright child, he never felt that he did well academically. He says: “It is only thanks to my parents and their drive and my mother’s patience that got me through my exams and got me on to university. I narrowed down the subjects that I was taking and engaged in subjects which I had more of a personal interest in and things started to click.  Things turned around at university. I didn’t do brilliantly well in my A-Levels. I remember arriving at university and almost apologising to the admissions officer about my grades.  She just said to me, “Don’t worry about it, if you work hard here and you do well here, those grades will be forgotten.”  Never a truer word said. I would pass that onto younger people today; if you keep focusing and you keep your head down, as long as there is continuous improvement, you’ll be remembered for the last great thing that you did.”

Ben studied for a degree in European Marketing and French and on his sandwich year he spent time in the South of France working at Texas Instruments. He explains: “That probably was the trigger for the technology part of my life, although even at that point, I didn’t realise that was the case. … It was the really early days of technology.  I had a desktop computer, I had an email address, which was quite exciting at the time, and there was instant messaging within the organisation, very basic communications, very email-centric, none of the richness of the Internet that we see now today, but it captured my imagination.

“While I was at Texas Instruments, they were a huge player in the mobile phone market at the time, but I had no real understanding of the mobile space, I was working in the marketing team and we were doing all sorts of internal events for distributors of the whole gamut of Texas Instrument products.  I met some wonderful people, learned some fantastic life lessons from them. They taught me how to conduct myself in a business environment, how to maximise relationships, build empathy with people. That was really truly inspirational.”

At this point, Ben was not working in a technical role, but he says: “I had an aptitude for technology, I was always happy to hack about with computers, I didn’t find it daunting at all.” He points to his upbringing of learning to ‘tinker with new products’  and adds: “I didn’t find anything particularly overwhelming, and because it was an area that was exciting and of interest, it really meant that I could get the most out of it.  It was almost embracing technology through osmosis. I was working for a large American multinational, they were very much focused around using IT in their business which meant I was able to type, that was a huge advantage, I was creating presentations, communicating via email systems.  It was just a wonderful immersion in what were some of the foundation steps as to where the world evolved.”

Upon his return from France, Ben worked hard during his final year at university and then set out on the road to finding his first role. He says his criteria for applying for roles was to apply to companies whose names he knew and worked on the basis that a recognised brand should have a good graduate programme. He says: “I applied to Renault, British Steel, Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, a whole host of the obvious “milk round” companies, and I also applied to this funny little company called Vodafone, based in Newbury, who were doing these mobile phone things.”

Ben was then offered a role with Vodafone in the Vodata subsidiary (the Value-Added Services Division) which focused on voicemail as its primary product.  He joined in 1994 as the GSM network was starting to gather momentum, he says: “I was lucky enough to be in the team that then went on to launch text messaging, SMS, and mobile data, that has gone on to unbelievably important technology in humanity almost. That may sound like a pretty ridiculous thing to say but imagine a world now without smartphones, instant connectivity to the Internet, WhatsApp etc, all of those things were pioneered back in the 1990s at Vodafone.”

After two and a half years with Vodafone, Ben moved to Lucent Technologies, based in Swindon. The company was moving into Europe to sell its network infrastructure technology, initially 2.5G (GPRS) technology, and then latterly, 3G.

Ben says his move was instigated by his ambition, he explains: “There was a very strong middle-management layer at Vodafone, which was extremely well-renumerated with share options and therefore there was never going to be any opportunity to progress through the company easily, because no one was going to go anywhere. Having worked with Texas Instruments, a US multinational, I felt very comfortable with international business and I knew if I wanted my career to progress, I needed to move relatively quickly.”

