Telco’s burning exchange moment – a playbook of fixes

The previous article in this series, “Telecommunications has reached its burning exchange moment,” highlighted that the current telco business model is at risk. It described how we could be experiencing an era of creative destruction of capital based on the works of Schumpeter and Marx.

It also described:

• Poll results where nearly half of Europe’s telco CEOs don’t expect their businesses to make it through the next decade
• Why creative destruction is needed
• Evidence of telco’s ability to massively change, but not the right type of change
• Why I call it a burning exchange moment (telco’s version of a burning platform)
• Why OSS and BSS are an essential vehicle of change
• What we in the OSS / BSS industries can do to help
• The single mindset shift to trigger the change

That sounds dire, and in some ways it is. But telco services have never been in greater demand, so a fitter, stronger, faster business model is sure to arise to service the needs of the world. Will it be by the existing telcos, or disruptive new entrants to the market?

CSPs retain many strengths that new business models can be built around:

1. It’s not a lack of revenue ($1.55 trillion annually), but a lack of profitability of the current business model that needs fixing.
2. They have billions of customers willing to pay for services each month, and perhaps more importantly, they are trusted to issue bills each month (as well as having strong collections pipelines)
3. They have billions of companies that rely on bitstreams delivered by CSPs (but could also benefit from connections, partnerships and supply chains directly facilitated by CSPs)
4. They have masses of data (the new oil)
5. They have vast technical workforces that have honed their delivery skills to accommodate labour-force and related regulatory challenges in the countries / regions / jurisdictions where they operate
6. They also have vast technical sales machines that have an empathy for local needs, conditions and regulations
7. They have real-estate in highly valuable locations
8. Many have semi-monopolies in their access networks (but they’re not constrained to only offer services in those areas and they have the option of considering business models that are more global in nature)
9. They have technical implementation skills that allow the possibility of leveraging new technologies and delivery models (hat-tip to Amrit for highlighting this one)
10. They have innovation in their DNA (hat-tip to Stefano for highlighting this wonderful article that links Blade Runner, Schumpeter’s gale and how innovation can be linked with periods of creative destruction / progress / stagnation)
11. Command and Control + Crisis Management via the network operations centres, crisis management processes and other capabilities that could be attractive for emergency services organisations beyond just raw connectivity
12. Wholesale settlement and partner-management machinery. Beyond billing end customers, many telcos already operate complex partner, carrier and service-provider charging/reconciliation flows that could underpin ecosystem marketplaces and B2B aggregation models
13. Retail and field-access footprint. Shops, appointment engines, installers and authorised access into homes, buildings and remote sites can be monetised for adjacent tech services plays such as energy, security, smart-building and managed-device lifecycle services (aligns with #5 above)
14. Location Intelligence (ie Real-time location / positioning and remote situation awareness capability). Modern mobile networks and labour forces can expose positioning capabilities, creating openings in asset tracking, workforce safety, logistics and industrial automation (rather than leaving all location value to OTT players)
15. Permission to interrupt. Within reason, they can lawfully and habitually reach people through SMS, apps, portals, email, bills and support channels in ways most brands never can. This must be very tactfully used though because it’s generally only invoked for public safety reasons
16. Presence at moments of change. examples of change include moving house, starting a business, changing devices, travelling overseas, upgrading broadband, opening a branch office, launching a site, recovering from an outage, etc. All tend to trigger telco interactions when other changes are occurring
17. The customer’s “always-on” dependency. People may like banks, retailers or media brands, but they need connectivity, which gives telcos a very different starting position for adjacent offers
18. The bill as a programmable media surface. Bills are usually treated as back-office artefacts, but they are recurring, targeted attention surfaces that can drive education, upsell, prevention and behaviour change
19. The household graph. Family plans, shared addresses, shared payment methods and bundled services can reveal natural buying groups far more accurately than many third-party audience models
20. Appointment engine. The ability to schedule, prioritise and route scarce field appointments is a powerful commercial lever that could be repurposed well beyond telco repairs and installs
21. Contact-centres. Telcos sit on huge libraries of real-world customer language about friction, confusion, urgency and buying intent, which is gold for product design, AI training and journey redesign. Rather than a cost centre, these could be a revenue centre
22. The outage room capability. Their ability to mobilise cross-functional command structures during incidents is a capability that can translate into resilience, continuity and managed-response services (can combine with #11)
23. Energy Management. Site batteries, generators / backup power assets and energy management capabilities may become strategic in energy trading, resilience services and distributed infrastructure plays
24. Proof of identity. A mobile number often becomes a person’s de facto identifier across banks, apps, services and contacts, which gives telcos a stronger identity position than they often acknowledge
25. Convening power. Telcos often underestimate the value of being one of the few players who can sit between and influence government, utilities, hyperscalers, enterprise IT, construction and consumer markets
26. Timing and synchronisation. Telco networks rely on some of the most precise timing and synchronisation infrastructure on the planet. This could become invaluable for coordination across finance, utilities, transport, emergency services and industrial automation
27. Early intent signals. Telcos often see weak signals of expansion, relocation, digitisation, hardship, travel, construction or operational stress before those become formal procurement events

