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Telco 2031

Decision Time

October 14-15, 2026

London

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About

2026-7 is a pivotal year for telecoms throughout EMEA. Decisions made this year will determine the identity and evolution path for telcos across the region. Decide, or the decision will be made for you.

This two-day executive meeting will feature a wide variety of essential discussions for your business in interactive formats; chances to ‘ask me anything’ with subject experts; interactive discussions; and closed-door group meetings, all under Chatham House Rules.

Join us at Endgame to understand the key choices facing telecoms service providers, the factors driving those choices today, and what they will mean for your opportunities, risk, cost, operations and customer engagement.

Theory is all very well, but execution is better.

“Decision Time: What Would You Do?”

Join in with a facilitated scenario exercise. Through the event groups of attendees will be presented with a fictional but realistic operator profile and situation, and faced with a set of decision points drawn from the conference themes. Your objective will be to offer “The Board” your suggestions for building the best company possible over three-year and five-year time horizons.

Groups have 45 minutes to debate and reach a strategic recommendation for the Board’s way forward.

Day One - 14 October

More details coming soon

2026-7 is going to be a pivotal year in EMEA for many reasons. Between legislation; changing investment pressures and geopolitical outlook; and technical maturity in key areas, decisions made this year will have major repercussions.

Technical sovereignty plans in Europe and the Middle East are creating tensions. Operators are being asked to build sovereign infrastructure while simultaneously relying on global hyperscalers for cloud and AI capabilities. And, while national security is an important consideration, for companies who want to act as international leaders the business positioning becomes problematic. 

The session  explores what “sovereignty” actually means operationally for a telco, what it costs, who pays, and whether the current investment commitments are remotely sufficient.

J.P. Morgan has called 2026 the “year of sector consolidation.” The Vodafone/Three UK merger is complete, MasOrange is operational, the three-way carve-up of Altice France is under way, and the GSMA is lobbying hard for reformed EU merger guidelines. But consumer groups and some regulators are pushing back, arguing that consolidation reduces competition, raises prices, and doesn’t reliably increase investment.

At the same time, the array of service providers has never been more diverse; MVNOs and specialist providers for indoor, enterprise, IoT, satellite, neutral host, shared and private networks are proliferating. Does this hail a structural change in the industry, and if so what does that imply for old models of consolidation?

Networking and drinks

Boosting profits can be done in two ways; by growing revenues or by saving costs. In a time of constrained revenue growth, investing in long-term innovation can be a hard sell to shareholders looking for stable returns. How can CEOs reconcile these different forces?

Much of the conference’s strategic territory  ultimately comes down to what investors will fund and on what terms. This session inverts the usual dynamic by putting the money side of the equation on stage and letting operator executives interrogate them.

This is your chance to put your questions. What return profiles make sense for telco transformation? Is the market pricing in the regulatory tailwinds from legislation? How does investor appetite differ between markets? Where is private equity actually looking?

Major telecoms providers serve two masters: governments who want a well regulated utility; and investors who want returns. Increasingly we are seeing some divergent evolution paths from a similar basis. Where could and should you take your company?

Delicious!

Most of the telecoms industry has focussed on competing based on network quality. However, a small but growing set of service providers threaten to transform the status quo. Are you equipped to respond?

While there are an increasing number of alternative service providers, the core of the industry has maintained the same fundamental business structure for generations. Is it time for a change, and what can we learn from sectors in a similar position? 

Recharge, reflect and reconnect with your peers.

Unless action is taken quickly, the next five years will see some drastic changes in skills availability. Leaders already identify gaps in necessary skills as an essential issue, but the age of many engineers and leaders brings us close to a retirement ‘cliff’. How can we bring through enough new talent, even while cost-cutting?

We end the day surfacing the risks that aren’t being adequately discussed. The obvious risks – revenue decline, regulation, competition – are well-understood. In this session we open up the discussion to those concerns which don’t get enough air-time.

A chance to take in the ideas of the day along with conversation, food and a glass of something interesting.

Day Two - 15 October

More details coming soon

Telecoms regulators have typically had a limited position in the industry, promoting a level of competition and managing spectrum auctions. As competition dynamics change, uncertainty increases and the pace of change accelerates, how can we ensure that regulators have the knowledge and independence to support the health of an industry ecosystem; or, if we can’t, what is their role?

Telecoms is at the mercy of many layers of global monopoly or near-monopoly. In this discussion we examine whether adopting different procurement practices or incentives can change that; and if so, which ones? 

Reflect, refresh and network with your peers

The telecoms industry has a profusion of alliances, associations, standards and industry bodies. However, none of them is in a position today to provide effective telco buyer-power in the way that operators had with GSM. Is it time for current industry bodies to get a make-over, or for some other group to take up the reins?

Delicious delights, engaging conversation.

The B2B segment has experienced growth in recent years, and a few telecoms companies have done well from this refocus. However, it requires the right underlying agility in the technology and the business processes in order to support enterprises affordably and with the speed they need. Out of all the changes possible, where should the focus be?

The majority of telco AI investment today is focused on operational efficiency — network optimisation, automated customer service, predictive maintenance. These are valuable, but they position the operator as an AI consumer, not an AI business. The alternative — building sovereign AI infrastructure, selling GPU-as-a-service, enabling edge AI for enterprise, or co-creating industry-specific AI solutions — requires a fundamentally different capability set and risk appetite. The Nvidia-Nokia $1 billion AI-RAN deal signals that some players are making big bets. Morgan Stanley’s 2026 outlook highlights cyber defence partnerships and sovereign data centres as the most promising AI-driven telco opportunities. This session will make  attendees clearer on which side of the AI value chain they sit on and what that means for capability investment.

Refresh, reflect and network with your peers.

Legislation such as NIS2, the Cyber Resilience Act, and the EU AI Act’s high-risk provisions have fundamentally changed the liability landscape for telecoms operators. CEOs and boards can now be held personally accountable for cybersecurity failures. The SK Telecom data breach and the Red Sea cable cuts, among others, demonstrated that the threat landscape is real and evolving.

So what do operators need to change in their governance, their vendor management, and their incident response? What does “good enough” look like under NIS2? And how do you prepare for threats — particularly AI-powered attacks — that your current team may not understand?

GSMA Open Gateway and the broader network API movement represent one of the most tangible near-term revenue opportunities, but the revenue projections range absurdly from $30 to $300 billion by 2030, and most operators are still in pilot mode.

This session cuts through the hype by examining: Who owns the commercial relationship? What’s the realistic path to scale? And can APIs serve as a Trojan Horse to deeper commercial relationships with enterprises?

As the event rounds out, we look back across the group “Decision Time” discussions, inviting members to synthesise the key outcomes and suggestions and highlight areas of alignment or disagreement in practice.

Given these outcomes, we encourage participants to reflect upon which decisions they face which will look prescient a few years from now, and which will look like missed opportunities.

It’s been a blast, but let’s make sure it’s also practically useful.

Hear From Industry Experts

Jefferson Wang

CSO, Telecoms & Cloud, Accenture

Dave Stehlin

CEO, TIA

Buddy Carter

Congressman

Jay Obernolte

Congressman

Jeff DeCoux

Chair,
Autonomy Institute

David Knight

CEO, Terbine

Stephen Rose

CEO, Render Networks