With his new role at Lucent, Ben was given the opportunity to travel the world with trips to Australia, Taiwan, the US, and across Europe. He adds: “It was very, very exciting times in the development of mobile networks. My job was to evangelise the technology, evangelise the experiences that would be delivered with richer data services, which was really looking into a crystal ball of what would happen in the future.  For example, we worked up a whole set of scenarios of how the world might look in the future and we developed, almost jokingly, this idea of what we called the ‘pizza phone’. The idea that you would have a phone which featured a menu and you’d be able to select the pizza that you wanted, the different toppings etc and then submit that to the pizza company and they would deliver the pizza to you.

“Any young person watching this video will be looking at me and asking what on earth is this guy talking about, but honestly, that felt like science fiction at the time. We presented this concept to people and in some cases, they’d look at us like we were from another planet.”

 As well as travelling, Ben also worked on the development of text-to-speech technology. He explains: “I had the chance to work with an unbelievably bright guy from the Bell Labs arm in the US, who had been developing some quite interesting text to speech technology. We called it WDS; the Wireless Data Server.  We were able to take emails and then make a call out to people and read their emails to them, which again, seems a rudimentary service today, but this was just an astonishingly clever piece of technology.”

After seeing Lucent struggle to gain ground in the European mobile market, Ben decided to take a risk and join his friend, Simon Buckingham (https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonbuckingham/), a serial entrepreneur, at Mobile Streams.

Ben explains: “Lucent wasn’t replicating the success that it had had in the US with CDMA technology.  It was under sustained attack from Chinese manufacturer Huawei, while Ericsson and Nokia were dominant incumbents. I went to the European president of the company and said, ‘I’m thinking of leaving because I’m not really sure how you’re going to fix this business.’ He was very honest, he could see I was ambitious, he liked me, he wanted me to do well, and he said, ‘Ben, I can’t put my hand on my heart and say we can fix this business.’ So, I said to him, ‘Well, that’s very good because that’s made my mind up, I’m going to take an enormous risk, and I’m going to go and work with a friend of mine, in a start-up, in a kind of hand-to-mouth basis, and create a business.’  Simon and I had worked together at Vodafone. Simon had scaled up a business around mobile content.  He owned numerous web domains with the biggest ones being Ringtones.com and Picturemessaging.com.

Simon and Ben built the Ringtones business at the same time as running a technology advisory / analyst business providing advice on the market.

Ben adds: “I won’t say that it was easy, it was probably the toughest few months of my whole career. I was working with someone who was an absolute workaholic.  We didn’t have a great grasp of how to professionally run a business, so, we had all those sorts of challenges of making sure that we got enough money in through the door to pay all the bills at the end of the month. But slowly and surely we built a really nice business. … I walked away from that business with some equity and a business that continued to grow.  I made a major contribution to that growth and putting in some stable foundations.”

Simon floated the company on AIM. Ben adds: “l learned an awful lot about how to run a business, which stood me in good stead for the transition onto CCS Insight eventually.”

After staying with Mobile Streams for just a short time and helping it to grow, Ben moved on to join Gartner, based in the UK. He says: “By that time, I had realised that I had a good skill set when it came to distilling technology down into easy-to-understand sound bites and being able to assimilate a market and provide analysis on that market.  So, the opportunity at Gartner was really a perfect fit for me. It was all around mobile phones and smartphones which had, at that point, become a real area of interest for me. I went in to Gartner and it just opened my eyes to another whole opportunity. It really progressed my career because I went on to have a very large global team spanning all the way from Australia to Dallas which meant it was almost a 24-hour operation. I went on to be one of the youngest research vice presidents the company had ever had.”

After five successful years at Gartner, building a media profile and reputation for himself, Ben began to think about moving on and either starting a business for himself or joining a business. He had been having conversations with Shaun Collins (https://www.linkedin.com/in/shauncollins47/) who started Collins Consulting Services (CCS). Ben explains: “Shaun had created this fantastic one-man-band consultancy business in 1993, and I hooked up with him about 10 years after that although we had been talking for a while.

“I had reached the end of the line at Gartner, I felt I’d gone as far as I could with that business and I had a choice.  I was sitting at a crossroads. I could either go off and set up my own business. I’d built pretty good brand equity, the ‘Ben Wood brand’ had got out there, I’d developed a very good media profile as well.  So, I did have the opportunity to do something on my own.

