- Swisscom says control of software and identity now matters as much as the physical line
- Hosting the comms platform itself carries real operating costs for carriers
- The customer is buying continuity, and the supplier is their point of accountability
For years, the promise of a private line was reassuringly physical. You could point to the cable, the exchange and the company responsible for keeping the connection alive and secure. Then software-defined networking moved the decisive parts of the service elsewhere. Egon Steinkasserer, CTO of Swisscom's B2B division, says this raises a new question for carriers and their customers: “Where does this software come from? Who can pull the plug?”
That is a more useful test of sovereignty than the location of a data center, or the logo at the top of a cloud management console. The national carrier can own the access network and still depend on a remote supplier for the software that defines the connection, authenticates its users and applies its security rules. If that supplier can interrupt the service, Swisscom's promise to its customers has a hole in it.
Steinkasserer says the company began hosting its virtual networking infrastructure in its own data centers when it adopted software-defined networking more than a decade ago. As security and SD-WAN converged, it applied the same logic to the SASE fabric, identity and access management, and device controls. “It's very difficult to keep up this sovereignty promise, this control promise, this ‘we can assure that nobody can pull the plug’ promise with a software-as-a-service solution,” he says.
There is a bill attached to giving customers the Swisscom-backed sovereignty that they want. Swisscom must host and operate the platform, train people to run it and find vendors willing to support that model. Steinkasserer is candid that customers face choices about how much of that control they can afford. He also draws a geographical boundary: Swisscom's Italian and Swiss operations have separate legal entities, data centers and platforms. A single seamless claim of sovereignty across very different jurisdictions would be hard to defend.
He also describes the less glamorous machinery behind the promise. Swisscom has rules about which services can run on its premises and which can use cloud infrastructure, and what customers must be told about that distinction. A group function sets the data-governance and security rules; his product team builds within them. Keeping the functions separate is important because “sovereign” can otherwise become a sales adjective painted on top of the architecture after it has already been chosen. A bank outsourcing critical systems needs to know where the control points sit, what happens if a supplier fails and whom it can hold responsible. Swisscom is choosing to carry that responsibility itself.
The network boundary itself has changed. In Swisscom's beem offering, Steinkasserer describes a security perimeter defined by a user, the state of the device and the application, and whether the connection is mobile or fixed. “Now identity is part of our control plane,” he says. That is the point at which an apparently ordinary telecom service becomes a system for deciding who may do what, and under which conditions. (Pay attention, because this is the future of profitable telecom services.)
I've asked who will control the control plane of the world before. Swisscom's answer is unusually concrete: keep the crucial machinery in a place it can operate, govern and answer for. Steinkasserer calls the product “business resiliency.”
Sovereignty is easy to sell in a B2B campaign. It is harder to deliver when a supplier fails, a platform goes down or a geopolitical relationship changes — and Swisscom still has to keep its customers’ data sovereign and its network running.
Additional reading
Opinion: Lumen is behaving nothing like a carrier
Opinion: Fiber’s next act: From broadband to the infrastructure of the physical AI economy
Opinion: Technology isn't the hard part anymore — Scaling is
Opinion: Telecom’s great AI dilemma: Everybody wants the future, nobody knows how to monetize it
Opinion: Sovereignty tunnels are here
T-Mobile’s Ankur Kapoor: AI is moving from the cloud into the core network
Q&A: AI at the crossroads — Blue Stream Fiber on replacing the task, not the job
Stephen M. Saunders MBE is a communications analyst and USPTO-registered inventor examining how digital infrastructure — 5G, cloud and AI — is reshaping industry, power and society, as well as underpinning the emerging, ubiquitous global digital economy. As anchor of FNTV and a longtime industry insider, he focuses less on growth narratives and more on execution, risk and how hyperscale technology is distorting markets, governance and society at scale.