Talk about Dead Vendor Walking. Optiva Inc.($OPT.TO), the legacy BSS company, recently announced a support agreement with holders of 85% of their outstanding senior secured notes to avoid defaulting on $113.8 million that was due July 20, 2025. Net net: the company has 45 days to figure out how to survive. When companies face financial restructuring, it’s brutal for everyone involved. Customers start wondering if their systems will be supported. Active projects stall out. And the talent? The best people jump ship, leaving the company scrambling to deliver on existing commitments. These events typically accelerate migration decisions by 6-12 months as customers seek stability, creating a 30-40% customer churn rate. Are you an Optiva customer wondering what to do next? See how Totogi can quickly swap you to the vendor of your choice (ANY VENDOR, BSS or CHARGING!). Contact me to discuss your options before it's too late. ✨
Remember when SoftBank sold its entire $3.6 billion NVIDIA stake back in January 2019? Well, if it’d just held on, that investment would be worth $160 billion today—a staggering 44x return that’s actually larger than SoftBank’s entire current market cap of $111 billion. Talk about timing the market wrong. This was right before the AI boom exploded and NVIDIA became the darling of Wall Street. While Masayoshi Son was busy placing big bets on WeWork and Uber through the Vision Fund—all of which became massive writedowns or total losses—he had the ultimate AI winner sitting in his portfolio and decided to cash out. Ouch!
EchoStar is reportedly exploring a possible combination of struggling Boost Mobile with MobileX, the MVNO run by original Boost founder (and Telco in 20 podcast guest) Peter Adderton. Translation: EchoStar CEO Charlie Ergen needs a lifeline. Boost has hemorrhaged 2 million subscribers ( 9 million in 2020; 7 million today), the FCC is breathing down its neck about spectrum obligations, and its contemplating bankruptcy. Bringing back Adderton would be admitting DISH completely botched what was once a successful urban prepaid brand—something Adderton has been saying for years. The fact the company is even considering the move shows how badly DISH misread the prepaid market. It was never about infrastructure; it was about brand and customer experience. This potential deal screams “maybe the original founder can save us.” Peter denied it on X, but we’ll keep our 👀 on this story.
T-Mobile just went nationwide with T-Satellite, its Starlink-powered direct-to-device service, and once again we see Elon circling the telco industry. T-Mobile is so confident that the service, which uses Starlink’s low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites, it’s offering it to customers of every other carrier for $10/month. (Talk about first-mover advantage.) Meanwhile, AT&T and Verizon are stuck waiting for AST SpaceMobile’s teeny-tiny five-satellite constellation, while Elon’s got 650+ birds in the sky. By offering service to competitor customers, T-Mobile is essentially using AT&T and Verizon subscribers to subsidize its Starlink partnership costs. Will this force AT&T and Verizon to abandon AST SpaceMobile for Starlink deals of their own? 🧐
Italian mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) CoopVoce just ditched TIM for Vodafone in Italy, and it’s a perfect reminder that MVNOs are customers, too. Network operators spend billions chasing individual subscribers while sometimes treating their wholesale MVNO partners like afterthoughts. Bad idea. We've seen this happen before: Lycamobile left EE for Three, Tesco Mobile switched from O2 to Three. Each time, millions of customers moved overnight. The irony is that operators spend $200-400 per direct customer acquisition while MVNO deals can bring over a million customers for the cost of a wholesale agreement. Every MVNO that switches networks takes its subscriber base along—leading to an instant customer loss and revenue hit. Smart operators understand that MVNOs can bring millions of connections in a single, high-margin contract. Provide better wholesale terms, superior network performance, and a strong relationship with the MVNO, and you win their subscribers without the customer-acquisition cost. The lesson? Stop seeing MVNOs as competition and start seeing them as distribution partners. When MVNOs are happy with your network experience, they become your sales force. When they’re not, they take their subscribers to your competitor.
Here’s another MVNO self-own: Remember when Verizon put contractual caps on how many business mobile lines Comcast and Charter could sell? That “protective” strategy just spectacularly backfired. T-Mobile swooped in and offered the cable companies what Verizon wouldn’t: “unrestricted access to the very businesses Verizon considered its core” via a new MVNO deal. T-Mobile made this move because it couldn’t compete head-to-head with Verizon’s dominant business sales machine, so it weaponized the cable companies’ existing SMB relationships as a shortcut to market. Now Charter and Comcast can attack Verizon’s most profitable segment, creating a super-competitor. Classic own-goal. Brutal! 🤦🏻♀️
Amazon Web Services (AWS) just dropped Kiro, a new AI coding integrated development environment (IDE), and it’s not just another GitHub Copilot competitor. It’s AWS’s play for the end-to-end developer experience. While Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot and Google’s Duet AI help you write code, Kiro integrates directly into the entire AWS ecosystem, from prototyping to production deployment. Kiro also creates technical docs, diagrams, and deployment plans that naturally funnel you deeper into AWS infrastructure—genius. For telcos building on AWS, this could be game-changing. Imagine AI agents that write your network automation scripts AND automatically configure the underlying AWS services to run them. This isn’t about coding faster; it's about making AWS so integrated into your development workflow it accelerates your innovation. Super cool!
While the major carriers spend millions on advertising about having the “best nationwide coverage,” Vermont engineer and regular guy Patrick Schlott is out there solving their coverage problem. He realized there was no cell service for 10 miles in either direction around his rural community and decided to do something about it—by installing free pay phones using old technology that actually works. Over 500,000 square miles in the US have no cellular coverage—that's nearly twice the size of Texas. Carriers spend billions on 5G in cities while ignoring these rural dead zones entirely. Truth is, it’s not economically viable for carriers to serve these areas. Rural towers cost 3-5x more to build and serve 90% fewer customers. If you want to check coverage at a hyperlocal level in the US, check out the Goji app! You can check routes, compare plans, and even swap to new providers. Give it a try! (Disclaimer: TelcoDR is an investor in Goji.)