So, let’s take a look at the types of different business models that could rise out of these existing strengths. The following are just some top-of-head ideas, but I’m sure you can think of many others (note that it’s a bit lengthy, so it might be a bit TLDR):

1. It’s not a lack of revenue, but a lack of profitability

The total addressable market (TAM) of telco services globally is estimated at around $1.5T. It’s clearly not the top line (revenue), but the bottom line (profits) that are a concern as indicated in the graph below. Kevin Kelly predicted as much back in 2008, suggesting that everything is converging on free (which is not the ARPU that telcos are hoping for!!)

This graph, from Bain & Co / TM Forum shows just how far average shareholder returns of telco providers is lagging other industries (hat-tip to Tony for pointing me to this research). As we move into a cycle of increasing interest rates (cost of capital), will investors be deterred from investing in telco at these rates of return? With revenue per bit declining against increasing bandwidth consumption, along with the reduction of premium services revenues like international calls declining precipitously, profitability seems to also be steadily declining

Therefore, new business models are required that ensure a greater level of profitability (and shareholder returns) in the sector. Examples might include:

• Measuring revenues is relatively easy. Measuring profitability is much more difficult, especially apportioning costs by product. Telcos tend to have many product offerings (SKUs – stock-keeping units). However, many are simply not profitable. The Whale Curve analysis suggests that 20-30% of products make up 200=300% of a telco’s profits. Could a telco of vastly less SKUs (and possibly lower revenues) actually be more profitable? A much smaller SKU-count would certainly simplify the entire business and reduce the pyramid of OSS pain
• Vastly simplified operations models also reduce the pyramid of OSS pain. Instead of having every different make / model / type / topology of network, take the Southwest Airlines approach to the network (and related services)
• Many of the world’s biggest telcos also have a low-cost sub-brand / subsidiary with a much smaller operational footprint, simplified offerings and lower cost-to-serve (refer to this whitepaper by James Crawshaw for many examples of sub-brands)
• Regulated pricing models, generally associated with utilities, that ensure essential services like comms, power, water, etc remain commercially viable and resilient for consumers
• Enhancing profitability of telcos through subsidisation by big-tech companies (aka net-neutrality, as outlined well in this article by Tom Nolle)
• Telcos have done a great job of stripping out low-hanging costs (Tom Nolle suggests “Operators have already taken most of the accessible opex reductions, and the maximum capex reductions they could hope for would drop costs only by about 4.7 cents of every revenue dollar, and that would take five years to fully realize.”),
  • However, telcos remain large, bureaucratic organisations that, “manage huge organizational resources, but no longer derive the same scale advantages they used to” because technology has significantly reduced transaction costs. Perhaps zero-touch networks or concepts such as DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) or GenAI-led company models represent a path to far greater operational efficiency?
  • The communications, bureaucracy and political overheads of large organisations have the potential to be massively streamlined, such as the use of generative AI to reduce meetings and only highlight the most essential activities from meeting transcriptions or from this innovation in procurement being trialled by BT
• Flip from high-volume, low-value to low-volume, high-value services, such as this example that Warren Buffett deployed
• What other profitability optimisation techniques have you heard of and what part does OSS / BSS have to play?

