TelcoForge caught up with Pete Koat, CEO of AxyomCore, at MWC 26 in Barcelona to discuss the company’s strategy and approach to 4G, 5G, and the path towards 6G.
In this interview, Koat addresses topics such as 5G Advanced and 6G, MVNOs, converged core, and new solutions. Watch the video below or read the transcript!
Alex Lawrence: We’ve been hearing a lot about indoor wireless and private networks. Why do you think these are gaining such traction right now?
Pete Koat: This traction behind indoor coverage and private networks isn’t just about bars on a phone; it’s about data sovereignty and the industrialisation of AI. I see three primary drivers for this trend.
The first being the indoor-first reality of 5G and 5G Advanced. Most high-frequency spectrum, like millimetre wavelengths, struggle to penetrate modern energy-efficient building materials.
Since roughly 80% of mobile data traffic is generated indoors, the industry is moving away from the outside-in macro cell model to support this IQ era, where every device has an AI agent. At that point, we really need dedicated indoor infrastructure like small cells to ensure the high-throughput, low-latency pipe that all these agents require.
The second item is the rise of physical AI and robotics. In AxyomCore’s context, we’re seeing several factories and warehouses move from simple automation to embodied AI. You can’t run a fleet of autonomous mobile robots on public Wi-Fi or a congested macro network. Private 5G networks provide deterministic low latency—what we see in the standard as Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC).
This provides a guaranteed response time for safety-critical robotics. Similarly, with the advancements in RedCap (Reduced Capability), we have the ability to connect thousands of sensors per square kilometre in massive IoT applications without signal dropouts.
Finally, data sovereignty and security. With the move towards edge computing, enterprises want their sensitive AI training data to stay on-prem. A private network acts as a walled garden, allowing a company to keep its proprietary data off public networks, reducing attack vectors and maintaining total control over network slicing and priority traffic.
Alex Lawrence: Can you tell us a bit more about the network extender that you’ve exhibited at MWC?
Pete Koat: The network extender we’ve showcased this year is a significant leap forward from traditional small cell solutions. It has industry-leading performance in terms of coverage—supporting 3,100 square feet—and just shy of one terabit per second throughput.
These figures translate into real cost savings for operators, as they can use fewer cells to support the same loads, simplifying operational requirements. Once plugged in, it performs a real-time spectral analysis of the surrounding macro environment and automatically adjusts its gain and filtering to prevent interference with the outdoor network, effectively healing the indoor coverage gap without requiring a technician to turn a single dial.
Alex Lawrence: So you talked about accommodating 4G and 5G on your core. What is a converged core, and what are the benefits?
Pete Koat: A converged core is a platform that can support 4G, 5G, 5G Advanced, and the upcoming 6G within a single, unified ecosystem. In the past, you might have had to modify a data plan in the HSS for one technology and then do it again as you transitioned to 5G. In a converged core, you modify that setting once; it’s a one-time event for the engineers, which brings a lot of efficiency.
Furthermore, with a stateless architecture, if there’s a massive spike—such as millions of IoT devices coming online—the platform can dynamically scale specific microservices without scaling up the entire ecosystem. We use exactly the same core software for private applications, like emergency services, as we do for major Tier One operators servicing millions of customers.
Alex Lawrence: You probably get asked this all the time, but just how scalable is your core?
Pete Koat: That’s a fair question. As an industry, we’ve evolved from measuring scale by simultaneous subscribers to the ability to dynamically evolve the platform to adjust to various load impacts.
If a million IoT devices spool up in a fraction of a second, causing a signalling storm, you need a microservices architecture that can scale and handle that load. In a converged environment, one single platform services 3G, 4G, 5G, 5G Advanced, and 6G.
This future-proofs the platform; you don’t have to change policies every time a subscriber changes access technology. As the population transitions to 5G assets, those same resources can be reallocated to the new generation seamlessly within the same platform.
Alex Lawrence: You work a lot with MVNOs. They don’t have the same support requirements as a big player like Telefonica or O2. How does that change the way that you relate to them and the kind of support that they require from you?
Pete Koat: That’s a perceptive observation. For MVNOs, especially light or thin MVNOs, the relationship shifts from being a component supplier to a solution provider. Since they don’t have Telefonica-sized engineering teams, we act as a technical shield.
Tier ones have departments for regulatory compliance and roaming; for an MVNO, that’s a massive overhead. We treat compliance as a feature. Our core is designed to automatically handle local data residency requirements and complex multi-operator roaming logic out of the box.
Secondly, while support for a tier one is often about break-fix at a massive scale, with an MVNO it’s about co-innovation. We act as their virtual CTO. We don’t just sell them a core; we sell them autonomy. Our goal is to make a ten-person MVNO team feel like they have the technical IQ of a tier one carrier, allowing them to outmanoeuvre the giants because their infrastructure is more agile.
Alex Lawrence: If MVNOs are making this transition from being a thin MVNO to a thicker one, are you able to respond to that and support that as they’re going?
Pete Koat: AxyomCore addresses this journey with cloud-native scalability—offering a low entry but a high ceiling. The biggest hurdle for a thin MVNO moving to thick is the massive CapEx of traditional core hardware.
AxyomCore removes this barrier with a microservices architecture that lets them start small, deploying only the necessary network functions, such as a gateway or HSS, as software containers, and grow over time.
Secondly, the converged core provides futureproofing. Many MVNOs get stuck in thin models because their host MNOs make 5G integration difficult. AxyomCore provides a unified software stack for 4G (EPC) and 5G (SA and NSA), allowing them to take control of data session management today and transition to 5G without a second migration.
Finally, moving to a thick model is about owning the customer experience. AxyomCore enables this through policy control.
Instead of using rigid host MNO data buckets, a thick MVNO can create custom zero-rated apps, gaming tiers, or real-time parental controls. They can even use our platform for network slicing to act as an MVNE or carve out virtual slices for high-value enterprise clients.
