New Team Members Join the Team
2023 saw the aql team expand and we’re delighted to announce the appointment of Sharyn Coleman as the company’s new CFO. Sharyn has over 25 years of experience, working in a wealth of industries including manufacturing, construction and business process outsourcing. Sharyn brings with her a proven track record of success in the finance sector and her deep financial expertise, strategic acumen, and commitment to excellence make her an ideal fit for aql’s leadership team.
Sharyn is excited to join the aql team and play a pivotal role in the company’s growth. “My time so far at aql has been both challenging and rewarding. We now have a new team all eager and excited to support the aql vision for 2024 and beyond”
We’re also delighted to announce the involvement of Ivan Maksic in aql’s commercial matters. With over 15 years working in the messaging markets, Ivan’s experience in the industry will help shape our messaging services and solutions, ensuring that they continue to evolve in line with the market’s needs.
“aql is a company with enormous potential that has been built over the last 25 years. It’s my pleasure to be part of this exciting journey and I look forward to contributing in shaping aql 2.0’s strategy and execution.”
Undergraduate Excellence Awards
2023 was the 6th year of the annual awards for undergraduate excellence which we had the pleasure of creating in partnership with the University of Leeds in 2017 to celebrate and award excellence in undergraduate research. 10 students were awarded for projects ranging from the medical uses of protein hydrogels to accent discrimination and its impact on education and employment. Every year it’s amazing to see emerging talent be supported and celebrated, and this year we were able to host the awards alongside the Leeds University Undergraduate Research Conference—an event to showcase and celebrate the research of undergraduate students at the university.
What’s particularly life-affirming and rewarding is that now we’re well-established in the academic community, we attract a lot of entrants. We judge our winners based on their projects’ ability and potential to benefit society and how their work could be for further research and development, which is why it was particularly exciting when Dave Jones, a winner of the 2022 Undergraduate Excellence Awards, joined aql. Following his impressive research on the extension of quantum search algorithms with applications to cryptography, he joined the company as a software developer. He has now been at aql for just over a year, and continues to add value to our team.
Dave had this to say on his experiences. “The 2022 Undergraduate Award demonstrated to me that the hard work of me and my peers had not gone unnoticed, and aql has since paved the way for me to participate in the creation of real infrastructure that impacts real people. Working at aql in 2023 has been a pleasure, and I look forward to the many opportunities it provides in 2024.”
Digital Leaders In Leeds
In 2023, Leeds had the honour of hosting the Digital Leaders 100 for the first time—an event historically held in London. This prestigious event celebrates teams and individuals dedicated to advancing the UK’s digital transformation. As a technology entrepreneur driving global innovation, we have proudly supported and championed the Digital Leaders platform for many years. It was our pleasure to be the headline sponsor, with Andrew Morris, our Vice President of Product Development, launching this year’s digital nominations at the stunning Leeds Central Library.
As a celebration of the Digital Leaders being hosted in Leeds for the first time, we brought together the Leeds University Undergraduate Award winners with finalists from the Young Digital Leaders for an event held at Salem Chapel, our head office in Leeds. The event celebrated the hard work of the Undergraduate Award winners, Young Digital Leader finalists, and Leeds University SPARK scholars, providing them each with the opportunity to present their research and network, forging connections as they look to begin their careers.
Celebration of Tech for Good
2023 saw another major milestone, with aql delivering over 50 million messages for the parkrun initiative. When our chairman and founder Professor Adam Beaumont met the founder, Paul Sinton-Hewitt CBE at the start of his journey, he was impressed by his vision for parkrun: not only a movement to build communities, but to address health – both physical and mental – making a quantifiable difference to the burden on the NHS. His values struck a chord with Professor Beaumont’s founding vision for aql: to be the engine behind scalable innovation to benefit society (we power a significant portion of the comms for schools, healthcare, banking, transport and more).
One of the astounding things about parkrun is the tech. It’s so very simple, yet has created one of the most scalable movements for good. At the get-go of parkrun, myself and my team at aql agreed to provide the SMS text messaging for free. 12 years and 50 million plus text messages later, we’re still going strong and proud to be supporting this amazing initiative.
