Telcos are losing a war they don't even realize they're fighting. While carriers waste time competing with each other over minor price cuts, outside tech giants and agile startups are carving up their market share.
Starlink is bypassing ground infrastructure with satellites to cap home broadband prices. Twilio and RingCentral have turned enterprise voice into a software API for AI agents. Apple Passkeys and startups like Socure have eliminated the lucrative telco SMS verification step by handling identity directly on the device using biometrics. Even in heavy infrastructure, Nvidia is building its own data backbones, and companies like Boldyn Networks and many others are deploying private networks directly for factories using open spectrum. These are just a few examples, and if you extend this to the AI economy, there are hundreds of startups carving out small pockets of opportunity.

When a consumer installs a satellite dish on a roof, they establish a pristine, uncompromised line of sight to the sky using an active phased-array antenna with massive gain (30+ dBi). That architecture scales. Direct-to-Device does not. When you remove the dedicated roof dish and attempt to close that same 500 km link with an unmodified smartphone, you are forced to rely on an isotropic, omnidirectional antenna yielding roughly 0 dBi of gain and operating at a fraction of a watt of transmit power.
Despite the massive satellite apertures currently being deployed to brute-force the uplink, the laws of physics remain unforgiving. Orbital D2D cannot provide meaningful concurrent sector capacity, cannot provide low latency, and, due to a microscopic penetration margin, absolutely cannot provide indoor coverage.
Orbital D2D is more like an insurance policy. It is a brilliant, necessary solution for the 0.0001% of edge cases like the stranded hiker, the mid-ocean SOS, and extreme remote telemetry. But for Telcos tasked with delivering gigabits of data to dense urban and suburban populations, where 80% of data is consumed indoors, orbital D2D is practically useless as a core capacity layer.

At Reliance's Annual General Meeting, Jio shared a detailed proposal with India’s space regulator, IN-SPACe, outlining a massive orbital infrastructure project. The plan details the deployment of a proprietary Low Earth Orbit satellite constellation comprising approximately 1,650 satellites. Positioned at an operational altitude of approximately 650 kilometers, the network is designed to target two distinct service models: high-throughput rural fixed broadband and Direct-to-Device connectivity, which allows standard, off-the-shelf smartphones to connect directly to satellites without specialized satellite dishes or hardware modifications.

By anchoring machine identities directly at the network or hardware level, operators can definitively authenticate automated assets and enforce strict security boundaries. Recent initiatives by operators like SK Telecom and StarHub demonstrate this emerging use case, moving beyond high-level AI experimentation to build concrete frameworks that assign verifiable identities to autonomous systems, enabling audit, monitoring, and secure machine-to-machine operations.

Telco is still treating AI traffic as a synchronous chat interface, failing to account for the kinetic scale of what is actually occurring. The transition from human-latency software to machine-velocity swarms has already happened, and nobody is prepared for what is coming. I don't know the full implications either, but I could see some areas that are critical to discuss.

“There is a 1% population that’s not covered today in very rural areas,” Desroches stated. “And I think satellite is a great solution for that... but within urban and suburban areas, the infrastructure that is in place is better. It is the cost per bit to deliver that is cheaper.”. From the perspective of a tier-one telecom operator managing a $176 billion connectivity business that provides nationwide premium fiber and 5G service across America, this position makes total sense.
But the moment you set foot outside the telecom world, the broader financial market paints a radically different picture. Wall Street analysts are issuing downgrades over the satellite threat, and SpaceX is currently on its roadshow for a historic June 12 IPO targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation. It is a number built almost entirely on the premise of disrupting the global telecommunications market; in fact, SpaceX models Starlink’s total addressable market at $1.3 trillion, which is the exact size of total global telecom revenues.

The postman. I remember him from when I was a kid. He was an elderly man who brought letters to the door. We got excited when the doorbell rang because it meant news, a connection, or an update. Technology killed that job. Faster, cheaper ways to send messages replaced him. It wasn’t because the job was bad; it was because the economics of communication changed.
We’re seeing the exact same thing happen in telecom customer care right now. People like to say “AI will assist the human,” implying a nice, happy future where machines and people work together. That’s a lie. AI is not helping reps but replacing them. This is driven by three simple things: customers demand zero friction, speed matters more than small talk, and the cost of human labor is way too high.
The Telco call customer care layer is not evolving, but ending. Now, the human part doesn’t stop at zero. As the front lines go fully automated, a tiny group of about 5% of humans will remain. This is a high-stakes, specialized workforce. Their job is harder and more intense than anything we’ve seen before.