2. They have billions of customers willing to pay for services each month

Telcos are trusted as billers each month (or via payments for credits). This opens up alternative finance-based business models such as:

• Under-served banking markets like Africa have opened the door for novel uses of mobile money for non-telco related transactions and telcos are often trusted more than banks
• “Valued-added service” businesses have successfully partnered with telcos to incorporate their services into a monthly telco bill
• Telcos could tap into a buy-now, pay-later or Loyalty programs in partnership with financial and retail institutions. Some airline’s frequent flyer programs are more profitable and valuable than their airline business, and telco services have more flexibility than flyer miles
• There’s been discussion about “SuperApps” or portals where subscribers (presumably retail subscribers mostly) can buy anything. Small margin, high volume sales apps are a possibility if the platform is done right. I feel like the enterprise SuperApp might be more of a target for telcos to add value in conjunction with comms, compute, cloud, APIs, etc (but also the “match-making” service discussed below)
• What other models could BSS natively support?

3. They have billions of companies that rely on CSPs

Billions of businesses are customers of CSPs around the world. CSPs have to find a better way of adding value to these many business customers than just transporting ones and zeros for them, carrying many other over-the-top premium service offerings to these businesses. Many of these businesses are looking for better ways to do business, such as reach new customers, markets and partners, especially in the modern e-business world.

If we assume the principle of “everything is downstream from the lead,” then lead generation is incredibly valuable. You can guarantee that these businesses would love for telcos to assist them in finding new sales targets and revenues, for providing more secure business services, for providing one-stop e-business packages:

• Some telcos and cloud providers already offer a marketplace of network services and other partner products. This could be scaled up to help list the products / services of any of the telco’s products. Telcos previously provided Yellow Pages directories, but they died out as more people relied on Internet search. Telcos have the subscriber lists and other data to provide a much more personalised connection  service (assuming privacy mechanisms are adhered to)
• OSS and BSS are already a full e-business stack. They manage orders, inventory, invoicing, collections, customer relationships, and much more. They currently only do so for the telcos themselves, but there’s no reason these OSS/BSS stacks couldn’t be offered as a consolidated e-business service to subscribers as well (what I refer to as a Business Operating Systems or BOS)
• Rakuten’s ecosystem of different brands / products / markets , as shown in the diagram below, provides a strength through loyalty and cross-selling. Whilst many telcos don’t natively have this same ecosystem under their own brand, there are partnership models
  
• As mentioned above, with so many existing subscribers looking for ways to sell their own wares, a telco-based loyalty program and related marketplace could help add value to subscribers
• A partner connection / supply-chain support network where the telco performs match-making services for their customers
• Secured, managed services for e-businesses to allow them to focus on their core businesses. These managed services could be provided by the telcos or clients that provide services

4. They have masses of data

Telcos collect vast amounts of data on subscribers, networks, transactions, locations, environmentals and much more. There are many different ways to unlock the value in this data whilst considering privacy concerns. These include personalised services (eg health and wellness in conjunction with accredited suppliers), or B2C services (eg targeted advertising) or B2B services (eg environmental data recorded from tower sites).

5. They have vast technical workforces

• Telcos require vast workforces, both in terms of size and geographical spread, to maintain their networks and the services that operate on them. Telcos also have sophisticated workforce management and skills-based-routing to ensure the right people get to the right locations, at the right time to do a multitude of activities correctly. They also have the appropriate processes established to ensure all this work is done within applicable regulatory regimes.
• These workforces could offer multi-technology support, especially in remote / rural areas where skilled technicians aren’t nearby. With the advent of Augmented Reality set to arrive soon, telcos could provide remote guidance of a much more specialised nature to general-purpose skilled workforces as a service.

