Destination: The future telco

Is a scalable, cloud and AI-native telco network business that powers operational efficiency and delivers robust, sustained revenue streams finally in sight? The Mobile Network editor Keith Dyer spent the year investigating, revealing that this once idealized “future state” is already a reality for leading stakeholders. In this week’s issue of the Zero-Touch newsletter, he highlights his findings and the key takeaways captured in the Future Telco Report, out now.

Attend any telco conference, operator or partner event – and I attend a lot – and it’s pretty clear that most telecoms operators around the world are aligned on a vision for the network business.

Under similar-sounding inspirational taglines, the future telco is envisioned as a truly scalable, cloud – and AI-native network business – one capable of achieving greater operational efficiency while rapidly creating new sources of sustainable revenue. Such a business must combine newfound agility with the ability to harness oncoming technological innovation. Sunny uplands await.

The issue for the industry is that this can tend to sound like an impossible destination – some sort of perfect ideation of what a service provider could be – rather than an achievable goal that underpins a real-world business plan.

The failure of past iterations of this vision doesn’t help. Differentiated services, slicing, the network-as-a-platform or as-a-service, none of these are new. Now, as we head into 2026, there are new enabling technologies – the move to MLops, agentic AI, truly cloud-native network functions such as the 5G Standalone Core – that revive the promise.

Are we fooling ourselves once more? Having completed my reporting for The Mobile Network’s Future Telco Report, there is reason to believe that operationally, things are indeed changing. Operators have recognized that if the end result of a business is to change, then the legacy ways of operating the underlying engine of that business must also change.

So then the next steps become, what to do about it? What we’re talking about here is changing the way a business operates and manages itself.

A clutch of operators have indeed already made those steps – changing their vendor landscape, changing their internal processes, team set-up and culture, and changing their ability to act in the network.

Where telcos are starting from

No doubt the operational structures that telcos have built over decades remain one of the biggest obstacles to transformation. Proprietary hardware, siloed network and service domains, and vendor-specific OSS stacks have created sprawling operational landscapes.

Standardization attempts have paradoxically added complex architectural fixes, multiple deployment options, and extensive testing requirements. The result has been a maze of expensive consultancy engagements and integration projects that generate sunk costs telcos can neither ignore nor undo. This slows innovation, inflates operational expenditure, and ultimately undermines investor confidence – creating a vicious cycle of constrained investment, delayed delivery and eroded trust.

Over the past decade, these complexities have left many telcos unable or too slow to take advantage of major technological shifts. The value of the app economy moved to platforms. Hyperscalers built and monetized cloud capabilities on timelines telcos could not match. And the promise of 5G – particularly the ability to deliver tailored network slices – foundered on technical complexity and a mismatch between telco offerings and enterprise needs.

The good news: The future telco is emerging

Despite these challenges, the path forward is no longer theoretical. Around the world, progressive operators have begun to demonstrate what the future telco looks like in practice. Their leaders understand the gravity of the obstacles; indeed, many were hired specifically to overcome them. But they also recognize that the greatest impediments are not only technical, but organizational.

Many telcos have struggled to innovate internally – and to absorb innovation occurring externally – because their underlying systems and cultures were simply not designed for continuous change. The surge of executive pressure over the past two years to produce a credible “AI strategy” has only sharpened attention on these limitations.

Yet signs of genuine progress are emerging. Forward-leaning operators are embracing platform-based approaches that deploy software horizontally across the network, powered by an observability layer that provides a unified view of the entire system. Vendors too are realizing that they must act as enabling parts of a whole, rather than to seek to own and close off domain knowledge, and limit their customers’ own ability to innovate.

For operators that means that the goal is, finally, to leverage technology to eliminate operational complexity rather than merely manage it.

A blueprint for transformation

A clear pattern is now visible across the operators most advanced on this journey. Their blueprint includes:

• Establishing a programmable, cloud-native network foundation.
• Making network, application, and user data observable and contextualized.
• Exposing that data horizontally across business applications and workflows.
• Applying AI to enhance decision-making and close the loop between intent and network state.

Examples are multiplying, and are investigated in the report.

AT&T has digitized and automated site planning and is expanding AI across operations. Boost Mobile has built an EMS-less core, dramatically reducing the manual operational load. Rakuten Mobile’s fully cloud-native model remains a global touchstone. Vodafone has eliminated hundreds of systems, Orange is moving to a platforming approach in its OSS. DT and others are working towards the thoughtful implementation of data models to enable network AI agents.

Across these cases, a common truth emerges: if the future telco takes shape in the right way, then change becomes self-reinforcing, instead of self-defeating. In short, ongoing transformation becomes not a challenge to be overcome, but a self-enabling capability.

To understand more about how operators are making genuine progress changing their operating model, download The Mobile Network’s Future Telco Report here. Mention Keith Dyer in the comments to ask questions or start a conversation.

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