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5 MIN READ | Service Assurance

Accelerating telecom innovation: 6 strategic moves operators must make now

Rayan Salha
Sep. 30 2025
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Telco growth strategy conversations have moved. Telecom innovation now demands operational discipline. The question is no longer whether hot topics such as AI, edge and 5G slicing matter, but which of these capabilities actually change how networks are operated, bought and monetized. The tougher questions are practical: where do you invest first, how do you avoid “pilot purgatory,” and how do you make operational complexity visible and chargeable?

At “The Digital Telco” panel session, experts Malik Saadi (ABI Research), Colin Bannon (BT Business), Yue Wang (China Telecom) and Muhannad Alabweh (Infovista) met at that practical fault line: the technology is advancing fast, but value only appears when new capabilities become repeatable services customers understand and pay for.

Why taking action is so urgent: three concrete signals from the market  

What has changed that operators must act now to ensure sustainable growth and innovation? Three shifts are converging:

First, private networks and enterprise mobile networks have moved beyond pilots. The GSA reports thousands of private network deployments worldwide, with notable adoption in manufacturing, transport and the public sector.

Second, edge computing demand is accelerating as new applications (AI agents, AR/VR and industrial IoT) require predictable latency and local processing. According to Grand View Research, the edge market was valued at multiple tens of billions of dollars in 2024 and is forecast to grow strongly over the coming decade.

Third, the commercial case for guaranteed experiences is strengthening. ABI Research projects 5G slicing revenue to reach USD $24 billion in 2028 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 106%, reflecting the accelerating commercialization of slice-based services.

Taken together, these trends create demand for repeatable services rather than more experiments, which makes the immediate work operational and commercial: automation, telemetry, edge strategy and SLA productization.

What strategic movements and choices operators need to assess

1. Data quality is the business problem behind the AI promise

Discussing AI in telecom often obscures a simple operational truth: models rely on the signals that feed them. The panel kept returning to telemetry: its consistency, provenance and availability across RAN, transport and cloud. When those basics are missing, automation becomes brittle: alarms proliferate, root cause is unclear, and trust dissolves.

Colin Bannon captured the scale and irony of the challenge well:  

I would argue that we’re only using one percent of the data that we have on our network. The network, in fact, is the largest telemetry device that I know of in any company.

Treat telemetry as a core asset. Getting the vocabulary and provenance right is organizational work more than an IT ticket, and it is the foundation of dependable automation.

2. Edge placements rewrite cost (and experience) equations

Workloads are changing. Generative interfaces, AR/VR and many industrial applications push data upstream and demand millisecond response. That shifts how you judge capacity and where compute should live.

Yue Wang captured the change succinctly:  

Our compute needs to be placed close enough to the user, and that’s where Edge comes into play. 

The economics matter. Adding distributed computing costs money. The question to answer is when a measurable reduction in latency or transit cost justifies that expense. The right decision will vary by vertical; operators that can show clear cost/benefit comparisons will win the argument with customers.

3. Network slicing is only valuable when it’s a promise customers recognize

Slicing is a technical achievement, but 5G slicing monetization depends on whether customers can recognize and buy it. If you cannot present a slice as a short list of measurable guarantees, it remains an internal capability rather than a product.

Muhannad Alabweh highlighted the operational gap and the role of targeted automation that Infovista is applying with its Agentic AI framework, which translates complexity into “high-quality real-time insights” and utilizes specialized AI agents to make slice behavior visible and actionable.

Telecom product designers should focus on a narrow set of vertical-facing promises (three to five KPIs) that a buyer can understand and that can be observed in near real time.

4. Aligning fixed and mobile: the practical convergence

A practical point threaded through the discussion was the need to stop treating fixed and mobile as separate silos. Colin argued that many of the capabilities we’re reintroducing in mobile (programmability, closed-loop automation, QoS constructs familiar to fixed networks) are not new in principle. They need alignment in execution.

He put it plainly:  

I think it's important on both the mobile industry and the fixed industry to start to align between the two, and our friends in Infovista and other suppliers to help us provide packages that sit across both. 

That alignment matters for customers who expect a common experience across heterogeneous networks (fixed, mobile, Wi-Fi). Engineering choices that optimize only one domain will increasingly fall short when service expectations cross those boundaries.

5. Network data can pay, but only when governance is convincing

The panel agreed network-derived signals (location insights, operational alerts, fraud signals) have commercial value, but only if buyers trust the governance. That means narrow, auditable datasets with anonymization and clear access controls.

Early products will be tailored and compliant, not broad “data lakes” sold as platforms.

6. Procurement and governance decide whether pilots scale

Technical pilots might be easy; but organizational scaling is hard. Procurement and legal workflows often treat pilots as one-off purchases, which creates friction when a pilot works and needs to scale. The fix lies on the technical, contractual and procedural side: acceptance gates, contract templates and aligned KPIs across teams.

Colin highlighted a common procurement trap: fragmenting requirements can show local savings but increase total operational cost, misaligning incentives and slowing rollouts.

7. Automation redistributes where human value sits

Automation should remove repetitive work. The less visible consequence is a change in career design: senior engineers move from repetitive verification to exception handling, architecture and continuous improvement.

The industry must make those roles meaningful; otherwise, automation is perceived as simple cost-cutting rather than capability building.

Muhannad argued that embedding domain knowledge into automated agents is the way this scales, as it lets organizations turn observability into action without overwhelming scarce human experts.

The strategic frame for telecom innovation: three linked bets

These themes converge on a single question: how do you convert capability into an offer a customer recognizes and pays for? That requires three parallel bets:

  1. Data governance: define minimal, auditable telemetry contracts.
  2. Service definition: pick narrow, customer-facing promises (vertical + KPI set).
  3. Commercial alignment: adapt procurement and contracting so successful pilots have a pre-defined path to scale.

Each bet amplifies the others. Fail one and the others lose leverage.

Closing thought

The technical blocks to turn innovation and telco growth into real revenue are in place. The competitive edge will come from organizational discipline: making data trustworthy, making service promises simple, and making the path to scale contractual.

Networks already collect immense data. Turning it into reliable services is a commercial and organizational task, not a purely technical one.  

FAQs

How can operators move pilots into scalable production faster? 
Start by treating pilots as product experiments, not one-off trials. That means three simple commitments up front: (1) define clear acceptance criteria that include operational and commercial gates (time-to-activate, SLA checks, billing readiness), (2) pre-approve contract templates and procurement pathways so successful pilots don’t stall in legal review, and (3) measure repeatability early, run the pilot in two distinct sites or tenants to prove it behaves consistently. Together, these steps reduce the common handoffs and renegotiations that turn promising pilots into permanent projects.

How should operators approach an edge strategy for 5G? 
Treat edge placement as an economic decision: model latency improvements and transit-cost avoidance against the incremental OPEX of distributed compute. Start with vertical pilots where low latency or high uplink volumes materially change outcomes, measure real user KPIs, then scale the placement pattern that shows repeatable value.

What governance is needed to use network telemetry for AI and external services? 
Start with clear telemetry contracts (fields, timestamps, ownership and provenance) so every signal is traceable. Enforce anonymization and retention at source and ensure auditable access. Count on partners like Infovista to translate raw measurements into standard data models and apply an Agentic AI framework, specialized agents that retrieve, validate and contextualize signals before they reach analytics or third parties. The result: lower legal risk and higher-quality, AI-ready data.

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