Alex Sinclair

The Telco Tech Graveyard One of the first large-scale projects I worked on was IMS. The architecture was ambitious: native IP communication for voice, messaging, and media. In theory, it addressed the future of "rich-communications". In practice, it was slow, rigid, and fragile. Integrations were brittle. Time-to-market spanned years. Complexity multiplied. After years of development and global alignment, it never reached the user. Then WhatsApp arrived, with five engineers, and quietly rewrote the rules of global communication. No signaling frameworks. No telco-grade architecture. Just a fast, reliable product that worked. IMS was not the exception. MBMS, MMS, RCS, Joyn, NB-IoT, LTE Broadcast, Push-to-Talk, WAC, OneAPI, ParlayX, telco app stores, telco clouds; all launched with vision, budget, and technical depth. Thousands of engineers across operators and vendors spent years building systems that never shipped, or shipped too late to be of any use. The ideas were not wrong. The teams were not lacking. The budgets were not small. Yet these technologies failed to gain adoption. This is not a failure of intelligence or resources. It is a failure of the execution structure. The proof is WhatsApp. With five people, it reached a billion users. It did so because it moved quickly, owned the product end-to-end, ignored committees, focused on user value, and built for global scale without permission. That’s what execution looks like. For telcos to avoid repeating the same cycle, the model must change. Delivery timelines must shrink from years to quarters. Teams must ship live code, not specifications. Developers must be treated as customers, not edge cases. Platform logic must replace alignment logic. Monetization must shift from licensing to usage-based models. And the end user must stop being an abstraction buried under layers of compliance and governance. Until telcos operate with software-native speed, modular architectures, and product-led execution, the graveyard will keep growing. Vision has never been the missing piece. WhatsApp proved that execution, not scale, not funding, not standards, is what shapes the future.

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💷 CityFibre secures £2.3bn – Consolidation in UK Altnet Market is Officially Here Big news in UK telecoms this week as CityFibre lands a £2.3bn investment package, marking a huge step forward in the ongoing shake-up of the alt-net landscape. Let’s be honest – this move wouldn’t have happened without the Sky wholesale deal locked in. That agreement was the linchpin, giving the market (and investors) confidence in CityFibre’s long-term play as a credible BT Openreach alternative. What’s particularly interesting is that a significant chunk of the new funding is earmarked for M&A – but it’s clearly debt-backed. And here’s the challenge: many of the UK’s smaller altnets are still loss-making, meaning that any revenues CityFibre acquires through these deals won’t immediately boost the P&L. In fact, they’ll likely add short-term pressure to profitability when you also consider interest on the debt. But long game thinking is key here. With scale, better cost efficiencies, and now a tier-1 partner in Sky, CityFibre is positioning itself as a true powerhouse in UK telco infrastructure. Whether they can turn loss-making assets into profitable ones will be the real test. This is just the beginning of what’s likely to be an intense period of consolidation across the UK fibre market. 📈 Watch this space. #Telecoms #Altnet #CityFibre #Investment #FibreBroadband #UKTelco #SkyDeal #Infrastructure #Connectivity #DigitalUK #TechNews #MergersAndAcquisitions #FibreNetwork #NetworkExpansion #Openreach #SkyBroadband

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The 10 Bad Habits of Telco Michael Jordan once said he missed more than 9,000 shots in his career, and that is why he succeeded. Failure itself is not the problem. The problem is when mistakes are repeated so often that they stop being lessons and become habits. In telecom I have seen this again and again over 25 years. Here are the habits that keep coming back: 1. Letting IT dictate the business 2. Treating vendors as discount boxes instead of partners 3. Fighting other telcos while platforms capture the real value 4. Believing Gs are business models 5. Underselling our role in the digital economy 6. Adding endless middle management layers 7. Overcomplicating the structure until nobody owns decisions 8. Rewarding politics over performance 9. Acting like lonely wolves instead of building ecosystems 10. Accepting regulation as destiny instead of shaping it These are habits that compound over time. And when bad habits compound they destroy value. The good news is that habits can be changed. I share more reflections on how to flip each one here: https://lnkd.in/gXbyjWSZ