Techco is dead.The definition was always consulting fluff.
McKinsey defined Techco as an evolution into “platform-oriented innovators akin to today’s top tech players.” The financial mechanics prove this is a category error. Telcos and tech companies share nothing but the letter “T”. The inherent financial structure leaves no room for debate: telecom runs on 1% R&D; tech runs on 15% or more. We do not write proprietary operating systems or build global developer ecosystems. We manage heavy, long-lived physical infrastructure, power, and heating loads, using standardized vendor hardware.
Attempting to secure a software valuation by changing corporate vocabulary does not alter the depreciation cycle of a cell tower or the CapEx of a fiber trench. Techco is simply the newest headstone in the telecom graveyard, buried alongside WAP portals, Telco 2.0, DSP, and the Smartpipe.

The telecom world is split right down the middle over a major spending decision. This is even more polarizing than whether Pizza should have pineapple or if cats are better pets than dogs. The Telco fans are divided!
Telcos are trying to figure out whether tomorrow’s radio networks actually need GPUs, or if they can just keep using dedicated ASICs or even the CPU hardware they already have. The decision may seem small, but it has massive consequences across the value chain, vendors, the ecosystem, Capex, and monetization.
To understand where people stand, I ran a poll on LinkedIn asking if we actually need GPUs in the RAN to build a future-proof RAN network, or if the standard ASIC/CPU approach is enough. The results showed a clear dividing line. Around 60% said standard ASICs and CPUs are good enough, while 40% feels GPUs are mandatory.

There is a unicorn startup out of Latin America called NotCo. Their killer product is NotMilk. It is exactly what it sounds like: milk that tastes, pours, and froths exactly like milk. But it takes the cow completely out of the equation.
Yes! They removed the friction of the animal, the environmental tax, and the legacy supply chain, yet delivered the exact sensory outcome you want in your morning latte.
The telecom industry has the exact same problem.
After 150 years of legacy operations, the “telco” part of the equation produces nothing but friction. To be brutally honest, the word itself is tainted. It is universally associated with dropped calls, incomprehensible billing, utility, hidden fees, and hours wasted on hold.
But the reality is that today’s operators ( Telco) provide exponentially more value than basic connectivity alone. They are the invisible backbone of the modern digital economy. To survive, the industry needs to remove its own cow from the equation.

Look at the machine the telecom industry built.
It is, without exaggeration, the most complex and astonishing technological achievement in human history. Right now, it seamlessly connects 6 billion human beings and 21 billion machines. It works everywhere, anytime, and almost for free.
Engineers designed this infrastructure to operate with 99.999% reliability. Every five years, they completely rebuild it from the ground up just to make it run 10x faster. It keeps the global digital economy breathing across continents, oceans, and concrete.
It is an absolute miracle of physics.
And the reward?
Nobody loves the telco. In fact, the public barely tolerates them. When you look at the cold, hard data, the telecom sector sits at the absolute bottom of global brand loyalty. It ranks below airlines and banks, and is functionally tied to the local tax authority in the hearts of its own consumers.

The financial markets are currently parsing the implications of SpaceX’s proposed $1.75tn IPO valuation. While much of the initial retail focus has centered on the company’s interplanetary ambitions, institutional investors are scrutinizing a far more grounded thesis detailed in the May 2026 S-1 filing. The prospectus outlines a strategic pivot from a launch-and-logistics provider to a vertically integrated global telecommunications and compute utility.
At 94 times its projected 2025 consolidated revenue of $18.67bn, SpaceX’s valuation represents a significant departure from traditional aerospace and telecommunications multiples. The justification rests on the company’s definition of a staggering $28.5tn Total Addressable Market. By partitioning this TAM into space logistics ($370bn), global connectivity ($1.6tn), and AI infrastructure ($26.5tn), the prospectus argues that the historical separation between the physical transport of data and the compute layer is converging, and the company intends to capture the margins of both.