6. They also have vast technical sales machines

• Telcos have vast technical sales teams, but also all of the technology to manage those teams, the products they sell and the customer relationships they need to manage. Many of these teams manage complex technical sales too. At the moment, these sales teams tend to only sell the telco’s own services and some partner services. However, with appropriate solution-identification tools, these sales teams could also sell solutions from their broader customer marketplace (mentioned earlier) and clip the ticket on each sale made
• Again, everything is downstream from the lead and telcos have most of the pieces to be amazing lead-gen and match=making engines for their subscribers

7. They have real-estate in highly valuable locations

To service widespread locations, telcos have many sites in highly valuable locations near businesses and residences. These sites (eg exchange buildings, cabinets, towers, equipment vaults) often have advanced, resilient power and comms that are suited to many other partnership purposes. Examples of valued real-estate business models could include:

• Due to the miniaturisation of active network devices, equipment footprints in exchanges (and even cabinets) have often shrunk, leaving available capacity. These can be leased to other organisations such as edge data centres, secure storage, community batteries, charging stations and more. Refurbishment could even make exchange sites into multi-purpose buildings
• Tower asset sell-offs are starting to become commonplace, especially to non-telco investors. These investment organisations take a vastly different approach to monetising thes assets. Unlike traditional telcos with their large operations and maintenance teams and age-old processes, investCos want to keep head-count to a minimum, automate and outsource any labour possible. This makes them far more open to digital twin, drone and augmented reality technology models to remotely support their assets. In additional InvestCos are far more interested in maximising the number of leases, to as many network operators as possible
• Telco REITs (real-estate investment trust) models
• Infrastructure sharing with other telcos or mixed-model service providers like IoT or sensor networks, private networks, content delivery, gaming, etc

8. Many have semi-monopolies in their access networks

• Access networks are expensive to build and maintain. In many cases, it doesn’t make commercial sense to build where others have network. This is why wholesale network models and InfraCo models exist. The incumbent network providers have a significant advantage. It also gives the incumbent a significant monopoly over “ownership” of customers served by the access network.
• This opens up partnership opportunities such as this approach used by Jio to build a network and sign up customers, making the network an attractive investment for providers wanting access to those customers. As described in this article, Jio built a 4G data network for $32B and sold 42% for $16.8B (note these numbers may have changed since the article was written). This is an interesting alternate strategy to the net-neutrality model of forcing big-tech to pay for service (note some of the investor groups in the table below)

9. They have technical implementation skills

Telcos have strong technical implementation skills that provide the possibility of leveraging new technologies and delivery models such as edge, AI/ML/GenAI, private networking, etc to craft new business models around, but only if new thinking is applied. Some B2B business model examples include:

• Managed tech services – consulting to businesses to help them deliver Business Operating Systems (BOS) as described earlier, AI/ML
• Edge compute – including compute, comms, private networks, etc for organisations wanting localised services and/or where low-latency / improved-performance networking is essential
• Augmented reality (AR) applications, services, content and compute as a bundled offering for organisations
• Smart cities
• Digital twins
• I’m sure you can think of many others

10. They have innovation in their DNA

This wonderful article links Blade Runner, Schumpeter’s gale and how innovation can be linked with periods of creative destruction / progress / stagnation.

The telco industry was a technological juggernaut throughout the 1900s and created breakthroughs such as OSS, transistors, lasers, solar cells, satellites, communication theory, Unix operating system, the C and C++ programming languages, etc. Unfortunately, most telcos have dismantled the primary research and development arms in a corresponding period to their structural declines.

The telco industry’s R&D leadership in tech has waned in recent decades and to be honest, any reinvestment now is unlikely to lead to significant business model changes in the near term.

11. Command and Control + Crisis Management

Telcos already run some of the most mature command-and-control environments in the economy. Their network operations centres are built to monitor distributed infrastructure in real time, correlate alarms, triage faults, coordinate field response and communicate clearly under pressure. That capability is easy to overlook because it is usually framed as an internal necessity for keeping networks alive. In reality, it is a transferable operating model that many other sectors still struggle to build.

