Telecom for Dessert

From the dawn of the internet to the proliferation of mobile phones, we’ve been living through a complete transformation of how we communicate, transact, and simply live our lives. For the past decade, we’ve talked about “software eating the world.” Yet, in the telecommunication industry, the rules around how we connect to networks still rely much more on physical technology than on software. Maybe software has been saving the best for last.?

Grab a tea or espresso. It’s time for dessert.

But first, the dog food

Let me share how I arrived at this proverbial dinner party. In 2013, after PayPal closed its acquisition of Braintree + Venmo, a bunch of the early team spent the next year thinking about where to innovate next. Some of us went on to big tech, a ton of venture capital and associated talent was flowing into healthcare, and several folks were thinking about taking some well-earned time to themselves. By late 2014, Iqram Magdon-Ismail and I started a venture studio where we incubated a variety of different ideas, eventually turning down a $1M seed investment from a top VC firm. It simply wasn’t the right time for either of us to launch another startup. Importantly, I was able to use that year of experiments to reflect on my next B.H.A.G. (big, hairy, audacious, goal) and Iq took a cue from Wildlife Control and started a fantastic new band.

I’m into dogfooding, so I looked around at the problems closest to me, things I use everyday, to find what I could fix next. I had recently moved out to the suburbs and into a house with Verizon Fios. I finally experienced the huge improvement going from NYC’s notoriously bad cable internet to the promise-land of fiber-optic internet. It lived up to the hype. But I couldn’t understand why this phenomenal tech came bundled with a cable TV interface that felt like it was from the Stone Age. In fact, all of the digital touch points from Verizon’s site to their apps all felt ridiculously difficult to use. Of course, in 2016 this was true across the board in telecom, a problem further highlighted by the rapid innovation that was happening everywhere else.

All I wanted to do was set up a new account with?@TWCable_NYC but 36hrs later I've lost the will to live. – Sir Patrick Stewart

Now I had the itch. If software was eating the world, then why was it that among all the major verticals, telecom was so far behind? It turned out big red agreed with my assessment and wanted my innovation mindset to help fix this problem. I dove right into the belly of the beast and got to work reimagining Verizon’s customer experience.

Layer cake, aka the nervous system of commerce

What stands out about telecom right away is its rich history in analog technology, dating all the way to the invention of the telegraph in the early 1800s. By 1874 the telegraph was so prevalent that William Orton, President of Western Union, declared it "the nervous system of commerce.” A series of investments into experimentation on telegraph technology were made to inventors including Thomas Edison, Elisha Gray, Thomas Watson, and Alexander Graham Bell resulting in the original prototypes for the telephone. By 1878, the first commercial telephone exchange was started in New Haven, Connecticut.

What followed over the next few decades is the fastest proliferation of physical infrastructure and technology the world has ever seen. The promise and power of instant communication globally was obvious to all and the race was on. The foundation laid over 100 hundred years ago forms the basis for many of the same techniques we still use in networks today. From exchanges to switches—the nervous system of commerce is alive and well—only now instead of sending coded signals with electricity over telegraph lines, we send bits and bytes through lightwaves in fiber-optic cable.

The icing = evolution (not revolution)

It was precisely because of the rapid proliferation of telecom infrastructure globally, that it's been impossible to wholesale modernize the industry. The existing infrastructure is too critical to risk, and changing it requires alignment on equipment, protocols, and standards–not to mention hefty amounts of capital. But our appetite for data and connectivity demands ever-increasing capacity on our networks, which is why we see massive investments into fiber globally and 5G continuously dominates the telecom news cycles.

Advances in the underlying network promise greater flexibility, orders of magnitude more device capacity, and speeds and low-latency that allow for pretty much anything we can imagine. But the way we connect to those networks and the associated service experience still relies on many of the same systems and methods from the days of placing a phone call to a switchboard operator.

Maybe you’ve wondered: why is connecting a device to the internet the most difficult part of using the internet? Or… why are roaming rules so random? Or… why does a device need to care whether it’s connected to a WiFi network or cellular network? Or… why does the pricing make almost no sense?

We’ve built our software driven world on telecom systems and rules that weren’t originally meant for how we’re using them. The industry has played catch up admirably–you reading this right now would not be possible without amazing advances in network technology. But software clearly hasn’t eaten telecom yet.?

I know how disruption is supposed to feel. When we disrupted payments with Venmo, we looked at everything from the customer lens. What do people actually want when they send money to each other? At the time, the payment rails in the United States took 3 days to move funds from one account to another. We were a tiny startup and couldn’t fix the underlying systems, so we overlaid a better experience where sending money felt like sending a text message. Behind the scenes the money still moved at a snail’s pace. But for the customer, it was instant and it felt like magic. Adoption of Venmo was fast and furious, forcing the overall industry to take a deeper look at the underlying systems. Along with several concurrent innovations in the last decade, software has clearly eaten financial services.

Innovation flavored whipped cream

Five years ago I dove head first into telecom and soon after I started seeing what this industry was capable of becoming. Following a series of innovative projects and leading several patents, my closing chapter at Verizon involved a project to unify their wireless and wireline services, something the company struggled to achieve for nearly two decades. A relatively small group of us led the solution, a joint promotion and corresponding service experience that is still in place today (I’m a customer, remember dog food!), but we were just scratching the surface of possibilities like fixed-mobile convergence. As I started brainstorming what a global communications service looked like, I knew I would need to leave and go back to my roots as a disruptor.

So I left Verizon in 2019 and went right back to incubating companies with Shah Ventures. My focus on telecom continued within my portfolio, as I launched a customer-first mobile phone service and a next-gen platform for premium video. Eventually I had the opportunity to join Tucows, a company with deep roots in the internet and networks, to incubate a new way to approach the heartbeat of the telecom stack, globally. Thus marked the beginning of my journey towards launching Wavelo, which brings us to our finalé.?

The future, with a cherry on top

Technology is driven by our desire to make our lives better. Once we see a future that we believe improves our life (whether it is actually better or not is a different debate), someone, somewhere will be working on the solution. Often it’s multiple people arriving at a solution at once. The history of the telephone is a perfect example of how we race towards these advances.

Personally, I think it’s a little weird that I and everyone I know spends at least some time thinking about a device being on a cellular network or a WiFi network. I find it odd that I need to choose a network and enter a password. How about when my phone goes from one country to the next–why is any of that complexity passed on to me? Ever check to see if you are eligible for fiber internet in your area–what’s up with the weird address format? There are logical and understandable answers for all of these and most point to underlying systems that need to change.

A new software based approach to evolve business orchestration and network operations is underway globally. Innovators are addressing the underlying systems of record and data models. The methods used to transact between those systems are getting rewritten from the ground up with truly modern technical strategies. Even the infrastructure of the network itself is moving to a distributed model in the cloud.?

In the not so distant future you could have access to the best surgeons in the world, who can perform precise remote surgery no matter where you live. How about the ability to virtually visit friends from the top of an epic mountain climb and show them what you’re experiencing, immersively in real time. And networks so reliable, fast, and robust that billions of autonomous vehicles are able to meet the safety standards needed for adoption.

When software inevitably eats telecom, no one can say for sure what it will mean for you personally. But I imagine a world where your devices are connected to amazingly fast networks globally, with zero friction, at prices that make so much sense, you never think about any of this stuff again. Now that’s a pretty good dessert. Bon appétit!