This week at the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference, executive leadership from the major U.S. wireless carriers and AST SpaceMobile presented their outlooks on the direct-to-device satellite market. The public consensus among the telecom CEOs framed orbital connectivity as a strictly complementary technology rather than a disruptive threat.
Verizon CEO Dan Schulman stated that for the foreseeable future, satellite will remain a complementary service to the carriers. He noted that terrestrial capacity is 100 to 1,000 times more efficient than satellite in urban and suburban areas. T-Mobile CEO Srinivasan Gopalan doubled down on this view, noting that satellite traffic currently accounts for just 0.0002% of T-Mobile’s total network usage. Gopalan also dismissed the potential threat of a D2D provider launching an MVNO to compete directly with carriers, arguing that it would not add incremental total addressable market. AT&T CEO John Stankey similarly described satellite as a natural extension of the network, acknowledging it currently handles a small percentage of total network traffic.

In the next 30 days, global telecommunications networks will route 3 quadrillion AI tokens—generating 77 exabytes of traffic. Yet, over the course of an entire 12-month fiscal year, the collective direct AI revenue for the world's top operators caps out at roughly $1 billion. That is 0.04% of the $2.52 trillion AI economy.

Telecom autonomy has struggled to evolve under traditional machine learning models because these older systems operate as uninterpretable black boxes. Machine learning excels at deterministic tasks and pattern recognition across massive datasets. However, network engineers managing critical infrastructure require clear explanations before executing system changes.
This lack of explainability stalled the progression of autonomous networks. Handing over control of complex actions without understanding the underlying math creates an extremely risky trust gap for Telcos. To resolve this, Nokia and Google Cloud designed the Gemini-powered agents using a “glass box” architecture.
Instead of executing an unverified command, the action reasoner agent functions as an advisory layer. It processes the network data and presents a confidence-based recommendation to the human operator. Because these specialized agents can explain their conclusions and reasoning, they elicit greater trust from users. Human engineers retain control and final approval over critical control points before logging and executing fixes. By combining autonomous data analysis with human observability, the platform establishes the required safety to deploy machine-speed operations.

Global mobile network data traffic grew by 22% between the first quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026. That is a steady number, but it shows growth is slowing. Compare that to 2019, when the explosion of mobile video caused traffic to spike by 80% year-on-year. The data shows that the predicted AI data tsunami on the access network is absent.

In 1960, a legendary Harvard Business School professor named Theodore Levitt published a paper that essentially called the most powerful executives in the corporate world a bunch of unimaginative fools. He argued that entire industries stagnate and die not because people stop buying things, but because executives fundamentally misunderstand what business they are actually in.
Later in his career, Levitt dropped a hammer that should be bolted to the wall of every telecom boardroom on earth today. He stated that there is no such thing as a commodity, and that all goods and services are differentiable. Levitt believed that “commoditization” was never an inevitable law of economics; instead, it was simply a failure of imagination. He argued that even the most basic, elemental raw materials on earth could be differentiated through packaging, service, proximity, or context. To Levitt, settling for selling a commodity meant that a management team had entirely given up on strategy.

Sure, 6G will deliver necessary operational improvements. It will utilize new 7GHz spectrum, improve radio performance, and lower the cost per bit for operators still recovering from the 5G capex hangover. However, consumers and enterprises do not pay a premium for faster pipes. Connectivity is now a hyper-commoditized utility.
If Telcos want to capture value in this new economy, they must stop defining their core business as “connectivity.” Telecom is a distribution business.
Networks serve as the last-mile delivery system for the global economy. In the past, the industry distributed voice, SMS, and 8K video. Today, the asset being distributed is intelligence. Hyperscalers are building massive, centralized AI data centers, but that compute power requires a physical delivery mechanism to reach users.
To get in the path of the money, telecom operators must pivot to distributing AI agents and semantic compute to the edge.

Unplanned downtime costs manufacturers $50B annually. Root causes, prevention strategies, and CMMS-powered approaches to eliminate reactive maintenance.