Emergency services, transport agencies, utilities and local government all need the same core muscles: shared situational awareness, fast escalation paths, clear role allocation and disciplined decision-making during live events. Telcos could package not just connectivity, but the surrounding crisis-management capability as a service. The real asset is not the network alone. It is the orchestration layer around the network.

12. Wholesale Settlement and Partner-Management Machinery

Most people think of telco billing as a mechanism for invoicing end customers. But under the surface, many operators already manage complex webs of charging, reconciliation, settlement, dispute handling and partner accountability across carriers, wholesalers, resellers and service providers. That machinery has taken decades to build and harden. It is far more sophisticated than many adjacent industries realise.

That means telcos may already possess the commercial plumbing required to underpin ecosystem marketplaces and multi-party B2B platforms. Anywhere value has to be shared across multiple contributors, whether in IoT, energy, digital services, smart-city platforms or industry-specific partner models, telcos may be better positioned than expected. They do not just know how to sell services. They know how to settle complexity.

13. Retail and Field-Access Footprint

A retail shop is not just a sales outlet. A field workforce is not just an installation cost. Together, they form a distributed physical presence with trusted access into homes, offices, buildings and remote locations. In a world where so many adjacent services are still stuck at the last practical step, that footprint may be one of the most underleveraged assets telcos have.

This opens the door to adjacent services well beyond connectivity. Energy setup, smart-home and smart-building services, device lifecycle management, security installation, remote-office support and other physical-digital hybrid offers all depend on trusted presence. Telcos already have much of the hard part in place: scheduling, identity checks, customer notifications, access protocols and branded field interaction. That makes the footprint commercially reusable.

14. Location Intelligence

Modern mobile networks are not just transport layers for data. They are sensing layers too. Combined with field workforce data, service data and operational context, telcos can build powerful real-time location and situation-awareness capabilities. That does not just mean a blue dot on a map. It means knowing where assets, people, incidents and dependencies are in relation to each other.

That capability has clear value in logistics, workforce safety, industrial operations, critical infrastructure response and asset tracking. Yet much of the commercial value created by location still leaks away to app platforms and over-the-top players. Telcos are often sitting on the foundations of a location-intelligence business but treating it as an internal technical by-product rather than a monetisable layer.

15. Permission to Interrupt

Very few organisations can reach customers directly, repeatedly and with a high likelihood of being noticed. Telcos can. Through SMS, apps, portals, bills, email and support channels, they already have lawful communications paths into millions of people and businesses. That is a rare asset in an age where most digital messaging is filtered, ignored or distrusted.

Used clumsily, it becomes spam and a rapid destruction of trust / brand-value. Used carefully, it becomes one of the most valuable public-interest and service-enablement assets in the market. The highest-value use cases are not generic promotions. They are moments where immediacy matters: safety alerts, outage guidance, fraud warnings, appointment changes, service recovery and urgent next-best-action prompts. The opportunity is not more messaging. It is more meaningful messaging and the opportunity to establish further trust

16. Presence at Moments of Change

Telcos are often present when people and businesses are already in transition. A person moves house, changes job, upgrades a device or travels overseas. A business opens a site, launches a branch, digitises operations or relocates staff. In each case, the telco becomes involved at exactly the same moment other commercial needs are surfacing too.

That means the telco is not just servicing connectivity demand. It is sitting inside broader change events. Those events can create demand for energy setup, cybersecurity, managed devices, workplace services, insurance, compliance support, remote working tools and continuity planning. The hidden value is not the telco transaction itself. It is the adjacency to a cluster of other high-intent transactions happening at the same time.

17. The Customer’s “Always-On” Dependency

Customers may admire entertainment brands, retailers or banks, but they depend on connectivity in a more fundamental way. If the telco service fails, work stops, payments fail, safety risks rise, coordination breaks down and frustration escalates very quickly. That creates a different kind of commercial relationship. It is not just preference-driven. It is dependency-driven.

That dependency gives telcos a more privileged starting point for adjacent offers than they often recognise. When customers are already relying on you to stay connected, there is a natural logic to also trusting you with resilience, backup, managed devices, smart-site services, security overlays or operational continuity solutions. The starting point is stronger than many telcos price in.

