Researchers from the James Watt School of Engineering in Glasgow are claiming to have constructed a new development in affordable, open-source mobile networks that enables near-real-time control of robotic arms. The technology could help doctors work on patients in remote locations in the years to come.
The first demonstration of the medical innovation has seen the research team use the system to perform mock dental exams on a pair of dentures, highlighting its potential for use in medical procedures.
The system is based on off-the-shelf hardware that has been used to build a 4G LTE mobile network which connects a haptic controller to a robot arm, with the network allowing users to direct the arm’s movements with very low latency, enabling a high level of control.
The research team built their framework using the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) framework, which uses open-source software to control mobile network hardware. They repurposed a USB network dongle, more commonly used for consumer mobile internet, to create stable connections between the haptic input device, the robotic arm and a computer configured to act as an intelligent base station.
The system’s signal quality, data rates and latency were monitored and fine-tuned using specialised xApps software.
Its mobile dongle also helped the team create a network that drew considerably less power than comparable connections using the software-defined radio (SDR) more commonly used in similar tasks. The system used 4.5 watts, a 90% reduction on the 45 watts required by traditional SDRs to perform the same activities.
From a performance basis during lab tests, the researchers enabled communications between the base station, the controller and the robotic arm with a bandwidth of 10Mbps. They said that such a connection allowed them to control the arm to simulate a dental exam on dentures with less than a second of latency and minimal signal loss.
The James Watt School of Engineering is part of the University of Glasgow, which was the first institution in the UK to confer degrees in engineering, and established the first chair of engineering in the UK in 1840. Its research environment includes coverage of a broad range of engineering subjects, as well as the interfaces with biology, chemistry, computer science, medicine and physics.
The college claims its research and teaching is “at the forefront of discovery, creation and practice that is internationally leading in education, innovation and new capability”.
Commenting on the project and its aims in a paper outlining the research, Saber Hassouna of the James Watt School of Engineering said: “The O-RAN framework holds a great deal of potential for enabling intelligent, data-driven, programmable and virtualised networks, but a significant amount of work remains to be done to demonstrate that potential being achieved in the real world, beyond theoretical modelling.
“The testbed we’ve developed here using commercially available hardware shows that O-RAN can be used to enable excellent performance in robotic teleoperation, which is a complex task. For applications like dental procedures, the robotic arm must move very smoothly, which requires high data throughput and low latency, both of which we’ve been able to achieve for the first time with O-RAN.”
Qammer Abbasi, head of the University of Glasgow’s communications, sensing and imaging hub, added: “This is a very encouraging demonstration of the potential of O-RAN to enable fine-grained, close-to-real-time control of a robotic arm. [This] showcases the performance we’ve been able to deliver in a single room with a direct line of sight between the base station and the arm, and we’re currently working on developing the system further to ensure it can deliver the same level of performance at greater distances.
“Ultimately, this could be a step towards creating reliable, affordable methods of performing complex tasks remotely, opening up new applications in medicine, automation, industry and beyond.”
But this lock’s interior deadbolt manages to hold an impressive amount of technology. There’s a new dual-core chipset that has a ton of compatibility and unlocking options, including Matter and NFC tags, and the dual core means it can run Bluetooth and Matter on separate cores. It’s also compatible with Apple Home Key, along with Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Samsung SmartThings. It’s quick and responsive when I use the app to unlock it, though my go-to unlocking method is usually the optional Level Keypad ($79) (the lock otherwise does not come with a keypad), which connects to the lock via Bluetooth. The lock responds instantly when I enter the code on the pad, which I have installed on my door frame.
ScreenshotLevel via Nena Farrell
ScreenshotLevel via Nena Farrell
The Level Lock Pro can also sense if the door is open or closed without needing any additional accessories. It uses a magnetometer to sense the closed door placement, and you’ll calibrate it once when you set it up. It’s worked well for me, though it did have a weird week where it claimed my door was open when it wasn’t. While the magnetometer is supposed to use the Earth’s gravity field, I was able to fix the open door issue by readjusting my strike plate on the doorjamb, which had gotten lose and ended up at a weird angle. (Installing and removing so many smart locks has left my doorjamb and its screw holes worse for wear, to say the least, so this isn’t normally an issue people should run into.)
The app is also easy to use and easy on the eyes. It’s a very pretty interface, with customizable wallpaper and immediate confirmation if your door is locked or unlocked. You’ll click the three dots in the corner for your device to see the Settings, Sharing, and Activity options, which you can click into to adjust the various settings, create different access codes, and see when your door was opened and by whom. It synced easily and immediately to my Amazon Alexa ecosystem, and I can ask Alexa if the door is locked and to lock it. Alexa can’t unlock it by default, but you can go into the Alexa app to toggle this on. I’ve opted not to; nobody needs to be able to voice-command my front door open.
