The Amazon Web Services (AWS) region in Spain didn’t go down in the recent outage on the Iberian Peninsula, but lots of telcos suffered slowdowns, including Telefónica, MasOrange, Finetwork, Vodafone Spain, Altice and NOS in Portugal… even WhatsApp. Desperate subscribers turned to Starlink to access the internet. If you couldn’t activate your disaster recovery system because it was offline, then what good is it? Invest in a pure public cloud system (like Totogi for charging) and never miss a beat again.
Agentic AI can do a lot for telcos, as Appledore Research lays out in The Role of Agentic AI in Telecommunications. The report explores how autonomous agents can significantly improve efficiency, customer service, and network performance. Even modest investments can yield substantial returns. I couldn’t agree more! Give a listen to my recent podcast, AI agents are transforming telco, with Microsoft’s Kevin Shatzkamer, or read Totogi’s whitepaper with Appledore Research’s John Abraham, GenAI for BSS systems. And then when you’re ready to start, check out Totogi’s BSS Magic, an AI agent-powered solution ready to connect to any system to add AI to your BSS estate.
AWS has built an AI agent that can support DOCSIS 4.0 deployments. The specialized agent can synthesize extensive DOCSIS-specific knowledge, offering relevant guidance on complex network tasks like capacity forecasting, maintenance, and troubleshooting. AWS’s approach uses both generative and agentic AI to create a virtual team of specialists to help operators manage and optimize increasingly smart networks. Pair it with BSS Magic and you’ll be able to optimize customer-facing processes, too. All we’re missing is the OSS piece… is that next?
AWS has launched its second-generation Outposts racks, bringing edge-ready, x86-powered M7i, C7i, and R7i EC2 instances to on-premises sites. The new hardware doubles vCPU, memory, and network bandwidth—and boosts performance by up to 40% over the first-gen C5/M5/R5-based racks. AWS also announced an accelerated-networking instance class aimed at ultra-low-latency, high-throughput workloads such as financial-exchange trading engines, 5G cores, and media distribution. Want to know more? Coming up on the Telco in 20 podcast, we talk to Dr. Ishwar Parulkar, Chief Technologist for Telecom at AWS, about using Outposts for network workloads, like they’re doing with O2 Telefónica Germany. Catch that episode on May 27.
Artificial intelligence and AI agents are changing how work gets done, and by extension, the workplace. Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index suggests we’ll begin to see a few changes starting this year, including “frontier firms,” that let agents handle end-to-end processes autonomously across a wide variety of functions. The report’s author also proposes that we’ll move from organizing companies around PEOPLE, or ORG charts, to organizing around the actual WORK that needs to be done, or WORK charts. It's a great read —check it out!
Are UK organizations really reassessing their reliance on US-based public clouds? Short answer: NO. New national rules—the Telecommunications (Security) Act 2021 and a forthcoming Cyber Security and Resilience Bill—will require critical data and systems to be on-shore. But with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud all hosting regions in the UK, it won't be an issue to use the public cloud. Sounds like fearmongering to me.
Want to build some agents? Check out Anthropic’s Claude Code, a new command-line tool for agentic coding. It’s a flexible, low-level tool that integrates the Claude large language model (LLM) into coding workflows without enforcing strict structures. You're still missing the connection to enterprise data and an ontology (you'll have to add that to your agents), but it's a good start. Want to jump to the head of the class? Don't forget you can build a BSS AI agent for free with Totogi!
Totogi got another shout-out for our work with Zain Sudan last year, restoring service to the operator amidst civil unrest. We migrated Zain’s core services to Charging-as-a-Service in just 18 days, restoring connectivity for more than 20 million subscribers. The shift cut Zain’s outage losses (≈$12 million per week), generated nearly $100 million in fresh revenue, trimmed total cost of ownership by 76%, and slashed carbon emissions by 96%. We also wrote a case study about this great project. Go Totogi!
I’m featured in Southern Africa Wireless Communications this month, talking about how the public cloud and software as a service (SaaS) apps are creating new possibilities for African MVNOs and the operators who host them. Find the article, The MVNO moment: rewriting the connectivity playbook, on page 17.
TM Forum’s DTW Ignite 2025 is coming up, June 17-19 in Copenhagen. This year’s theme is Pathways to Growth, with three focus areas: composable IT and ecosystems, autonomous networks, and AI and data innovation. More than 130 speakers will join over 400 industry professionals for demos, Catalysts, hackathons, masterclasses, and interactive “Solutions Room” sessions, all aimed at turning strategy into growth. Should be exciting! Team Totogi is going to the show, doing a Catalyst project, and hosting an AI dinner. Want to be part of the dinner conversation? DM me on LinkedIn or X for an invite.
Telcos & AI is the latest DSP Leaders Report from TelecomTV. It distills feedback from 200+ telco professionals surveyed worldwide about how they see AI reshaping our business, including what we collectively think about AI’s impact on operations, revenues, efficiencies, energy consumption, partnerships, and more, both now and in the future. Biggest surprise: only 52% of respondents think AI offers major new opportunities to generate revenue. People, didn’t you hear that Totogi made an AI-powered money machine?
In the "uh-oh" category, Verizon reported losing an unprecedented number of subscribers in its earnings report. The operator says it’s related to “pressure from federal government accounts,” i.e. losing a lot of them via the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But is it? Or maybe people are leaving in droves because of the heinous new website colors. I don’t know what consultant advised that red and yellow were a good idea, but probably the same one who said to go with an on-prem private cloud. D'oh! 😘
