Podcast profile
By Danielle Rios, TelcoDR
Over the next 20 years, the telco industry will radically change as we move the entire IT estate to the public cloud to use AI. Are you ready? Telco in 20 helps telecom execs drive transformative change through the savvy use of public cloud and AI.
Latest episode
20 min
Topics
Telecommunications systems, carriers, wireless networks, spectrum, broadband, and industry infrastructure.
Major technology platforms, companies, ecosystems, leadership, and competitive behavior.
Network architecture, routing, switching, protocols, operations, and network engineering.
Formats
Detailed technical, architectural, or research-oriented examination.
Host-led conversation where a guest supplies most of the subject matter.
Audience level
Regularly assumes specialist knowledge and discusses implementation, architecture, protocols, code, or research in depth.
Stay connected
From the feed
Episodes shown — 10 of 25
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.