Power Play
Photograph: Nena Farrell
Unlike other smart locks that use bulky battery packs or several AA batteries, the Level Lock Pro uses a single CR2 lithium battery. The lock comes with a nonrechargeable CR2 battery made by Level, but you can replace it with any CR2 battery once it runs out. It’s the same battery the brand has been using with its earlier locks, but the Lock Pro is designed to make better use of it so it lasts longer. Where the previous Lock+ had about six months of battery life, the Level Lock Pro is expected to get about a year of battery life from a single CR2 battery.
Barry Panayi, group chief data officer (CDO) at insurance firm Howden, is on a mission to create what he calls the datasphere. Rather than simply collecting data, he wants information and insight to become integral to joined-up business operations.
“Our work is not about producing a list of tables with numbers in rows and columns,” he says. “Yes, that effort is important, but it’s not the stuff that will set us apart. If you can get the information first – such as what’s happening in the supply chain or a technological advancement that’s affecting the business – we must factor that insight into the rows and columns of numbers. That’s the key business transformation for us.”
Panayi’s attempt to build the datasphere at Howden began in August 2025. He joined the firm after working for retailer John Lewis Partnership (JLP) for four-and-a-half years, where, as he explained to Computer Weekly in December 2022, his team oversaw data management, business intelligence, and research and insight.
Having previously worked in financial services as data chief at both Lloyds and Amlin, Panayi says the opportunity at Howden provided the chance to return to an industry he knew well, but with a different slant.
“I wanted to work for more of an upstart,” he says. “Howden felt right, because it had the scale – it was big, it was winning – but it wasn’t weighed down like one of the bigger incumbents.”
Panayi describes his new employer as a “hyper-growth company”. The firm employs about 23,000 people, having grown from around 10,000 employees five years ago. The use of data and technology is right at the centre of the company’s growth agenda. While Panayi enjoyed working for JLP, he was attracted by the ambition and energy he found at Howden.
“It’s just dynamic,” he says. “It’s a private and owner-led business. CEO David Howden owns the company. He’s enormously charismatic, and the organisation felt energetic. I thought I’d give the opportunity a go, and it’s been great.”
Leading change
Panayi looks back on his time at JLP and says his team’s biggest achievement there was ensuring the right insight and information were being pushed to people in shops and operational locations.
“We did all the cool stuff, like getting the platform and tools up and running, and maturing our capability. However, the thing that made the difference was, for the first time, people in our shops weren’t looking at printouts on pinboards. They had apps on their handsets that told them the location of a delivery or product, or pricing information,” he says.
“We did all these concepts, and they all took off and became industrialised. We did some cool AI stuff, but we made people’s lives better in the shops. We were able to get information to the people who actually use it. This insight meant there was more stuff on the shelf for people to buy, priced at the right price. And that’s what retail is about, buying something and selling it for more than you bought it for.”
“We want to get people using data, but not in a way that we build a massive central team. We want to do it a different way. That different approach comes with challenges, because entrepreneurialism means moving quickly, and sometimes things happen that you’re not aware of. But that all makes for a fun vibe”
Barry Panayi, Howden
Panayi recognises that leading data at Howden means working across a different type of organisation.
“We are so federated and entrepreneurial. That is David’s ethos – you get out of people’s way. We’ve grown through acquisition, so we don’t want to snatch everything into the middle. It’s a different challenge from JLP, because we want to get people using data, but not in a way that we build a massive central team,” he says.
“We want to do it a different way, which is quite rare, because big enterprises want to suffocate things. That different approach comes with challenges, of course, because entrepreneurialism means moving quickly, and sometimes things happen that you’re not aware of. But that all makes for a fun vibe.”
Panayi says Howden broke into the global top 10 insurers for the first time in 2025, and the senior executives at the firm can see a potential route to the top four. He gives an example of the rate of growth. Having started from zero in the US, the company employed 300 people before Christmas as it began its operation and added another 200 during the holiday period.
“When I joined, in my second week, I was told to go and help them set up the US business, from a data point of view,” he says. “So, we really are moving quickly.”
Developing products
As global CDO, Panayi manages data across 50 countries. The broad nature of the business also impacts his role. “We’re a broker, but also an underwriter and a reinsurer,” he says. “Because we do different things, it means the data also does different things.”
Panayi is responsible for the technical platform and engineering, as well as the data management and architecture around the insight the firm creates. He also oversees analytics, data science and machine learning, and has an internal transformation office with technical business analysts that can help drive pioneering projects.
