Reimagining Telco: Why the Industry Must Stop Clinging to the Past

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Reimagining Telco: Why the Industry Must Stop Clinging to the Past

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The telecommunications industry, once a beacon of innovation and necessity, is now at risk of self-sabotage. The relentless pursuit of over-engineered complexity has created a self-sustaining ego, pushing the sector closer to irrelevancy. While the world has moved on, telcos remain stuck in the past, convinced that their traditional business models and bloated infrastructures still hold relevance. Spoiler alert: they don’t.

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I say this as someone who, for better or worse, has earned the label of a "telco guy." While I’m not entirely comfortable with the title, a decade in the industry makes it hard to dispute. That said, my focus has always been on tearing apart what doesn’t work and rebuilding it into something that’s ready for the future. The hardest part of this mission isn’t seeing what needs to change; it’s finding like-minded partners who share the vision of what telco should be, could be, and needs to be for its customers. Instead, the industry clings to an outdated arrogance of “we know what’s best for them.”

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As Steve Jobs famously said, “You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you are going to sell it.” Yet telcos and their vendors continue to operate under this exact flawed premise, prioritizing technology over customer experience. The telco mindset is stuck, chasing complexity and overengineering instead of focusing on delivering meaningful outcomes for customers. It’s a rut that’s both self-inflicted and entirely avoidable.

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Over the past decade, the most transformative developments in the internet, mobile networks, and B2B opportunities haven’t come from telcos at all. They’ve come from over-the-top applications. These services have proven to be more reliable, more resilient, and far more innovative than anything traditional telcos have managed to deliver. This trend is only accelerating, and yet telcos—and the vendors who serve them—seem incapable of adapting. They lack the people, the mindset, and the investment strategy to compete in this new reality.

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5G, for example, was sold as a transformative technology, promising unprecedented speeds, ultra-low latency, and a new era of connected devices and applications. Yet, in practice, it has largely failed to deliver on these lofty ambitions. Telcos globally raced to implement 5G, pouring billions into replacing their RAN and moving to NSA. However, these efforts have yielded little in terms of tangible customer benefits or significant improvements to telcos’ revenue profiles. The consumer experience remained largely unchanged, while the expected wave of new applications that 5G was supposed to unlock has been slow to materialize.

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The real opportunity, however, wasn’t in flashy use cases or chasing unfounded promises of telcos securing a slice (see what I did there?) of the revenue pie. It was in leveraging 5G architecture as a driver for backend cost savings. Moving to new architectural models on the backend—reducing costs through automation, containerization, and cloud-native platforms—and, critically, moving off all that old telco crap, would have yielded significant operational efficiencies. Instead, the focus remained on delivering an extra few hundred megabits per second of speed to customers who weren’t even prepared to pay for it. By prioritizing theoretical customer-facing innovations over practical, long-term cost savings, telcos missed a critical chance to improve their economic fundamentals.

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Meanwhile, the push for open standard applications for vendors introduced a new set of challenges. While the goal was to foster interoperability and innovation, many vendors struggled with the immaturity of their applications when ported to virtualization and containerization layers. This immaturity created a reluctance to relinquish control over these layers, ultimately undermining the full potential of open standards and cloud-native platforms. Rather than embracing a cleaner, more flexible architecture, both telcos and vendors ended up perpetuating the complexity they were trying to escape.

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Shiny Tech Toys Won't Save You-ish

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Here’s the hard truth in this journey: Telcos don’t innovate like Spotify or any other customer-centric tech company, no matter how many Agile coaches they hire or how many cultural change programs they initiate. The telco industry’s obsession with maintaining the status quo under the guise of ‘innovation’ is precisely what’s holding it back. By clinging to outdated financial structures and complex, over-engineered ‘carrier grade’ systems, they’re effectively inviting disruption from leaner, more innovative players who are unafraid to rewrite the rules.

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Telcos must abandon their outdated structures, let go of their ego-driven complexity, and rebuild themselves for the future their customers deserve, not the one their accountants think they can sustain. The only way forward is to break it down and start fresh. The alternative? Irrelevance. And no one needs another example of an industry that refused to adapt until it was too late.

