At the 2025 Twimbit Telecom Awards, industry leaders gathered not just to celebrate progress, but to face a hard truth: Telcos are at a turning point.

For years, telecom operators built and operated the digital foundations that made the internet possible. But as cloud and digital natives continue to build shiny new buildings on top of the digital estate, telcos mostly stuck to traditional roles — like maintaining the lawn. The result? Revenues have remained stagnant despite increased CAPEX spending and rising data traffic and consumption.

Traffic Is Soaring, Revenue Is Not

Over the past decade, mobile data traffic has grown by over 60% per year, fuelled by smartphones, video streaming, social media, and more recently, generative AI. But in the same time, global telecom revenue has barely moved — growing just 1% per year.

And the outlook isn’t much better:

• Mobile data usage is projected to grow nearly 20% annually through 2027.

• Yet telecom revenue growth is expected to fall from 2.5% (2023–25) to just 2.2% (2025–27).

• Compared to other sectors like IT security services (8.5%), media (7.5%), and banking (6.9%), telcos are clearly lagging behind.

• Core services like SMS and voice have been entirely replaced by free apps. And new growth is going to cloud, tech, and AI players instead.

Telcos are essentially building faster, bigger roads — but they’re not capturing the value of the traffic riding on them.

Connectivity Alone Isn’t Enough Anymore

Telcos hold a powerful asset in the internet economy value chain: the network. And today’s networks can be more than pipes — they can become platforms that combine connectivity and compute, particularly at the edge, where data is generated and needs to be processed fast.

With the rise of Gen AI, large language models (LLMs), and real-time applications, we are entering a new era where algorithms move to the data, not the other way around. This is a major shift from centralized computing toward edge-based computing.

Real-time call summarization, instant video generation and personalized AR/VR experiences all rely on low-latency, high-compute environments that only a smart, distributed network can provide.

By 2025, 75% of enterprise data will be created and processed at the edge — up from just 10% in 2018. Telcos are uniquely positioned to meet this demand.

Ronnie Vasishta, SVP of Telecom at NVIDIA, put it simply in his keynote: “Networks must evolve from single-purpose to multi-purpose.” That means no longer just moving data from one point to another. Instead, networks must combine connectivity with computing power, becoming smart, dynamic networks that can adapt to what users and businesses actually need.

Empowering Mobile Edge Generation

To make this real, telcos need to turn their base stations and edge sites into mini data centers, a model referred to as Mobile Edge Generation (MEG) — representing a shift from static connectivity infrastructure to localized, compute-enabled platforms.

With Gen AI becoming more demanding, and LLMs requiring increasingly complex inference, telcos can reduce latency, improve privacy, and offer real-time responsiveness by hosting and running AI workloads at the edge.

Smaller models, when given more compute time during inference, can outperform larger models. That means inferencing — not just training — is becoming compute-intensive, and edge inferencing will be critical for delivering high-quality, real-time AI.

For businesses, this opens a door: offload your GenAI workloads to telcos, and get real-time performance without building your own infrastructure. For telcos, this means a new high-value product — GenAI at the Edge.

A New Kind of Orchestration

Another big play lies in orchestration — helping enterprises manage their AI and cloud traffic more intelligently.

As AI workloads move into the cloud, organizations want more control. They want to:

• Avoid massive egress fees (estimated at $70–80B/year)

• Route sensitive data to comply with national laws

• Automatically scale network capacity for latency-sensitive AI tasks

Telcos can offer intelligent network services — a layer that sits between the enterprise and the cloud, optimizing performance, compliance, and cost.

Companies like Lumen and BT are already moving in this direction:

• Lumen’s ExaSwitch gives customers a self-service way to connect their own edge locations and control traffic flow.

• BT’s all-in-one networking and security platform helps businesses gain visibility and reduce risk while moving to the cloud.

It’s early days for this next generation of software-defined networks (SDNs), but the signal is clear: telcos can no longer afford to be just the middlemen.

Why 5G Might Be the Last “G”

Another sign of this shift? We may never see a 6G as we knew past network generations.

The jump from 4G to 5G promised a lot, but for many users, it didn’t feel that different. That’s because faster speeds alone don’t create value — the use cases do. What we need now isn’t a new G, but a new mindset.

Think continuous improvement over one-time upgrades. Think software-defined, not hardware-bound. Think AI at the core, not just at the edge.

Orange Group’s CTO Bruno Zerbib said it well: “We are no longer just a connectivity provider. We are transforming into a platform company.”

Act Now, or Be Left Behind

Telcos don’t have the luxury of waiting. With AI, edge computing, and cloud reshaping how the world works, inaction is the biggest risk.

The silver lining? Telcos already have the assets. They’re trusted. They’re distributed. And they sit in the perfect place — between the user and the cloud.

What’s needed now is action:

• Build AI-ready infrastructure

• Partner with the AI ecosystem to deliver outcomes

• Listen to what enterprises need

• Move fast, learn fast, and adapt faster

Because the networks of the future won’t just carry data — they’ll enable decisions, orchestrate intelligence and power the future economy.

And this time, telcos can lead the way.

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