“The data is everywhere, not because it’s poorly organised, but because there’s such a variety of information that our brokers need to have conversations with their clients. From a data point of view, the work involves more than identifying the data sources and ingesting them into a platform,” he says.
“It’s a lot more nuanced than that, and you could waste a lot of time trying to get everything into shape, when really what we need to do is help our brokers get the information they want, and that they didn’t know they wanted. And the way to serve that insight isn’t in a report in Power BI or Tableau. That just isn’t going to work.”
Instead, Panayi wants his team to help the business build dedicated products for the customers it serves.
“If you’re building a datacentre under the sea or in the desert or on a farm, insurance is different,” he says. “And if you’re insuring a restaurant, even if it’s the same cuisine and the same floor space, it matters where it is in the street, city and country. So, there’s a bit of an art involved in this work.”
Building the datasphere
Panayi says the business will continue to grow, which creates human resource demands. While technically capable staff are important, the key professionals for the data team are those who understand a wide breadth of operational activities.
“All these different lines of business have different questions,” he says. “I need people who are partnering with the business. I’ve never been in a position before as a CDO where I’m trying to employ those business translators almost as much as the technical people.”
Panayi explains what that focus means for the data products his team creates. He suggests the aim is to develop data-powered conversational interfaces that help employees make insight-led decisions.
“Our brokers need someone on their shoulder all the time,” he says. “They need technology that tells them the stuff they want to know immediately. For example, say they’ve just come out of a meeting, they need to speak to their AI on their phone to capture what’s happened, and the AI to say, ‘Oh, remember this element is coming up for renewal. You should speak with your colleague.’”
By sharing knowledge via emerging technology, Panayi says the company’s datasphere can bring together employees in disparate places. “Connecting people is another thing that data can do,” he says. “There’s a huge opportunity, as we grow and get a more varied business, for people to help our clients by referring them to other bits of Howden. We haven’t grown up together. We’ve grown up in different firms.”
Panayi returns to the example of datacentre insurance, where each part of the building process – construction, supply chain, fire and employee benefits – involves different elements of the insurance business. By sharing knowledge, colleagues can understand new opportunities. “We can do all that work, and the data is helping people at Howden to understand our cross-organisational relationships,” he says.
Spreading insight
Panayi wants these initiatives to be implemented during the next 24 months. Two years from now, he expects Howden employees to benefit from a mature data approach that’s unlike any other insurance business.
I would like one of our clients to stand on stage at an internal leadership event and say that the information and insight they get from their conversations with our brokers is unlike anywhere else. And I’d like brokers to say that this capability exists because they have power from everyone else’s data Barry Panayi, Howden
“Whatever question you have, there will be a bit of information or data or insight available to you quickly that helps you make a quicker or better or deeper decision. That will not be by chance – it’ll be by design that we have connected globally, the people who are talking to our clients,” he says.
The company’s datasets are held in Microsoft Azure, while the data platform is Databricks. Panayi says it plans to use as many native Databricks capabilities as possible, including Genie, a conversational interface on the platform that allows business teams to interact with data using natural language.
The aim is to create a simple platform for Howden to run complex data projects. The acquisitive nature of the firm means it’s crucial that technology can be used to help spread information and insight to internal employees across the organisation. He paints a picture of the technology-enabled, data-sharing business 24 months from now.
“What I would like is for one of our clients to stand on stage at an internal leadership event and say that the information and insight they get from their conversations with our brokers is unlike anywhere else. And I’d like brokers to say that this capability exists because they have power from everyone else’s data,” he says.
“No broker will be on their own talking to a client because they can tap into all our knowledge straightaway. I care about brokers and underwriters having superpowers. Ours are already the best in the market, but we’re going to make them brilliant – and our clients will tell us that. That’s what I want to happen.”
The latest filings in Tesco’s £100m lawsuit against Broadcom and VMware over an alleged breach in software licensing terms demonstrates the complexity in dealing with resellers and distributors of VMware software.
It also highlights the risk in having one company provide not one, but two business-critical products, a situation Tesco found itself in as a result of Broadcom’s acquisition of both CA Technologies in 2018 and VMware in 2023.
Tesco’s complaint, filed on 15 July 2025, states that it is a long-standing customer of VMware International and CA Europe through the purchase of VMware licences for server virtualisation software and CA Technologies’ mainframe software, along with support services. Tesco stated in the complaint that Broadcom is now seeking to supply its virtualisation and mainframe software and services to the retailer on an abusive, “take it or leave it”, long-term and bundled basis.