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With the ever-increasing demand for connectivity and the rapid evolution of technology, staying informed is key to success. The Ericsson Mobility Report has consistently provided me with valuable knowledge about the evolving digital landscape, and this upcoming edition promises to be even more insightful.   Mobile subscriptions are projected to grow at 2% annually through 2030, reaching 820 million users. The real game-changer? 5G subscriptions, set to rise at an impressive 40% CAGR, signaling a major shift in how we engage with digital services—from mobile finance to telehealth and e-learning.   By 2030, 5G will dominate with 61% of mobile connections, while 4G will account for 37%. 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) is also emerging as a pivotal solution, complementing traditional broadband and enabling next-generation connectivity.   Service providers are not just expanding network capacity—they’re also focusing on energy efficiency and reducing their carbon footprint. Network modernization remains central to achieving business objectives and advancing toward net zero targets.   Exciting times ahead as we shape a digitally empowered, sustainable future! 🌱💡 Ericsson Mobility Report | Read the latest edition https://lnkd.in/eRCKXndV   #MobilityReport #5G #DigitalTransformation #Technology #Innovation #Sustainability 

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💸 Telecoms has a price problem. For years, the industry has relied on complex tariffs, legacy bundles, and long contracts to drive ARPU. But let’s be real — that model is creaking. Consumers today want simplicity, flexibility, and value. That’s where eSIM and MVNOs come in. 👉 eSIM strips away the friction, making onboarding seamless and giving consumers instant choice. 👉 MVNOs, often more agile than legacy operators, can challenge pricing models and deliver propositions that truly resonate with today’s digital-first customer. The industry is at a crossroads. Those who cling to old ways risk irrelevance. Those who embrace change — leveraging eSIM and partnering with MVNOs — could reshape telecoms as we know it. 📖 I’ve broken down the challenges (and opportunities) in more detail here: 🔗 Telecoms Has a Price Problem: The Role of eSIM and MVNOs in the Industry’s Future https://lnkd.in/eh9XDdaZ What do you think — are operators ready to move beyond outdated pricing models? #Telecoms #MVNO #eSIM #Connectivity #Innovation #FutureOfTelecoms

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Telcos, Welcome to Your New Customers: AI Agents The iPhone marked a before and after in telecom. Networks engineered for voice collapsed under video demand. Operators spent billions on spectrum, radios, and fibre backhaul, but ARPU sank from $22.39 in 2009 to $13.56 by 2019 and another 20 percent by 2023. The value was captured by Apple, Google, and digital platforms, not the carriers who carried the load. A second shock is arriving with AI agents. These are not IoT devices with dumb SIMs but autonomous pieces of software, often cloud-based, that authenticate, negotiate, and transact thousands of times per second. Their arrival reshapes every part of the telco business. Networks shift from managing downstream video streams to orchestrating upstream biometric data, inference payloads, and relentless bursts of signalling. Edge compute becomes the new backbone, replacing CDNs as the critical layer of performance. Operations and BSS no longer revolve around monthly bundles but around real-time billing, event-based charging, and automatic SLA credits. The customer journey breaks apart: the “user” is no longer a human who can be persuaded by advertising or loyalty points, but an algorithm that selects providers based only on latency, trust, and price. Commercial logic pivots from ARPU to RPI, revenue per thousand verified interactions, with identity and determinism becoming the true products. Even the ecosystem map shifts: just as Apple and Google seized the interface in the smartphone era, hyperscalers are already racing to build agent marketplaces. SoftBank has announced plans to deploy one billion AI agents across its companies, and forecasts put the telecom opportunity at $188 billion by 2034. Nobody willl invite Telcos to the party. We will need to claim our role this time, or once again build the infrastructure while someone else takes the economics. Full analysis here: https://lnkd.in/gvkTKqzx

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The massive seasonal influx of visitors to the UK's most popular holiday destinations presents a significant network engineering challenge for all operators. This surge in demand often strains local mobile network capacity to its limits, where usage can vary enormously from month to month. Addressing this requires the operators to partner to offer (often temporary) additional capacity. The latest move from O2 (Telefónica UK) and Freshwave, deploying small cells in popular UK holiday towns like St Ives and Newquay, is such an example. It’s a more surgical approach to network densification. Instead of building significant new infrastructure, it is delivering a targeted capacity injection at specific high-footfall locations like beaches and train stations, managing the spikes in data demand that these destinations experience every summer. The partnership between the operator, the infrastructure specialist, and the local authority serves as a classic blueprint for regional network enhancement that is likely to become far more common as data demand continues to surge. These alliances are increasingly being recognised as prudent and economic solutions to troublesome and often uneconomic challenges for traditional network planning strategies. #5G #4G #SmallCells #Connectivity #UKTourism #Cornwall #O2 #Freshwave #NetworkDensification #UKTelecoms #CustomerExperience

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