When I worked at Google, the cultural difference was clear. Engineers there were treated like stars. This wasn’t just a figure of speech; they earned the same respect and pay as top athletes like Messi or Michael Jordan. They got million-dollar contracts because leadership knew that nothing would happen without their talent. The business team at Google understood their job was to support the engineers’ work. They knew the product was the engineering, and they treated the engineers with real respect.
Contrast that with the average telecom operator or vendor today. If you walk into a typical telco office, you will find the engineers in the backseat, hidden away in back rooms, tasked with the mundane, high-pressure duty of keeping the network alive. They are the ones sweating over the five-nines, ensuring the infrastructure stays up through every crisis, while the people at the front of the room- the business folks, the strategic advisors, the ones who talk big and sell the “digital transformation” vision- take the glory. It is a massive absurdity.

Yes, Laser is the ultimate communications medium. Physics dictates that transmitting photons through a vacuum offers near-infinite bandwidth with zero latency constraints. But deploying naked lasers on Earth has historically been an exercise in frustration. Atmospheric turbulence, fog, rain, and physical interference forced the industry to wrap light in glass cables or default to the reliable, albeit slower, medium of radio frequencies.
For decades, Free Space Optics, or FSO, was dismissed as a fragile science experiment, and, to some extent, the case was officially closed.
Laser communications are back, driven by an explosion of technology developments and critical infrastructure needs that were once far from mainstream. Today, lasers are taking over every single layer of the network topology simultaneously, building a seamless architecture from space down to the terrestrial core. In orbit, optical inter-satellite links are creating massive mesh networks in a vacuum to route data globally.

While the telecom sector spent years comfortably looking down on satellite internet as a niche utility for remote cabins, the cold mathematics of orbital infrastructure have been quietly laying the groundwork for an absolute takeover. A recent comprehensive forecast by the analyst firm New Street Research projected that Starlink will scale from its current base of roughly 10.3 million users to a massive 100 million subscribers by 2034. That means capturing nearly 10% of the global fixed broadband market and translating that density into roughly $49 billion to $55 billion in annual top-line revenue.

Today, video streaming consumes around 70% of network traffic. Naturally, we spent years building infrastructure optimized for humans watching screens, chasing peak download speeds, and fighting buffering.
That architecture is about to change dramatically.
The 2026 Cisco report reveals a rapid structural shift in how networks are used. AI inference token consumption is growing 10x year over year, and by 2035, inference alone will account for 25% of total network traffic. But this time, the real issue is not volume but the shape of the data.
Agentic AI operates autonomously at software speed. An agent executing a task generates up to 450% more traffic than a human would. More importantly, it requires sustained state and upstream capacity, not downstream bursts. Autonomous agents don’t care about gigabit downlink speeds. Their survival relies entirely on Time To First Token (TTFT) and an unbroken connection to the model.
If you are still engineering exclusively for downstream consumer video, you are building for the past. Here is the technical reality of the new inference network.

The SpaceX S-1 filing is their public declaration that the traditional telecommunications business model has entered a terminal phase. By valuing its connectivity segment opportunity against a $1.6 trillion Total Addressable Market, SpaceX is not signaling a partnership with telcos but their replacement, to the fullest extent that physics allows. This transition may not be completed in 12 or 24 months, but the 10-year ambition is clear.
Faced with this orbital expansion, the industry is frantically seeking a counterweight, and market sentiment has converged on AST SpaceMobile as the only viable alternative. It is time to examine what AST SpaceMobile brings to the table in terms of its corporate strategy, technological architecture, and partnership framework, and to assess whether it offers telcos a path to maintaining their relevance.

To appreciate the significance of this development, it is helpful to look back at the previous defining era of telecommunications. In the early 2010s, as smartphones became ubiquitous and app economies exploded, the metric of value for both carriers and consumers shifted dramatically. This was the era of the gigabyte. Subscriptions, usage caps, and pricing tiers were all defined by data consumption. Telcos established the price per gigabyte as their primary billing KPI, monetizing the massive demand for mobile internet, video streaming, and app-based services. For a decade, the “GB per month” was the yardstick of digital life.