However, I was a little nervous about whether I’d be able to ramp up the business on my own and be able to develop a business at the same time as starting it from scratch.  I knew I was really good at the delivery, but my concern was that all of the work that goes around building a business, securing business, getting through procurement processes and all of those sorts of things, would slow me down.”

Ben’s leaving Gartner coincided with the point at which Shaun was looking to expand Collings Consulting Services with investment from Michael Walker who subsequently became a co-founder of CCS Insight. Shaun and Michael realised they needed to recruit someone and Ben was Shaun’s top pick. The three agreed a deal and launched CCS Insight. Ben continues: “So, the three of us founded this second-generation of the CCS Insight business and we haven’t looked back since then.  It’s gone on to be a multimillion-pound business with about 30 people in the team.  We’ve got offices in Kings Cross in London, and we have a few people on the West Coast of the US as well.”

The company counts every handset manufacturer of a certain size among their clients alongside network operators such as BT, Vodafone, SingTel, Telefonica and many others. Ben adds: “We also work with the big web players, semi-conductor players, like Intel and Qualcomm, a tremendous stable of companies which is truly humbling as a small English business which has grown organically. We’ve funded all of our own growth without having to take any investment, and we’re extremely proud of what we’ve achieved.”

The company started a set of predictions annually looking at what might be expected of technology in the future. The report became so popular that Ben and Shaun, decided to create the Predictions Event. Ben explains: “It started as a simple report but over time it became a bigger franchise and we moved it from being a report to an event. We’ve hosted numerous events getting bigger and bigger every year.  It is hosted in London with really senior people from all over the world. We had people like Cristiano Amon, the CEO of Qualcomm, for example, on stage, we had people from Amazon, the CEO of BT; many, many people.  We use our “brains-trust” of analysts to put together around 100 predictions every year, spanning an enormous range of technology areas.  They are designed to be thought-provoking and opinionated, but not deliberately controversial.” The company decided to focus on this middle ground between banal and controversial and have had a variety of successes with the predictions over the years as well as a few that have ‘got them into trouble by being too difficult to believe they would ever come true’.

Ben adds: “A very memorable one was that we predicted that Google would buy Motorola’s handset business. We had Motorola as a client at that time and when they saw this prediction, they rang up and went absolutely berserk and threatened to cancel their contract with us, only to find 18 months later that that particular prediction came true.  Another one was O2 and Three in the UK, where we had a prediction about those two companies coming together. We had Ronan Dunne, the CEO of O2, in the audience at that time. We had warned him this prediction was going to be there, we didn’t want to ambush him, but he kindly volunteered to comment on the prediction when it came up at the event and he memorably said that he had no worries about that and that he would sleep well at night. Lo and behold, a hostile bid came from Three for O2 shortly afterwards, no one knew that was going to happen at that time. We’ve predicted various technology trends as well, so, it’s a great event, it’s really good for our research team, it sets the agenda every year, and it’s something I’m very proud to lead.”

Ben and his team do not expect all 100 predications to come true but rather provide their customers with a set of predictions that can act as a ‘strategic bellwether’. Ben adds: “Each year we publish a report featuring the 10 that we got right and 10 that we got wrong. We’re not afraid to put our hands up when we get something wrong. I think it is one of the big shortcomings of the analyst world, that people tend to rewrite history and brush their mistakes under the carpet.  At CCS Insight, that’s not something we’ve ever done.”

Ben says of his career, that he “was very fortunate to end up in a business where I was working with things that I really loved. I’ve been fortunate throughout my whole career that going to work has never been a chore.  It’s a cliché, but I live to work, I really love what I do. I’m very passionate about what I do and I genuinely feel so honoured to have been on this journey of this technology curve. When I joined Vodafone who would have thought the mobile phone would become the most prolific consumer electronics device on the plant.  We had no vision that we would reach these dizzying heights and I jumped into an industry at a time where it was exploding, and I’ve been on that trajectory ever since, and it continues, every day is different.”