Particularly in remote & regional footprints, some telcos are the technology enabler for the region, not just a telco.

18. The Bill as a Media Surface

Bills are usually treated as accounting artefacts. They get generated, sent, paid and archived. But that view misses something important. Bills are recurring, trusted and context-rich communication surfaces. They arrive with a level of legitimacy that most marketing channels can only envy. They are opened in moments where the customer is already thinking about value, usage, fairness and service quality (albeit with the negative connotation of money having to be paid).

Used carefully, that makes the bill a programmable media surface rather than just a financial document. It can be used for education, prevention, retention, targeted upgrade paths, behavioural nudges and contextual up-sell / cross-sell / adjacency offers. A roaming overage warning, a resilience recommendation after an outage, a family-plan optimisation suggestion or a device-protection prompt can all be delivered in a moment of unusually high relevance. Or it could just be a better brand-builder if turned into a monthly newsletter. The bill is not dead media. It is often underused media.

19. The Household Graph

Third-party audience models often guess. Telcos often know. Family plans, shared addresses, linked payment methods, bundled services and usage structures can reveal natural household buying units with surprising clarity. That is commercially powerful because many products are not bought by individuals acting in isolation. They are bought by households making trade-offs across shared budgets, shared devices and shared risk.

This creates opportunities for far more accurate packaging, retention and adjacent service design. Home energy, home security, family safety, parental controls, device lifecycle plans and support packages all make more sense when viewed through the lens of the household rather than the single subscriber. The hidden asset is not just data volume. It is the relational structure inside the data.

20. Appointment Engine

The ability to schedule, prioritise and route scarce field appointments is one of those capabilities that feels operationally mundane until you realise how many industries struggle with it. Telcos have spent years learning how to match availability, skills, geography, access constraints, customer preferences, route-finding and live operational changes. That is not necessarily just an internal cost centre to facilitate a telco service function. It is a commercially valuable coordination engine.

That same muscle could be repurposed into other sectors where field access is hard and service windows matter. Energy, facilities, security, healthcare support, device swaps, smart-building upgrades and remote-site maintenance all depend on similar orchestration logic (and potentially even the same cross-skilled workforce). Telcos may be sitting on a reusable operating system for appointment management without viewing it that way.

21. Contact Centres

Contact centres are typically described as cost centres because they are measured through internal call handline metrics like volume, average handle time and other efficiency metrics. But they also capture something more valuable than many firms ever get to observe: real-world customer language at the exact point where friction, confusion, urgency and buying intent become visible. That corpus is incredibly rich.

Handled properly, contact-centre interactions can become inputs into product design, journey redesign, agentic AI training, churn prevention, cross-sell logic and service recovery. They can even support entirely new revenue plays in insight, managed support or white-labelled service operations. The hidden opportunity is to stop treating the contact centre purely as a cost and start seeing it as a sensor network for commercial learning.

And just like the appointment engine (item #20 above), telco strengths at setting up and managing contact centres as internal capabilities could also be offered externally (especially as part of a managed service bundle).

22. The Outage Room Capability

When incidents hit, telcos often pull together cross-functional command structures faster than many organisations in other sectors can imagine. Engineering, operations, field teams, service desks, executives, communications teams and partners all converge into a live-response model with rhythms, priorities and escalation paths that have been rehearsed over time. Most telcos already have latent capacity in terms of operations centres, hot-desks, war rooms and the like in readiness for crisis events. That capability has value beyond the outage itself.

Resilience, continuity and managed-response services all require the same operating discipline. Enterprises don’t just need alerts. They need structured response on rare occasions but need to know the capability is stood up and ready to go (a bit like an operational insurance policy – and like an insurance policy, it comes with recurring charges whether used or not). Utilities, transport operators, councils, campus operators and industrial businesses may all value a partner that can help them run a serious incident room rather than merely sell monitoring tools. In that sense, the outage room is not just a defensive necessity. It may be a product prototype.

