Telco in 20

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...

The telco industry has been buzzing about AI transformation, but few operators have seen tangible results beyond pilot projects. The challenge isn't just adopting new technology—it's fundamentally changing how telcos build and maintain their business support systems (BSS). For this special episode, I join Scott Bicheno and Iain Morris on the Telecoms.com podcast to discuss Totogi's recent AI demon...

If AI is so awesome, why isn't it having a bigger impact on your bottom line? I hate to break it to you, but the problem isn't with AI—it's with your leadership. Look no further than the quality of your ideas and capability of your execution to figure out why your team is not getting better results with AI. In this episode, I sit down with strategic HR and transformation leader Jim Abolt. He has d...

The telco industry loves to differentiate on technical specs—five nines of reliability, fastest 5G, most coverage. But Gabriela Styf Sjöman, Managing Director of Research and Network Strategy at BT Group, has a radically simple framework that cuts through the noise: every technology decision comes down to two questions—does it help us make money or does it help us save money? In this episode, Gabr...

MIT research shows that 95% of enterprise AI projects fail, and the culprit is likely the daunting task of managing business context . When AI doesn't understand the full picture of your business, it makes poor decisions and delivers disappointing results that leave operators questioning whether AI can deliver real value. In this "What's Up with Totogi?" episode, I'm talking with Michael Walker, w...

MVNOs are having their moment. From Ryan Reynolds with Mint Mobile to the Trumps launching Trump Mobile, everyone wants in. But the truth is it’s tough to be an MVNO. MVNOs who pay millions in licensing fees struggle to actually go live because incumbent MNOs work overtime to squash them. Take Nigeria - regulators handed out 46 MVNx licenses and collected serious cash from hopeful startups. The re...

Telco transformation projects are legendary for their complexity. Operators must maintain 99.999% uptime while ripping out decades-old legacy systems that are deeply intertwined with every aspect of their business. They involve massive technical debt, vendor lock-in, regulatory compliance requirements, and the challenge of modernizing infrastructure—all of which need to be managed while serving mi...

The telco industry has long been plagued by sluggish software development cycles that stretch across months and years. But operators are now building and deploying AI-powered solutions in weeks using what Microsoft calls "hypervelocity engineering." In this episode, I'm talking with Robin Cole, vice president of engineering at Microsoft, who works with telcos on their biggest technical challenges....

Google Cloud runs the largest private network on the planet, managing billions of users with a fraction of the staff that regional telcos need. Now it’s opening up its playbook to share this AI-driven approach with telecommunications operators. In this episode, I'm talking with Angelo Libertucci, global head of industry for telecom at Google Cloud, about its partnership with Ericsson to build a cl...

Network APIs are the telecom industry's next big bet for unlocking new revenue, with McKinsey & Company projecting they could generate up to $300 billion in connectivity and edge computing revenue over the next four to six years. But the real challenge isn't technical—it's convincing millions of developers to adopt telco’s network APIs instead of sticking with what they already use. In this episod...