He continues, adding: “If I’d gone to work at British Steel, or wherever else I’d applied, you don’t see major disruptions.  You might live through one generation of technology, for example, in the car industry, you might go from fossil fuel engines through to electric during your lifetime, whereas in the mobile industry, I’ve now lived through four generations of technology. I arrived when it was analogue. I wasn’t there at the conception but I saw the birth of GSM, with 2G, I saw 3G arrive, 4G arrive, and more recently 5G. That’s beyond the realms of most levels of innovation most people would see in a career.”

Ben is the founder of the Mobile Phone Museum, which is home to thousands of handsets ranging from the earliest devices of 1985 to collector gems such as the Huawei KFC phone emblazoned in red and engraved with an image of Colonel Sanders.  The museum is virtual, however, Ben is aiming to have a physical pop-up exhibition by 2025 for the 40-year anniversary of the first mobile phone call made in the UK. His inspiration for founding the museum came to him while working at Vodafone and seeing old handsets being dumped during a building refurbishment.

He says of founding it: “I grew up in a household where design and appreciation of product design were important. … One day I was in the office at Vodafone and I saw this lab being dismantled and people carrying large phones out of the building to put into a skip. I was absolutely horrified by this, because it struck me that these were devices that were an important part of social history.  I was witnessing how quickly the mobile phone market was evolving going from a device in the 1980s that was the size of a car battery through to the slick hand-held devices, which you could take all over the world and make a phone call.  So, I rushed out after these guys and told them not to throw the phones away, I would look after them. I took them home and then began my mobile phone collection.  Over the years, I just collected phones, and whenever I saw anything of interest I picked it up.”

In 2010, realising that his collection had grown to around 1000 or more, Ben did an inventory of what he had. He says: “I started pulling them all out, cataloguing them, putting them all into an Excel spreadsheet, and as I did that process, I’d lay out all of these phones on my workbench by brand, and I’d put photographs of them on social media, through LinkedIn mainly. The outpouring of nostalgia was overwhelming. There were plenty of people out there, like me, who had great fond memories of all these different devices. As a result, it snowballed into more phones being donated but also, it got picked up by a guy at the FT (see: https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/blog-detail/smartphone-evolution), who did a short video on it, it got picked up by the BBC, I was on The One Show with the phones for one of the iPhone launches and that was kind of the start of it.”

In 2018/19 Ben was contacted by Kamil Vacek (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kamilvacek/), from the Czech Republic, who wanted to give Ben his entire collection of every HTC phone that had been made.

When Ben and Kamil met, Kamil, an entrepreneur, asked about the idea of a museum suggesting that he would like to be an angel investor in the idea.

Ben continues: “This was around the time of the start of the pandemic and we knew that the traditional museum was kind of a broken business model. Because we were so into technology and because we wanted to have massive reach with this amazing collection that I’d created, we felt that the best thing was to start with a virtual online museum, which people can find at mobilephonemuseum.com.

“At this point, I’d also joined forces with another mobile phone collector, a gentleman called Matt Chatterley (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattchatt/) who had been working at Nokia in the early 1990s, and we’d struck up a tremendous friendship. Matt had a superb collection of phones so, we brought those two entities together. Thanks to Kamil’s help, we built the website, the brand identity, a huge database, we catalogued all the products, we started photographing them.  We also knew that we wanted the mobile phones to be used as a force for good.”

As well as creating the museum, Ben also set up a charity. He says: “The pillars of the charity were to safeguard these historic iconic devices, but also, to pioneer an education arm to take these phones into schools and virtually into young people’s lives so they could learn about the amazing journey that the mobile phone had been on, and hopefully, inspire some of the designers and engineers of the future through that.”

