The telecom power shift no one is ready for: Why owning the network no longer means owning the market

March 3, 2026

Isabelle Paradis, President and Founder, HOT TELECOM; GTWN International Board Member

Telecom has long told itself a reassuring story about how power works. Networks are hard to build, expensive to operate, and foundational to the digital economy, so those who own and run them should naturally occupy a position of long-term strategic advantage. That logic has held true often enough in the past to feel permanent. It no longer is.

This is not because networks have become unimportant. It is because high-quality connectivity has become widespread enough to no longer determine who controls markets, defines customer relationships, or shapes ecosystem behaviour. The industry broadly recognises this shift in theory, but it has not yet absorbed what it means in practice.

Engineering excellence is no longer enough

From a technical standpoint, modern telecom networks are highly capable. Reliability, coverage, and performance levels that once differentiated leaders are now widely expected. Continuous improvement in automation, latency, and resilience reflects genuine engineering success.

The problem is that convergence changes where value sits. When network quality becomes a baseline, incremental improvements rarely translate into pricing power or strategic leverage. Yet, much of the industry still behaves as though further optimisation will restore relevance on its own. In most cases, it will not.

Value has moved away from the network layer itself and toward how connectivity is combined with identity, security, policy, billing, analytics, and increasingly AI-driven decision layers. What matters now is not simply performance, but who controls how services interact and decisions are made.

AI accelerates this dynamic. As optimisation and decision-making become more automated, differentiation depends less on the network and more on who governs the data, constraints, and logic surrounding it. Connectivity remains essential, but it increasingly operates as an input into intelligence applied elsewhere.

Orchestration is about power, not process

Telecom often treats orchestration as an operational concern, focused on workflow automation or resource allocation. That view is too narrow to explain what is now happening.

In multi-party environments, orchestration is fundamentally about designing the rules of interaction between networks, platforms, partners, and customers. It determines how capabilities are exposed, how dependencies form, and how value flows across the system.

Those who occupy this position shape behaviour without needing to own the underlying assets.

AI makes this explicit. Models do not create power on their own. Power sits with whoever decides what data they can access, which network capabilities they can invoke, how identity and policy are enforced, and how outcomes are priced or constrained. These are system design decisions, not technical ones. As AI becomes embedded across enterprise connectivity, fraud detection, service assurance, and customer experience, the orchestrator increasingly determines who captures value. Those who control how AI interacts with networks shape the system. Those who merely supply connectivity support it.

From infrastructure ownership to system positioning

This is where the conversation needs to change. The challenge facing operators is no longer a lack of technology. The necessary platforms, APIs, cloud infrastructure, identity layers, AI tooling, and network capabilities already exist. The problem is that system-level decisions about how these elements interact are rarely owned clearly or made deliberately.

Telecom organisations were built for control and functional optimisation in a vertically integrated world. System positioning requires something different: explicit trade-offs across technology, commercial strategy, partnerships, regulation, and increasingly AI-driven decision layers. When those decisions are fragmented, they do not disappear. They are simply made implicitly, often by external platforms.

System positioning means deciding, deliberately and visibly, where the operator intends to be central, where it is prepared to be interchangeable, and where it is willing to accept dependency. It is about choosing which interfaces matter, which decisions must remain operator-influenced, and which capabilities are exposed by design rather than by default.

Operators that remain relevant will be those that decide where they want to shape interaction rather than simply participate in it. What matters is not the specific choice, but that the choice is intentional. Avoiding these decisions allows others to define the system first.

From insight to action: what operators must do now

If orchestration is now a question of power, then it can no longer be treated as a technical capability delegated to architecture or operations teams. It must become a core leadership responsibility, with explicit ownership and visible authority.

The first step is organisational. Operators need a clearly mandated system owner with responsibility that cuts across network, data, AI, commercial strategy, partnerships, and policy. As long as these decisions are split across functions, system design will remain accidental rather than intentional.

Second, operators must make their system positioning explicit. That means deciding, deliberately and visibly, where they intend to be non-substitutable. Which interfaces do they insist on controlling. Which decisions must never be fully abstracted away from the operator. And where they are prepared to accept being an interchangeable input because it serves a larger strategic goal. These choices already exist in practice. The difference is whether they are made consciously or by default.

Third, operators must take control of how AI interacts with their networks. Not by building generic AI capabilities, but by defining the rules under which AI-driven systems can access data, invoke network functions, enforce policy, and monetise outcomes. If operators do not define these boundaries themselves, platforms and aggregators will do it for them.

Fourth, system design decisions must be elevated to the same strategic level as network investment decisions. Capital allocation without system intent increasingly leads to stranded value. Building excellent infrastructure is no longer enough if others decide how that infrastructure is consumed, priced, and branded.

Finally, operators must stop treating dependence as failure and start treating unmanaged dependence as the real risk. Participation in ecosystems is inevitable. Irrelevance is not.

The real decision facing the industry

Telecom has already built much of the infrastructure on which future digital systems depend. The platforms forming above those networks are evolving quickly, increasingly shaped by AI-driven decision layers and cross-industry ecosystems. The unresolved question is not whether this shift will continue. It will.

The question is whether operators will position themselves as system shapers, or accept a role as high-quality suppliers inside systems designed by others.

That outcome will not be determined by technology adoption, vendor selection, or automation maturity. It will be determined by whether operators are willing to take ownership of system design as a leadership discipline, and to make explicit choices about where power should and should not sit.

The opportunity to shape the system still exists, but delay is already eroding it. Power, once ceded, rarely returns.

* AI has been used to support the editing of this article

Isabelle is President and Founder of HOT TELECOM, one of the most innovative and creative telecom research and consulting companies in the industry. HOT TELECOM has been supporting operators and vendors on a global basis for over 20 years, more particularly on the subjects of International and wholesale. More recently, Isabelle has been working with many of the world’s telecom service providers to help them define their transformation strategy and has written multiple articles and speaks at conferences on this topic.

She is also passionate about encouraging the involvement of women and young people in technology and science and conducts multiple panels and interview on the topic globally. She is a member of the Youth and Women Entrepreneurship ESBN taskforce, which is a working group created by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for the Asia Pacific (ESCAP), a member of the PTC Board of Governors and a member of the board of the Global Telecom Women’s Network.

She is also the founder of the Inclusion hub, which aims to encourage the participation of young people in the telecom industry.

Isabelle holds a Bachelor degree in Engineering, an MBA in Finance and has over 30 years experience working globally.