Telco in 20

When the internet arrived, operators laid the track and watched the OTTs collect the fares. Africa’s MTN Group doesn’t intend to let that happen again. In June, it put a hard number in front of investors: R30 billion in value from AI within three to five years, a target that by MTN’s count no other mobile operator in the world had put on the record. I sat down with MTN Group CTIO Charles Molapisi,...

In the first half of 2026, telcos spent $65 billion on mergers: Charter and Cox, Vodafone and Three, Fastweb and Vodafone Italy. Every one of those deals leaves somebody with two of everything and years of work to untangle it all. So what do you do with hundreds of systems? I sat down with Max Gasparroni, chief technology and security officer at Fastweb + Vodafone. He inherited up to 450 systems t...

I’ve been a guest on the Telecoms​.com podcast three times, and the dynamic never changes: hosts Scott Bicheno and Iain Morris see doom, I see upside. This year, Scott admitted he’s bored of his own dystopia and wanted someone to argue the other side. So he brought me in to talk AI. We get into why one number can mean two completely different things inside the same telco, why the SaaSpocalypse is...

Every ten years, telcos have to decide whether to move to the next G. The business case has always been based on usage, capacity, and a revenue forecast . That’s because the one number that should drive the decision—what each cell actually earns—has been out of reach… until now. In this special What’s Up with Totogi episode, I share the keynote I delivered at TelecomTV’s AI-Native Telco Forum in D...

Every telco has hundreds of AI use cases, dozens of pilots, thousands of agents. So why can’t they get to production at scale? I sat down with Kevin Shatzkamer, corporate vice president of the Telco and Media Engineering Studio at Microsoft Frontier Company, the hyperscaler’s new operating unit. His team embeds forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) at enterprise customers to build and run AI at scale....

To G, or not to G. That is the question every telco faces, and the 6G noise is getting louder. So how does that decision actually get made? Stefan Pongratz, vice president of RAN and telecom CapEx research at Dell’Oro Group, has watched operators wrestle with it through 16 years and three G cycles. He knows what it really costs, what’s on the boardroom chart, and why waiting has a price of its own...

Everyone has an opinion about how telcos are doing with AI. Almost nobody has evidence—until now. Guy Daniels, chief strategy officer and content director at TelecomTV, spent the year compiling the AI-Native Telco Index—the first 100% evidence-based report on telco AI adoption . It’s one piece of TelecomTV’s new AI-Native Telco Accelerator (ANTA), a community built to bring operators, vendors, and...

It’s hard to manage a network in space. That constraint shapes everything Dr. Mariam Kaynia thinks about as chief data and information officer at Eutelsat, Europe’s only LEO alternative to Starlink in orbit today. The company runs more than 600 satellites at 1,200 kilometers alongside a geostationary fleet parked even higher. When Eutelsat launches a satellite, the intelligence running it has to b...

What does it actually take to become an AI-first telco? Swisscom is finding out. It has launched the biggest transformation program in its history: a ground-up rebuild of the software core behind its consumer and enterprise business units. In this episode, I sit down with Mark Düsener, chief technology and information officer at Swisscom, to unpack how the operator is doing it. We get into why sta...

Every telco has a system it can’t get rid of—a mainframe, a billing platform, a vendor with hooks in everything. The transformation math is brutal: years of work, massive investment, and a failure rate that makes every next attempt harder to sell internally. Carlos Moreno Alonso is CTIO at TDC Brands, Denmark’s largest telecom provider. Nine months into the job, he’s leading the next phase of one...

Telcos love mergers. In 2025 alone, the industry spent nearly $70 billion on M&A, and every single deal brought its own baggage. New systems, new cultures, new tech debt—all bolted onto everything that came before. Everyone celebrates the deal. No one celebrates the hard work of bringing two organizations together. For this episode, I sit down with Daniel Askeroth, senior vice president of telco a...

Every major telco is racing to claim a piece of the AI infrastructure stack. Operators like Telefónica, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, SoftBank, and TELUS are betting on sovereign clouds, AI factories, and GPU-as-a-service to deliver local data, national compute, and a seat at the AI table.  Then there's AT&T. In March, it announced AWS Interconnect - last mile: fiber and fixed wireless plugged directl...

