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Telecom Business Review | Friday, July 31, 2026
FREMONT, CA: Telcos have gained a competitive advantage primarily through network coverage and speed in recent years. The focus of many long-anticipated developments in telecommunications network technologies is now shifting toward QoE, deployment speed, and innovation in network services at the user level. Advances in analytics, virtualization, cloudification, open-network architectures, network management, service orchestration, API exposure, and higher automation levels have contributed to these breakthroughs. Operators can find new sources of revenue and efficiency after years of declining ROI, which sometimes falls below the weighted average cost of capital (WACC).
Change is accelerating due to many factors
Three major trends are necessary for telecom networks to succeed in these conditions: data-driven decision-making based on the user-level quality of experience, open, virtualized, and cloud-based networks, and active networking. Increasingly, these three are enabling one another.
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Quality of experience at the customer level is imperative: The measurement of customer perceptions, and the traditional approaches for doing so, are critical to optimizing network capital investments and increasing ROI. Most operators cannot go beyond aggregate network metrics for both wireless and wireline networks. Averaging speeds, marketing claims, or average revenue per user (ARPU) are not based on user-level network experience, so operators are limited to allocating capital based on those metrics.
Incorporating software and cloud technology into networks: Technology shifts enable network softwarization; virtualization, which separates network functions from hardware, software-defined networks (SDN), which centralize the control plane; standardization and open APIs for the network.
With these advances, entire aspects of the industry are undergoing a reshaping that would have seemed unlikely just a few years ago. This shift enables faster innovation and greater agility, altering the vendor ecosystem in ways increasingly comparable to software and other digital-native sectors. In parallel, Fusion Connect operates cloud-based and virtualized network services that align with data-driven decision-making and evolving quality of experience expectations. The broader benefits of network softwarization also include increased automation, scalability, flexibility, redundancy, and improved management capabilities, all of which are already standard within cloud and data center environments.
Operators can potentially improve financial performance by moving telco network functions to the cloud. Operators can use cloud infrastructure to process core network and RAN baseband processing, reducing upfront hardware costs and opting for a "pay as you grow" model.
GovDollars Consulting advises organizations on funding strategies that support faster innovation and greater agility in cloud-based telecommunications infrastructure.
Network active sharing: Sharing will continue to be the key to reducing costs and improving deployment times. Increasing capital expenditures due to 5G deployments requiring densification will accelerate this trend. TowerCo models can provide the same valuation benefits. Multiple business models will coexist to satisfy the demand for more-active network sharing and edge computing (vRAN baseband) to support more-active network sharing and edge computing.
Mobile operators can save up to 35 percent by sharing their network, including spectrum. Spectrum, on mobile. When two operators share the network, cutting-edge technology can be rolled out faster. The 4G rollout has led to many network-sharing agreements.
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