Ever wanted to know the back story of Apple adding satellite service to iPhones? Well it seems Tim Cook doesn’t want to upset the carriers—even if it comes at the expense of pissing off Elon Musk. Apparently, Apple rejected a satellite partnership offer from Elon Musk back in 2022 (paywalled, but worth it). Musk gave Apple 72 hours to accept a deal… or else. When Apple rejected him, he made good on his threat, and went to T-Mobile and struck a deal with the US carrier. It's a fascinating read, especially for telco execs, as The Wolf of MWC keeps circling around our industry. Stay tuned.
AWS has quietly retired its private 5G offering, due to challenges posed by limited spectrum availability and reliance on third-party hardware. But I wonder if it’s also because AWS doesn’t want to compete directly with carriers? We saw the same thing with Microsoft pulling back on Azure for Operators. Maybe because there's really not a big market for private 5G, contrary to everyone's hopes and dreams. Or maybe it's because hyperscalers want to make it clear they aren’t competing with the telcos. Only time will tell...
Spain had its second major mobile outage in two months, leaving millions with no phone or internet access thanks to a botched Telefónica network update in the early hours of Tuesday, May 20. The outage disrupted calls, texts, and mobile data access across all major cities. By the early afternoon, Telefónica had restored communications. After the big April power outage that took down the network, I bet everyone thought, “Thank God this doesn’t happen all the time!” And then it happened again. Hot tip: set up backup in the public cloud with Totogi's Charging-as-a-Service so you never miss a beat. Resolve the issues in your network, then roll back to your legacy ways once it's fixed. If we can do it in war-torn Sudan, we can do it for you.
OpenAI started rolling out a research preview of Codex, an AI coding agent embedded in ChatGPT. Driven by the new codex-1 variant of the o3 reasoning model, Codex produces “cleaner” code, rigorously follows instructions, and repeatedly runs its own tests until they pass. It can write features, fix bugs, answer code-base questions, and run tests while users continue working. Guess my Stanford CS degree is becoming obsolete by the day…
A few days later, Anthropic claimed IT had the best models for coding when it released two new AI models, Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4. Both are specifically tuned for programming tasks. Anthropic says the new models are among the industry’s best performers on popular benchmarks, beating Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI’s o3 and GPT-4.1 on SWE-bench Verified, which evaluates coding abilities. The war to own the best AI for programming is ON.
The LLM business is a TOUGH business. It must suck to pour billions into your product only to have your competitor come out with something better almost immediately. Table stakes for AI right now is the Martingale strategy: you have to keep doubling your bet to stay in the game. It costs billions and you’re competing against some of the best minds in the world all while risking one, huge, devastating loss. Imagine if you had to do this to stay relevant in telco? Hard pass...
A new McKinsey report says that AI infrastructure is a new growth avenue for telcos, and suggests that operators host, connect, and power the data-center and GPU infrastructure enterprises need. Telcos doing GPUaaS? 🙄 The operators have NO SHOT at pulling this off, especially since they'll be competing against the hyperscalers. Can’t wait to revisit how this worked out five years from now. Anyone dumb enough to burn money like this will be completely crushed by the hyperscalers.
Telecom’s workforce is shrinking dramatically, with the combined total employees of eight major US telcos dropping from 766,300 in 2019 to 624,690 by end of 2024, led by AT&T cutting nearly 107,000 workers and Verizon reducing staff by over 35,000. Five of the eight companies saw revenue increases during this period. Efficiency efforts, including automation and AI implementations, look like the primary drivers. The trend will accelerate as AI improves, despite leaders’ claims that AI will augment rather than replace human workers. For my thoughts on this, see my blog this week!
AI is one of the few lifelines left for telcos looking to grow beyond commodity connectivity. That’s according to Usman Javaid, the Chief Product and Marketing Officer for Orange business. Sounds like Orange is exploring multiple avenues to make AI work, and while I don’t see the same opportunities in all of them, I applaud the willingness to try different applications. The key to figuring new revenue models for your telco is to start using AI everywhere internally first. By experiencing the capabilities every day in every role (including yours, execs!), you and your team will get great ideas on how to impact your business. Give it a try.
... and for something fun because I really do enjoy Iain Morris, but why does he always write such bleak, Orwellian openings for his articles, like is AI in telecom really a path to dull dystopia? He should know that the only way AI becomes useful is with expert humans guiding and giving it context. (We haven't reached AGI yet!) For fun, I decided to create a prompt for Iain to speed up his writing process and craft the intro for his next article. Copy paste this into your favorite LLM to channel Iain's style, and see what a depressing start you can write for your next missive, too. Here it is...
Prompt for AI:
“Write a short opening paragraph in Iain Morris/Light Reading style: Using historical or well known sci-fi movie plots, write two-sentences painting a dystopian outcome of [TOPIC] adoption. Include British wit and casual mentions of apocalyptic outcomes. Then segue into the telecom industry news article about [TOPIC]."
