For some, access-agnostic services have been the holy grail of telecoms. Why can’t we get there?
Last week, TelcoForge ran the first of our monthly Leaders’ Meetings, an opportunity for senior professionals – mainly C-levels and SVPs – to discuss issues that matter to them in a confidential environment.
The aim of these meetings is to provide them with a place to say things they just can’t discuss in a public setting, while TelcoForge can report the points raised and issues to you all so that you know where the priorities and stumbling-blocks lie. The only thing we can’t do is attribute any of the comments to specific people or companies.
In the course of two meetings (to cover all time zones), we brought together around a dozen professionals from Asia, Europe and America. Between their current roles and their experience, they represented a huge diversity of perspectives: operator, government, industry body, device maker, infrastructure, satellite, IoT and end-user industries.
The themes of future meetings will vary, but to begin with, we asked a question which would impact everyone involved: What would need to happen for telecoms to become truly access-agnostic?
This is an old idea – there were conferences about “fixed-mobile convergence” around the turn of the millennium. 6G is revisiting this with its “network of networks” concept, where the fundamental idea is that services should just work wherever you happen to be thanks to traffic being routed through cellular, Wi-Fi, satellite or, in some conceptions, even mesh networking. So… what’s stopping it, and is there a market?
We’ll be producing a more comprehensive set of notes from the two hours of conversation, but here are a few highlights to digest.
“Access-agnostic telecoms” is not one thing
An end-user doesn’t care about the underlying technology delivering the service, so long as it’s delivered. If that means roaming across different providers’ networks, so be it. This is a user-centric or service-centric perspective; eSIM and WhatsApp were held up as existing examples.
Within an individual telecoms provider, it may look rather different, for example, changing to run unified fixed, mobile and other telecoms services for their own customers on a common physical and logical network behind the access point. That physical and logical network could be a shared resource and is increasingly tending to be. This network-centric approach can be seen in many former incumbents.
2. It’s not about the technology
In 2024, NATO ran a successful exercise called DiBaX, the Digital Backbone Experiment, which delivered services for multiple nations and multiple cellular and satellite access networks on a shared NATO core.
“Technology-wise, I don’t think it was anything revolutionary, but it was just a different way of looking and tackling the problem,” one of the participants commented.
3. Commercial risk is overwhelmingly at play
While objectively there may be an awareness of the pressure to build new business models, which we saw very clearly in MWC 2024’s focus on finding opportunities from APIs, AI and enterprise services, the downside is that it would risk letting go of established revenues.
“Carriers are already burdened with massive debt,” one participant noted. “They’re not going to invest in something that disrupts their revenue streams unless the case is crystal clear.”
This risk aversion is understandable. However, a 2024 survey of CEOs within and beyond the telecoms sector underscored an awareness and willingness to take risks, as change is taking place so fast today that companies can disrupt themselves or be disrupted.
4. There is a coordination problem
WhatsApp and eSIM have pointed the way towards access-agnostic services and devices, so there is clearly demand and, therefore, business models. However, even if that business case can be made, an important challenge remains.
“The issue isn’t the tech; it’s getting operators to work together.”
If only one player a market opens their network assets up to seamless roaming it gives their competitors better coverage and better user experience without being reciprocated. There is a first-mover disadvantage.
As a result, providers would need to coordinate on making the change, and this is a point where an external party would need to get involved – typically government or regulators. Without some kind of trusted coordination body within a country, especially one which can help align and incentivise public and private goals, movement would be extremely difficult.
5. The spectrum debates around 5G and 6G may help
It is increasingly becoming canonical that new approaches to spectrum sharing and flexibility in the allocation or use of available spectrum will be needed, both within countries and internationally. On the radio level, that means a requirement for much greater flexibility in the device and the access point.
“One of the big discussions in 6G is the idea of versatile devices. So you come out on day one with the ability to configure a RedCap device, XR device, any MBB device… Marry that to AI/ML and maybe, just maybe, you get back to differentiation possibilities where you’ve got a different radio and a different technology working when you’re in the subway versus when you’re walking down the street.”
TelcoForge will produce a fuller report on the meeting this month to provide much richer insights into the industry’s dynamics that pulling on such a simple thread reveals, along with recommendations for next steps.
Image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
