Given the toxic relationship between operators and vendors, which includes an overreliance on vendors to do the operator’s development and integration work, a chance to get the academic perspective at Connected Britain could not be passed up. Dimitra Simeonidou, Director of the Smart Internet Lab at the University of Bristol, has cropped up many times in the Wireless Watch archive – most recently leading the REASON research project, but previously in 5G testbeds, and as CTO of the Bristol is Open venture. “These are challenging times, which impacts academic research, which is always based on how industry plans to use the technologies developed. Nonetheless, UK academic research in telecoms is really strong, but the question is how to liberate it,”…