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Telco in 20

Danielle Rios, TelcoDR

Telco in 20

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. Host Danielle Rios and high profile guests from across telecom share their vision for the industry’s future, the impact of artificial intelligence, and what telcos need to do to thrive.

1 DAYS AGO

AI Ready

Ep 145 - Swisscom is building the AI-first telco (Mark Düsener)

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. In this episode...

Jul 07

Ep 144 - TDC’s dragon in the basement (Carlos Moreno Alonso)

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 internall...

Jun 23

Ep 143 - Norlys bets big on Telia (Daniel Askeroth)

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 cele...

Jun 09

Ep 142 - AT&T bets on the last mile (Shawn Hakl)

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 comput...

May 26

Ep 141 - Tele2 goes back to the future (Ove Wik)

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%....

May 12

Ep 140 - Will telco let AI write its code? (Roy Chua)

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 miss...

Apr 28

Ep 139 - Can telco build an AI grid? (NVIDIA’s Kanika Atri)

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 t...

Apr 14

Ep 138 - From programmable networks to agentic AI (Chris Wade)

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 p...

Mar 31

Ep 137 - Hyperscalers' $2T bet (Charles Fitzgerald)

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 b...

Mar 17

Ep 136 - MWC26 Wrap Up (Mobile World Live)

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 ...

Mar 03

Ep 135 - Telco has a context problem (John Abraham)

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 c...

Feb 18

Ep 134 - Show me the money (MWC)

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...

Feb 03

Ep 133 - What’s up with Totogi: The biggest AI use case for telco

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”...

Jan 20

Ep 132 - Microsoft's framework for autonomous networks (Rick Lievano)

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 thi...

Jan 06

Ep 131 - Two takes on telco’s biggest bets for 2026 (Dean Bubley)

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 th...

2025/12/09

Ep 130 - Best of 2025: AI for networks and networks for AI (Gabriela Styf Sjöman)

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...

2025/11/25

Ep 129 - Goji Mobile: The Expedia of mobile phones (Thad Hwang)

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 loca...

2025/11/11

Ep 128 - Talking AI with Telecoms.com (Scott Bicheno/Iain Morris)

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 suppo...

2025/10/28

Ep 127 - The courage to change (Jim Abolt)

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 ...

2025/10/14

Ep 126 - AI for networks and networks for AI (Gabriela Styf Sjöman)

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 ...