Ben also secured sponsorship money from Vodafone UK. He continues: “Vodafone was the network where my career had started and also it was the network that had made the first public mobile phone call on 1 January 1985.  It was an opportunity to secure a multi-year sponsorship agreement with them because in, 2025, it will be 40 years of mobile phones in the UK which gives us a few years to build the collection, catalogue and photograph it, build our assets and the education arm, and then be in a position to have a really fantastic in-person showcase for the museum.”

The museum now has over 2,350 unique devices (over 5,000 in total with duplicates) which Ben believes is one of the most significant collections of phones in the world.  Since the official launch in November 2021, they’ve added a further 350 unique devices.

Ben adds: “There are always phones that we’re looking for, and we have a “Most Wanted” page on the website and of the 16 devices we originally posted on there, we’ve already managed to secure all 16!. We have a very, very good representation of phones from Europe, we have quite a good collection from Japan, but I’d really like to fill out the North American market and many of the CDMA phones produced.  I think South Korea would be another very fruitful avenue in terms of finding historic phones. There has been some tremendous innovation in the Japanese and South Korean markets in particular.”

The museum is currently piloting a schools’ programme of visits and will look to expand the programme over the next few years.  The school’s programme involves a team doing a two-and-a-half-hour workshop with students, talking about phones, their evolution and what technology has been subsumed into the phone, plus subjects such as sustainability.

Ben envisages the pop-up museum that he has planned as potentially a part of another museum such as the Science Museum or Design Museum. He explains: “Anywhere where there is a relevance to take the phones and put them into a museum setting in one of their flexible galleries.  Most museums have a rotating gallery where they’ll have a showcase for maybe 6 or 12 months, and that would work well for us because we don’t want to have the overhead of having a permanently fixed museum, we believe the virtual museum is a very forward-looking way to exhibit these products.  We’re developing more rich content, filmed some interviews which will be published with the phones. We take very high-quality photography of the devices and in future, we may do 360° photos of the devices. Who knows, maybe we’ll be able to deliver a virtual museum through virtual reality or the metaverse.”

Today 1.5 billion mobile phones are sold every year, Ben says this is a long way from the early days when he worked at Vodafone, adding: “I look back at those early days at Vodafone where we were fiddling about with text messaging, where you’d have to push a button three times to get a letter on a screen and send messages to each other.  We didn’t really know what we were doing and what a big impact that it would have and it would go on to be billions of messages sent. 1.5 billion mobile phones get sold every year and that’s about 42 phones every second: it’s incredible.

“Phones have provided education, the ability for people to create commerce, they are an invaluable part of everyday life, it’s the computer in your pocket. Society is hugely dependent on them now, even more so during the pandemic.

“Look at some of the things we’ve seen such as using QR codes in a restaurant to get a virtual menu, getting a text alert with a confirmation pin code for your bank account, being up to date with current affairs.  The rise of citizen journalism where the ubiquitous camera inside a mobile phone, which was considered quite a preposterous idea when it was introduced in Japan, has gone on to record, really iconic events.”

Ben also points to the key role played by phones in the 7/7 bombings of London, adding: “It was the first time that we saw live coverage of an incident as it was unfolding. There were people who filmed short videos and took photographs on the tube trains that had been affected, as they left the trains and stumbled down the  tunnels to come out.  We’d never seen any kind of footage like that in our lives. There are so many other wonderful things as well. People are able to capture their lives, share wonderful moments like a child’s first steps, it really has become an incredible tool in everyday life.”

Asked about some of the negative impacts of phones including social media bullying and so on, Ben says: “We’re very conscious of that. I think that that’s one of the interesting things when I go into schools and I talk to headteachers. Most of the time when they talk about mobile phones in schools it’s largely negative and I’m not going to pretend that there aren’t issues like access to pornography or phones used for bullying and all those sorts of things.  However, there’s plenty of things that they can do as a force for good as well.  What the teachers love when we take the phones into the schools is the fact that it is a positive message, in so far as it’s an amazing industry, much of which was pioneered and developed in the UK. It is something that we can be very proud of. It’s a testament to the evolution of technology. We’ve seen so many technologies subsumed into the mobile phone, of course, we’ve got challenges as we move into the future as well, around sustainability and telling that story in terms of how we need to think about these devices, we need to start thinking about new areas like how are they recycled, can we improve their longevity, can we, make them more secure, can we make them repairable? This is part of the story that we’re trying to tell as part of the mobile phone museum charity project.”