Every operator made the same bet—go digital, close stores, turn over distribution to the resellers. Somewhere along the way, they gave away the customer relationship. In the first half of 2025, data usage grew in 92% of markets while ARPU grew in only 50%. Operators are delivering more yet earning less.  Tele2 is fighting back. It’s opening physical stores while everyone else is closing them, cons...

Anthropic's latest model, Mythos, recently scored 94% on a benchmark for solving real software engineering problems—up from single digits just two and a half years ago. It also found a 27-year-old security flaw in OpenBSD that decades of human testing missed. AI's capabilities are exploding, and many operators are struggling to keep up. For this episode, I'm talking with Roy Chua, founder and prin...

AI is reshaping telco. At NVIDIA’s GTC conference, AT&T, T-Mobile, Comcast, and Spectrum announced they’re building AI grids, turning millions of existing cell sites and central offices into distributed AI compute infrastructure. NVIDIA's survey of 1,000 telco professionals found more than 90% reporting that AI is already delivering cost savings or revenue growth, with the biggest ROI coming from...

Telcos have spent years automating their networks, but most of that automation is rigid. It makes the same decision every time—whether the device is offline, whether it's a maintenance window, whether there's a weather event. Adding AI agents sounds like progress, but if those agents aren't built on a deterministic foundation, you're not removing risk, you're accelerating it. The real challenge is...

Hyperscaler CAPEX investments are staggering: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta spent more than $400 billion on infrastructure in 2025 and are expected to reach over $600 billion in 2026. They’re on pace to surpass $2 trillion in cumulative CAPEX spend before the year is over. Meanwhile, U.S. telco CAPEX sits at $50 billion for 2025—and it's shrinking. For this episode, Charles Fitzgerald, Manag...

MWC 26 is a wrap, and one thing is clear: the telco industry has moved past asking whether AI will transform the business. The new question is who's moving fast enough to capture value, and who's still playing catch up. Before I left Barcelona, I stopped by the Mobile World Live Podcast to debrief with host Justin Springham, Managing News Editor Kavit Majithia, and analyst Carolina Milanesi from C...

Every telco exec is talking about AI agents. Almost nobody is talking about what those agents actually need to work: context. Not just data — the logic, rules, and decision-making processes that define how your business actually operates. That knowledge currently lives in two places: buried in vendor code nobody fully understands, and inside people's heads. No agentic system, no matter how shiny,...

At MWC, vendors will flood the floor with AI demos that look impressive but can’t prove their actual value. Telcos have spent billions connecting systems, but connection isn’t comprehension. Most AI initiatives are blind—unable to see across the fragmented landscape of BSS, OSS, and network systems that speak different languages and live in isolated realities. The Totogi Ontology is a semantic lay...

The telecom industry is full of AI projects that fail. Most operators think it’s a data problem—connect the systems, feed AI the information. But data doesn't tell AI how to decide. Your processes do. Your rules do. In this special “What's Up with Totogi” episode, I flip the script and have my friend David Haselwood interview me about BSS Magic. We dig into what a breakthrough biology project from...

The telecommunications industry is heading to MWC Barcelona with a strong desire to skip AI hype in favor of AI proof. Telco executives aren’t looking for more possibilities—they’re demanding real deployments, measurable outcomes, and P&L impact.  For this episode, I’m joined by Rick Lievano, Microsoft’s CTO for the Worldwide Telecommunications Industry. We dive into Microsoft’s vision for network...

MWC26 in Barcelona is right around the corner, and the telco industry is already buzzing about what will unfold at the Fira. Four big themes will dominate this year’s event: AI-driven networks, network APIs, AI data centers, and regulation. But which of these present real opportunities for telecom, and which are expensive distractions or even potential minefields?  For this episode, I’m joined by...

What an incredible year for telco, AI, and the public cloud. Hyperscalers shattered CapEx records, the first brownfield 5G cores migrated to the public cloud, and we had phenomenal conversations with telco heavyweights worldwide. One of our episodes really stood out this year: my conversation with Gabriela Styf Sjöman, Managing Director of Research and Network Strategy at BT Group. We’re bringing...

Most consumers can't tell the difference between Wi-Fi and cellular networks, yet our industry expects them to navigate over 200 confusing plan options. This complexity leaves no easy way for customers to compare networks, compare coverage at specific locations, or recognize if they’re on the right plan for their usage patterns. For this episode, I'm talking with Thad Hwang, CEO and founder of Goj...