CCW 2026, London: what we brought to the show floor

From 16 to 18 June, ExCeL London hosted Critical Communications World 2026, the annual gathering for mission-critical and business-critical communications professionals.

This year's edition carried particular weight in the UK: the Home Office Emergency Services Network (ESN) served as host operator, marking a stage in the country's shift away from the narrowband, TETRA-based Airwave system toward broadband critical communications.

Three days of sessions, focus forums and live demonstrations brought together operators, integrators and technology vendors working on that transition. It was the ideal venue to show how AI-driven private 5G network security protects mission-critical infrastructure.

Critical communications and private 5G security sit close together, even when they come from different starting points.

The end-users at CCW, public safety agencies, industrial operators, defense and maritime bodies, are all facing the same underlying question: how do you keep a network reliable and trustworthy once broadband, automation and AI-driven traffic become the norm rather than the exception.

That's the same question we work on every day with NGCI and our AI RAN Threat Defense engine, so CCW was a natural place to be in the room.

We shared booth G40 with Keysight Technologies, building on a collaboration that already runs deep on the technical side. The demo ran on a live NGCI cell, protected by our Deep Packet Inspection engine.

Rather than reading message content, our DPI looks at traffic behavior: frequency, delivery patterns, and anomalies in how devices communicate, which keeps user privacy intact while still catching what matters.

When something doesn't match expected behavior, the system responds on its own, stopping the suspicious session, adding the source to a denylist, and shifting the cell's frequency to close off further exploitation.

None of this interrupts legitimate users; the network keeps working while the response happens underneath. The live setup demonstrated automated threat response in practice: NGCI detects behavioral anomalies, isolates malicious sessions, and maintains operational continuity without manual intervention.

Watch Mattia Lecci from Keysight talk with Mattia Bevilacqua, SMA-RTY's R&D developer, about how the demo works.

Beyond the demo itself, CCW is a useful place to test how our story lands with people who don't spend their day thinking about O-RAN architecture.

Public safety and industrial audiences ask different questions than telecom engineers do, less about the DPI model architecture, more about what happens on the ground when something goes wrong.

Those conversations are a good check on whether we're explaining the technology clearly or just repeating our own internal shorthand.

CCW 2026 confirmed something we've been seeing across the events calendar this year: the appetite for AI-driven network security is real, but audiences want to see it working before they trust the pitch.

A live demo that fails gracefully and recovers is worth more than a slide with a big claim on it. That's a useful discipline to keep, and one we'll carry into the next events on the calendar.

If you were at ExCeL and stopped by booth G40, thank you for the conversation. If you missed it, we're happy to walk through the demo whenever it's useful: you can reach us at info@sma-rty.com