The VMware licences and support were not purchased directly from VMware. Instead, Tesco procured the products and support services via a reseller, Computacenter, which had an agreement with software distributor Dell.
In 2023, following its acquisition of VMware, Broadcom announced radical changes to licences, resulting in a simpler range of VMware product bundles, and a focus on moving its customers off VMware’s perpetually licensed virtualisation platform and onto VMware Cloud Foundation subscription-based licensing.
Many existing customers have found that the new products increased their VMware costs dramatically, forcing some either to pay for the product bundles, which included products they did not use, or migrate to alternative virtualisation platforms.
Tesco claims that Broadcom has threatened to increase prices excessively for the VMware and mainframe software support it used. It said it was unable to migrate easily to another virtualisation or mainframe supplier in the short term, and that it would take at least three years to move off Broadcom’s VMware and CA Technology products.
Tesco maintains that Computacenter was well aware that it could not operate its retail business without the VMware software and support services or the mainframe software and support services. It stated that the majority of its stores operate using these software products and support services to administer business-critical functions such as logistics, stock management and replenishment, and payments.
The legal filings show that on 29 January 2021, Tesco originally purchased the VMware software licences from Computacenter, which along with VMware and Broadcom is a defendant in the legal dispute. The products covered include VMware vSphere Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation licensed perpetually and VMware Tanzu Basic and Tanzu Mission Control, which were licensed under an initial contract term up to 28 January 2026.
The agreement covered a five-year payment schedule, but Broadcom has denied there was an agreement between VMware International and Tesco in relation to the five-year payment schedule.
Now Dell has been drawn into the dispute. Prior to 2024, Dell was a distributor of VMware and, according to Broadcom’s legal filings, Dell had a channel partner agreement with Computacenter dating back to 2013. However, on 8 January 2026, Computacenter filed a claim against Dell relating to its inability to provide the VMware software it was contractually obliged to deliver to fulfil the contract with Tesco.
Broadcom claims that VMware and its subsidiaries had no obligation to Dell or its subsidiaries regarding the provision to renew VMware product offerings. It stated that as per the 2023 distributor agreement with Dell, any renewal was subject to the written acceptance by VMware.
Dell has now said it will sue VMware International for £10m, if it is found to have broken its contractual obligation to Computacenter.
Contract Ts&Cs. Who is liable?
In a LinkedIn post, Barry Pilling, principal consultant at BeDigital, noted that the case is about Broadcom not honouring a contractual obligation claimed by Tesco to provide the retailer with four years of additional support at the expiry of its enterprise licence agreement (ELA).
Broadcom argues that Tesco would not have the option to renew support services and Computacenter would not be obliged to procure a renewal of the Tanzu Licence if the relevant software or services are no longer available, or the products have reached end of life.
Commenting on Pilling’s LinkedIn post, Scott Bickley, a consultant at Info-Tech Research Group, said: “Having read most of the legal complaints and having reviewed hundreds of VMware contracts, it would appear few of these legal claims have legs. VMware was quite crafty inserting language that allowed them to go EOL (end of life) with active products at their discretion, effectively relieving themselves of future obligations around support.”
But there is more to the dispute, as Pilling explained in a conversation with Computer Weekly. He said Tesco is also claiming Broadcom has acted in an anti-competitive manner. “Tesco is saying Broadcom has been abusing its dominant market position,” said Pilling. “60% of the world’s virtualisation runs on its platform, and it has ramped up pricing without giving them any justification.”
Pilling noted that if the High Court rules that Broadcom has breached competition law, the UK’s competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), will need to investigate. As Pilling pointed out, the CMA had already approved Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.
However, he believes that decision did not take into account VMware’s dominant position in the marketplace. At the time of the CMA’s investigation: “There was a lot of concern in the industry around whether Broadcom, one of the world’s biggest hardware providers, would lock customers into its hardware when it sold them VMware software, which is what the CMA investigated. But nobody looked at the fact that VMware is the world’s biggest virtualisation software provider.”
The nuanced arguments presented in the court documents from the different parties represent a snapshot of the complexity of this case. Broadcom has stated that it has the right to stop selling products and providing support in a way that supersedes existing licence contracts. And while there appears to be email correspondence between Tesco and VMware relating to software contract negotiation, Broadcom is arguing that its direct relationship was with Dell, not Tesco.
The High Court will ultimately decide if Broadcom has broken its contractual obligation to provide VMware software and support services, and if it is acting in an anti-competitive manner. But as the case moves forward, the Tesco versus Broadcom, VMware and Computacenter lawsuit demonstrates the precarious position IT leaders and the organisations they work for can face when a key software provider changes its business model.
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