23. Energy Management

Telcos already manage distributed energy assets at scale, from site batteries and backup generators through to power monitoring, runtime optimisation and resilience planning. Historically, this has been seen as a support function for keeping the network alive. But as energy markets become more dynamic and resilience becomes more valuable, that same capability may become strategic in its own right.

There may be openings in distributed energy services, backup-as-a-service, site sharing, resilience platforms and even virtualised energy models where the telco footprint becomes part of a broader energy infrastructure ecosystem. At minimum, telcos have a far deeper operational understanding of distributed power than many digital businesses. At best, they may have the foundations of an energy-adjacent business hiding in plain sight.

24. Proof of Identity

A mobile number has quietly become one of the most persistent identifiers in modern life. It threads through banking, app sign-ups, security checks, delivery notifications, social platforms and two-factor authentication flows. Telcos often underestimate the strategic significance of that position because they are used to seeing numbers as routine service attributes and a KYC (Know Your Customer) obligation rather than trust anchors that others could rely upon.

That creates openings in identity, verification, fraud prevention, consent management and trusted transaction flows. The point is not that telcos should become governments or banks. The point is that they are already embedded in the trust stack of the digital economy. They may have more leverage there than they currently exploit.

25. Convening Power

Few organisations can sit credibly at the intersection of government, utilities, hyperscalers, enterprise IT, construction ecosystems and consumer markets. Telcos can and do. They are one of the few sectors whose infrastructure, commercial relationships and regulatory relevance cut across all of those domains at once. That gives them a kind of convening power that is easy to miss because it doesn’t show up as a line item on a balance sheet.

Convening power matters because many of the next growth plays are ecosystem plays (especially across compute / energy / comms / intelligence). Smart cities, industrial automation, digital infrastructure, resilience networks and public-private service platforms all require multi-party coordination. Telcos may be able to create disproportionate value simply by being the credible integrator or orchestrator in the room. The puppet-master so to speak.

26. Timing and Synchronisation

Telco networks depend on extraordinarily precise timing and synchronisation. Without it, mobile networks degrade, coordination breaks and service quality suffers. Most customers are totally oblivious to this invisible layer, yet entire classes of modern infrastructure depend on accurate time to function correctly. That makes timing one of the least visible but potentially most valuable assets owned by telcos.

As industries such as finance, utilities, transport, emergency response and industrial automation become more real-time, the value of trusted synchronisation and time-stamping may rise sharply. Telcos could choose to leave this buried deep in network engineering. Or they could recognise it as a strategic capability that underpins broader coordination across critical systems.

27. Early Intent Signals

Similar to item #16 about being present during times of change, one of the most overlooked advantages telcos have is that they often see weak signals before the market sees formal demand. Expansion plans show up as site-connectivity requests. Relocation appears in service moves. Hardship appears in payment behaviour. Digitisation shows up in bandwidth changes, security enquiries or device refresh cycles. Construction activity appears in access requests and temporary service demand. Entire new building estates may start formal planning discussions with telcos years before any of the lots are sold or houses start springing up.

Most organisations only see opportunity once it becomes a tender, a budget line or a crisis. Telcos often see it earlier. That gives them the potential to become much better at proactive service design, ecosystem activation and adjacent revenue capture. The hidden asset is not just data. It is the timing of the signal.

The appearance of a new McDonalds store is often a proxy, an early signal towards localised population growth, that signals others to invest into the area. In theory, telcos should have even better signal data than the McDonalds store planners.

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Summary

As mentioned in the previous article, big telco today has already been experiencing its burning exchange moment for years and needs a drastic business model change if it wants to continue to play a significant role in the future of the telecommunications services industry. We’ve shared a numerous ideas for alternate business models the telcos could use to stay relevant and profitable into the future. I’m sure you have many other ideas to share (we’d love to hear all about them from you).  As the OSS/BSS industry, it’s our job to build the tools that enable these business models to be enacted by the telcos. Our projects depend on it. You might also like this article, which describes personal approaches for navigating around the burning exchange.

If you’re a telco, OSS/BSS vendor or consulting firm and would like to brainstorm possible business models that could be a good fit for you or your clients, please leave us a note and we’d be delighted to discuss with you.