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As the future of mobile networks evolves, the focus must shift from simply adopting the latest technology to choosing the right technology for the desired outcome. Take blockchain, for example. It’s an impressive and innovative tool that offers transparency, security, and decentralization. Yes, blockchain can improve certain processes and enhance specific use cases—but the real question is: does the value it brings truly outweigh the cost, complexity, and effort needed for its implementation? Being a blockchain junkie, I still can’t say ‘yes’ to all opportunities presented. Not every problem requires the most cutting-edge solution. In many cases, simpler, faster, and more cost-effective alternatives may achieve the same outcome. Telcos must resist the urge to deploy technology for technology’s sake and instead focus on solutions that directly address customer needs while minimizing complexity and cost. By aligning technology decisions with clear business outcomes, telcos can ensure they’re building networks that deliver real value, not just technical sophistication.

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Of course, innovation is unpredictable, and has shown to be rather lack luster in the 5G space, perhaps some 16-year-old will create the next big breakthrough, but until that happens, Starlink and similar networks are setting the pace for a more connected, less centralized future. These networks are proof that the telco industry must adapt, innovate, and reimagine its role in this new era of connectivity, or risk being left behind in the wake of this accelerating disruption. Much like the automotive industry post-Tesla, the telco world is now at a crossroads: evolve or become irrelevant.

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One Size Definitely Doesn't Fit All

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As we iterate on telco’s 5G journey, a thought-provoking question emerges: Are cloud-native startups and other cloud-born vendors the Tesla of the mobile network operator world? These challengers are redefining the game, focusing on lean, software-first approaches that leverage cloud-native principles from the ground up. Unlike the legacy incumbents, they aren’t weighed down by bloated infrastructure or outdated operating models. If this is the case, could they be the ones to truly reshape the telco industry, just as Tesla did with the automotive sector? Or will traditional telcos and their entrenched vendors finally rise to meet the challenge?

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Rightsizing is about designing systems and strategies that fit the actual needs of a business, rather than defaulting to oversized, over-engineered solutions. It's about designing systems that fit actual needs, not building a spaceship when all you need is a good old Danish city bike. In the telco industry, this means breaking away from blue print architectures and vendor roadmaps built for the mega-telcos of the world, those with massive customer bases and unlimited capital, which are often too complex, costly, and inefficient for the majority of the market. Smaller telcos, operating in modest geographies and economies, don’t need these bloated systems; instead, they benefit from hyper-scalable, modular solutions designed for flexibility, cost efficiency, and speed. Vendors who cater exclusively to large incumbents now find themselves competing with nimble challengers focused on simplicity and scalability, offering platforms that reduce cost to serve, accelerate time to market, and align with real customer needs. By adopting right-sized architectures, telcos can move away from legacy inefficiencies, reduce vendor lock-in, and future-proof their investments, creating a leaner, more responsive model that delivers true value for their market and their bottom line.

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In hindsight, the global 5G rollout feels like a missed opportunity, a case study in overpromising and underdelivering. Instead of leveraging 5G to truly innovate, telcos doubled down on replacing infrastructure without addressing the core customer experience or creating new revenue streams. As the industry looks forward, this should serve as a cautionary tale: technology alone is not enough, it must be tied to meaningful outcomes for both customers and business sustainability.

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The next step is to redefine our roadmaps, not with more features and incremental updates, but with a clear commitment to simplicity, customer-centricity, and forward-looking platforms. It’s time to let go of the outdated models and focus on where the real growth lies: automation, reduced complexity, scalability, and delivering meaningful outcomes for customers, and yes Astrid (my personal LLM), data enabled decisions being the bedrock for the above. And above all remembering that the coolest new strategy isn’t just about the shiny new things, it’s about knowing when to end things that no longer fit the future.

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Reflecting on why I have work in telco for a decade now, I’ve always believed in the transformative power of connectivity to create opportunities, bridge divides, and shape the future. But this industry won’t live up to its potential unless we’re willing to make the hard decisions. If any of the vendors I work with happen to read this, I hope you keep these reflections in mind as we discuss what the future should look like in the places where we partner. And let me be clear: if you don’t embrace this change, if you continue to push oversized, outdated, and misaligned solutions, I will be the first person to call you out. The work we do now will define whether telco continues to play a meaningful role in the next era of innovation, or whether it simply fades into history as another industry that couldn’t adapt in time. Let’s aim higher. Let’s think bigger, I mean smaller, right?

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