In this episode of Carrier 2.0, Steve Saunders explores one of the communications industry's biggest challenges: how carriers turn successful deployments into repeatable, scalable growth.
As networks expand across customers, markets and jurisdictions, complexity can quickly become the enemy of scale. Different vendors, processes, regulations and operating models introduce friction at every stage. The answer isn't simply greater automation, it's designing architectures and processes that remove unnecessary complexity from the outset. Drawing on perspectives from across the industry, the episode examines why repeatability matters, how pilots can disguise the challenges of real-world deployment, and why moving AI from "pilot purgatory" to enterprise-wide adoption requires much more than a successful model. It also explores the principle of "integrate once", where stable interfaces allow networks to evolve without forcing customers to continually adapt alongside them. Ultimately, Carrier 2.0 isn't built by repeating successful projects. It's built by creating platforms, capabilities and architectures that make every subsequent deployment simpler than the last.
Steve Saunders:
Building one successful deployment proves a technology. Building a thousand proves a business.
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Steve Saunders:
And that's the challenge facing carriers today, how to create network models and repeat them at scale.
Growth creates complexity, unless of course the complexity is designed out first. Every successful carrier I've spoken to has reached the same conclusion. You've got to hide the complexity. You've got to standardize the architecture. You've got to make every deployment behave the same way.
Rachel Solomon:
At the heart of scalability, it comes down to process repeatability. And so one of the challenges that we face is as we go into multiple jurisdictions and counties, you get challenged by the different processes within each county. So what that means is different DOT requirements, different inspection workflows, different permit workflows, and that changes your ability to have a velocity and a quickness to build at the level that we'd like to build.
We need to control our engineering, our design process, making sure everything is scalable as we move into the potentially 270,000 homes that we have a line of sight to in Arizona. Because you make a mistake in one area and you repeat it a thousand times, now you've got to go back and fix a thousand mistakes. And so those are the type of things we work to keep ourselves out of so that our builds we're building to just perfection.
Steve Saunders:
Growth exposes every weakness in a network: different vendors, different software, different operating models. The temptation is to silo the problems and solve each one individually. Well, Google Fiber chose a different approach. Before accelerating its massive expansion, it rebuilt the operational foundations underneath its business.
Pilots are an established part of deploying new technology and services, but they can be deceptive. There is a tendency consciously or unconsciously to design them to succeed. