18 Mar 2026
10:15 - 10:45
Expo Theater I
Cayetano Carbajo Martin, Chief Technology Officer at Telefónica, will share his perspective on the future of global networks and the evolving role of operators in an increasingly connected world. His keynote will highlight opportunities and challenges in meeting surging demands for bandwidth, reliability, and sustainability, and the critical role of innovation in shaping next-generation network infrastructures.
Moderator
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Yoshiaki Sone
Senior Researcher, NTT, Japan
Speaker
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Cayetano Carbajo Martin
Chief Technology Officer, Telefonica, Spain
To address growing communication demands driven by emerging AI applications, network infrastructure is evolving toward a higher level of openness and automation across all segments, including optical transmission networks. Currently, a promising approach to achieving openness involves partial optical disaggregation and IP-over-DWDM architecture leveraging coherent pluggables. Moreover, network automation is implemented with the use of SDN controllers in the transport network with TAPI interfaces, which is the gate of the automation for optical networks. The presentation will also share Telefónica’s experience and plans for this evolution.
Cayetano Carbajo is a telecommunications engineer from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. In 1995, fresh from university, he joined Telefónica Móviles España as a radio planning engineer, from where he moved to the radio engineering department. In 1998, he was appointed Manager of International and Interprovincial Projects. In 2000, he relocated to Morocco, where he oversaw the deployment of the Medi Telecom network. In June 2001, he was appointed Access Network Director of the Corporate Unit of Telefónica Móviles. After participating in numerous international projects, he was appointed CTO of Telefónica Móviles México. In this exciting challenge, where he led the world's first transition from CDMA to GSM technology, he worked until May 2006, when he was appointed Director of Technology of the Corporate Unit of Telefónica SA. In November 2014, he was appointed CTO of Telefónica Deutschland. In this position, he takes on one of the biggest LTE deployment challenges in the mobile industry, while maximising synergies in the consolidation of the O2 and Eplus networks. Since November 2019, Cayetano has been responsible for core, transport, innovation, and ecosystem management, where he drives the transformation of Telefónica's networks.
In 2015, Cayetano received the Engineer of the Year award from the Spanish Association of Telecommunications Engineers.