Isle of Man 5G
On the Isle of Man, aql sister company BlueWave became the first 5G provider on the island. Complementing our existing coverage on the island, our 5G network provides ultra-fast connectivity to businesses across the island, supporting its growing capability as a home for digital businesses. BlueWave’s 5G network leverages high capacity subsea connections into the main global hubs via Leeds, Manchester and London, offering on-island broadband (fixed or via 5G) connectivity on par with major European cities.
In celebration of the unveiling of our 5G mast at Carnane, Professor Beaumont was joined by the Isle of Man’s Chief Minister Alfred Cannan, a tireless campaigner for the building of a digital Isle of Man, and David Morris MP, an unwavering supporter of Eden Morecambe.
The Isle of Man TT
Bluewave’s new 5G connectivity capabilities were used to maximum effect this year. In the company’s second year as the connectivity partner of Greenlight.tv in their live coverage of the Isle of Man TT races, a hybrid network utilising 4G and 5G connectivity was set up, providing a connection to tens of high-capacity connectivity points across the 37.7-mile-long course. This year, we’ve made our setup even bigger, using over 90 BlueWave 5G SIM cards, 30 fixed roadside connections, and even helicopter-mounted BlueWave modems to make live coverage of the event even more exciting. Using these connectivity points, high-definition trackside cameras were set up for low-latency live race coverage. In the two years that BlueWave has been supporting Greenlight, we’ve helped to provide over 1 million hours to more than 100,000 viewers.
MoD 5G Innovation
2023 continued our MoD innovation with the delivery of mobile 5G connectivity. Our 5G 4×4 has seen continued delivery across MoD initiatives and featured heavily at this year’s Royal International Air Tattoo. At the event, we demonstrated the power of connected vehicles’ 5G/4G/Wi-Fi connectivity powered by our low Earth orbit (LEO) capabilities. This fully working prototype has been deployed over several Department for Culture, Media and Sport 5G projects across the last two years. It was only a few years ago that the technology that makes it possible to connect to the internet in the farthest reaches of the planet did not exist. We were one of the first (if not the first) to turn that into the ability to deploy 5G mobile services anywhere and to connect the unconnected.
This technology will continue to support innovation by bringing us closer to nature at the Eden Project while supporting tomorrow’s 5G Factory of the Future at the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC).
DSIT 5G Innovation
As we conclude our 2023 DSIT 5G Innovation initiatives and look ahead to 2024, our global mobile and fibre network continues to empower DSIT 5G Innovation projects and leverage our 4G/5G/LEO wireless capabilities, complemented by our comprehensive fibre routes. These 5G Innovation projects include:
- YO-RAN (Yorkshire Open RAN) is a research and development project that will help change the way mobile radio base stations can connect with each other and the core telecommunications network.
- FoFoRAN (Factory of the Future Open RAN), continues our collaboration with the University of Sheffield AMRC and BAE Systems to revolutionise Industry 4.0 in manufacturing and distribution.
- REACH will use our and our project partner’s wealth of experience in developing Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) solutions to deliver improved data connections in areas that regularly host high numbers of visitors.
Each of these amazing initiatives will build upon the innovation delivered by our previous Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) 5G Create projects. Leveraging our 5G mobile network and high-speed fibre optic routes across multiple locations within the UK. As well as utilising our complete IoT infrastructure through our Core™ IoT platform.
Wavelength Services
We are proud to provide a wealth of connectivity routes through our heavily interconnected network. Now in our 25th year, we have made wavelengths from 10/40/100 Gbps upwards available across our main dark fibre routes and we’re continually expanding our footprint. Our wavelength service operates on our dark fibre to provide ultra-fast connectivity from the Isle of Man, through Leeds and on to the rest of the UK and mainland Europe, with onward connectivity from the nearest available point of presence (PoP) sites. If you would like to know more about our latest wavelength services please get in touch at enquiries@uk.aql.com
Launch of core.aql.com
The past few years have seen us expand our global mobile network with the development of 5G IoT testbeds across many exciting initiatives, including the Eden Project, Mobile Access North Yorkshire, Connected COWES, Live and Wild, and Factory of the Future. During these projects, we have built our new Core™ IoT platform from the ground up. Our approach to IoT is to provide our customers with a complete solution that can easily integrate into all verticals to empower smart city innovations. With our platform, you can connect any LoRaWAN gateway or any of our Edge™ IoT boards. With the launch of core.aql.com and our free plan it’s never been easier to access the benefits of our IoT platform. Our free plan allows you to connect a LoRaWAN gateway and up to 5 devices. Using our inbuilt analytics, you can start to monitor your business environment in minutes. The platform has been built with interoperability in mind and can integrate our IoT pipeline into any IoT integration, leveraging technologies such as LoRaWAN, MQTT, TCP and UDP uploads. The platform is also built with social integration so you can post live commentary and readings to popular social media platforms. Please check out our Core™ IoT X feed to see live readings and commentaries from across our many live IoT testbeds.
If you would like to learn more about how our Core™ IoT platform is powering a connected society please reach out to us.
White Rose Park IoT Hackathon
In celebration of the launch of our latest 5G/IoT testbed at White Rose Park, we hosted an IoT hackathon in November in collaboration with Ingenuity Leeds, Nexus and Fyma. Our incredible partners Dales Land Net, Leeds City Council, Fyma, AllIoT, Three, and RAF Leeming joined the event, providing industry insights, real-world environmental sensor readings, and IoT hardware, as well as delivering insightful talks on the practical application of IoT and real-world insights of its adoption across a mix of industries leveraging our global mobile network and complete Core™ IoT platform.
This celebration of 5G and IoT capabilities was supported by Leeds City College, who sent over 20 bright and enthusiastic students and tutors to take part in the hackathon. They were given the chance to understand and interact with our mobile network and IoT technology. The students had a wealth of IoT sensor readings from across all our 5G/IoT testbeds and took part in a variety of challenges from reprogramming our IoT Edge™gateways, adding sensors to our LoRaWAN network, and programming widgets to creating custom web parts. The impressive work the students completed was an inspiration. We were so pleased to be a part of the exploration of IoT that was undertaken by the students, and have given the winning students access to our Core™ IoT Platform and IoT data SIMs allowing access to our mobile network, hopefully inspiring and empowering their further exploration of IoT.
The images below demonstrate how IoT sensor readings can be easily visualised using our API. If you would like to learn more about the hackathon and the examples above, the assets for these are available from our free GitHub repository.
IoT New Partners
As we continue our innovation with the launch of core.aql.com, I’m pleased to announce two new partnerships:
Evans Turner approached us to enable their new lift cleaning solution, the LiftCleanse AIR. Building upon our aql Edge™IoT boards we provide remote connectivity and device management to the LiftCleanse AIR devices from our Core™ IoT platform. More details about this exciting new partnership can be found here.
2023 saw us partner with AllIoT, an exciting business known for its wealth of sensors available to support a wide variety of industries. As a heavy user of IoT sensors for our IoT testbeds, we have used AllIoT as a sensor supplier for many years. Following our partnership, the year ahead will see us obtaining sensors from AllIoT and integrating them into the Core™ IoT platform to be a seamless plug-and-play experience.
Launch of Trusti™ Secure QR Codes
Recently we launched a new cryptographic signature and token service. This service is known as Trusti™, and is based on banking/military-grade cryptographic processes. It allows the creation of a secure root of trust for issuing cryptographic verifiable tokens and certificates which can then be used to identify and securely manage assets, as well as secure and ensure data integrity for IoT devices such as remote sensors. This year saw the launch of new cryptographic capabilities with the launch of secure Trusti™ QR Codes
Unsecured QR codes can easily be spoofed, taking you to fake websites. Trusti™ QR codes are secured via our root and intermediate certificates, which are FIPS 140-3 compliant, ensuring the highest level of validation compliance and cryptographic verification, meaning that they are absolutely safe.
Unsecured QR Code:
Trusti™ secured QR code:
Thank You
2023 was a busy and productive year. We achieved a lot, from the launch of our Core IoT platform and becoming the Isle of Man’s first 5G provider to our work with the DSIT projects and launch of Trusti. In the coming year we look to build upon the foundations laid by our hard work in 2023 and are excited to see the challenges and accomplishments that 2024 will bring.