While the museum currently focuses on the hardware, Ben says that in the future, they may look at the software as well. He adds: “The hardware is the very tangible part of the story but the software is part of the story and another very pioneering part of the technology for the UK. Psion, who had many of the early personal organiser products, had the software which went on to form a lot of the foundational technology for the Symbian operating system; the early rudimentary smartphone platform that Nokia used. Unfortunately, that ran out of steam, they didn’t evolve it fast enough and we saw the ascendancy of iOS from Apple and Android from Google.

“Blackberry is another example of a company that lost their way. They felt that they had the optimal solution, they didn’t feel like they needed to progress their software as aggressively as some of the other players because they felt that going down that kind of massive computer platform with lots of memory and storage etc. However, it turned out that that was the direction that the world went in.

“User interface is a huge part of the mobile phone, it started primarily as physical buttons and the software and the hardware started to get blended together. Now, we’re moving to all sorts of other things like artificial intelligence, voice interaction, gesture interactions, etc, which will undoubtedly signal where the technology goes in the future.”

Saying that, “things have been rather dull since Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in January 2007, that moved towards a rectangular monoblock with all phones starting to look the same. One of the things that Ben is excited about is greater diversity in design. He adds: “I’m very excited about moving away from that sea of sameness to a little bit more design diversity with the arrival of flexible display technology, which allows us to have foldable phones and phones with screens wrapped around them. That is starting a whole new chapter of innovation.

We also have 5G which is available and allowing even faster connectivity, lower latency connectivity, and I’m sure that that will spawn a whole new range of applications that we’ve not previously seen.  One thing history has shown me is that every time we provide people more bandwidth, they fill that pipe up and it means we’re going to get richer experiences and more exciting experiences.

I think we’ll also start to see mobile technology starting to play a more important role in healthcare and in the health and wellness of our daily lives. We have things like smartwatches, which measure heart rate, sleep, etc, in future, maybe they’ll have blood sugar, which could be a revolutionary step forward for diabetics.  Temperature measurements is very, very important. The pandemic demonstrated how important it was to know how well you were, and if technology can deliver that, it would be fantastic. Our future technological development is almost limited by our imagination. The sheer volume of mobile phones and the reach of connected technology has made the world smaller, and that is super-exciting and bodes well for even more innovation in the future.”

Offering advice to anyone thinking of going into mobile phone innovation or technology as a career, Ben says: “The first thing is to find something that you’re passionate about. I was lucky, I ended up working for a company where I was immediately interested in what they could offer and it launched me into a fantastic career.  So, follow your heart, your ability to form relationships with people in your working life is hugely important and that has never been more difficult particularly, during the pandemic, we’ve been working from home, it’s been very difficult to onboard people but work hard on those relationships. Take opportunities and really immerse yourself in the technology.

“One of the things that I was very proud of as I went through my career was the fact that I was always happy to get my hands dirty with the technology, really live and breathe the technology. I still provide analysis on the mobile phone market and that means that I probably have to change my phone every three, four, five weeks; that’s an extremely difficult and challenging thing to do, swapping all your contacts over setting up all your apps and everything else.  But it’s the only real way you can be an expert.”

Ben explains that he has always learned from other people, identifying and adopting impressive characteristics and equally noting behaviour that he does not want to adopt. He adds: “I think that has been a tremendous life lesson for me.”

Asked if there is anything he would have done differently in his career, Ben says: “I have been so fortunate. I might have left Gartner a year earlier, I think I’d kind of reached the end of the road there, but I think a lot of people in their careers say, sometimes they’ve stayed in one place too long.  I’m really enjoying building CCS Insight. It doesn’t get any easier, as a company gets bigger, the challenges change.  In some respects, it was a lot easier when there were just the three or four of us, now, we’re ten times that number, it’s more challenging.  But, overall, I’ve been incredibly fortunate, and I should be grateful for that.”

Asked if the UK still has a leading position in the mobile phone industry, Ben says: “Our crown has slipped. There is no question that we haven’t built those big entities as we’ve seen in the West Coast for example, with the Googles, Facebooks, etc. We still have tremendous global businesses, like Vodafone, ARM and BT. We still nurture young talent in those businesses but it is challenging for the UK. I don’t deny that but we are very, very fortunate that we have such a unique position in the industry in terms of the history.  We still continue to have a lot of companies that want to locate here.  The UK market is still considered to be very much a leading-edge country, in terms of the deployment of new technologies, be it 5G or other technologies that we’ve seen deployed here. So, the time zone does play to the strengths as well, that has been so fundamental to the success of CCS Insight, in so far as we’re able to cater to a global audience from the UK time zone.”

Asked about the reluctance of countries to embrace Chinese companies in the 5G space, Ben says: “This a global issue, it’s the geopolitics of technology. There is a bit of a technological cold war between the US and China. With Huawei in particular, on the infrastructure side of things, decisions were made and the government didn’t feel comfortable having critical national infrastructure controlled by a Chinese provider.  But, these things ebb and flow, there is still plenty of room for innovation. The Chinese are not going to give up any time soon, they continue to invest and develop and create intellectual property, so, that’s not something that I’m hugely concerned about.”

Asked about the fear that mobile phones would cause brain cancer, a fear that circulated when they were first introduced. Ben says: “I don’t think we can have any form of complacency when it comes to the health impact of technology.  All the tests show that there aren’t any issues. … There are so many stringent tests and procedures that are used and done when new technology is introduced to make sure that it is safe.  “We’ve seen the rise of conspiracy theories which have been damaging. It was tremendously disheartening during the pandemic when there was all this nonsense about 5G masts causing Covid which was absolutely preposterous and caused really significant damage to some of the equipment which could have been essential to calling the emergency services.  I think we have to be careful how these messages are articulated, but at the same time, we have a responsibility as an industry to make sure that any new services or technology capabilities are checked for being safe and that we constantly revisit that.  The impact of technology on health is a very, very hot topic right now, and it’s good to see more is being put in place to support people in that respect. For me, the next big area is the environment and sustainability. We really do need to work harder as an industry to make sure that we take a more sustainable approach to the way in which deliver networks, the way in which we produce phones, recycle phones, etc.”

Ben points to batteries as possibly the single biggest barrier to technology evolution in mobile phones and other consumer electronics such as electric vehicles.  He adds: “It’s the one thing that we’ve not been able to easily crack. The UK, with ARM, has been pioneering in reducing the power consumption of the chips that power these devices and that was the way we actually engineered around the battery problem. We’ve made some predictions around the introduction of solid-state batteries, a new technology which will probably provide 20% better performance, be lighter and perhaps, more predictable in the way that they work.”

Ben says: “Building CCS Insight with my partners is a very big thing, but I don’t think that’s the sort of thing that will get remembered, whereas the Mobile Phone Museum is hopefully a legacy that will live on way beyond me.

We’ve amassed this amazing collection and we’ll be able to continue that long into the future. We’ll have the assets, the website, and the knowledge.  I hope that we will record lots of the stories around the phones because to me that is as important as anything else. Anyone can look up the spec of a phone, but the story of “how did this phone come to fruition, what had to be done to make this a possibility?”, a lot of that is stored in people’s heads. My goal is to unlock all of that, get it written down in a way and archive the industry as well make sure that that is captured for generations to come.”

Interviewed by Jane Bird

Transcribed by TP Transcription

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley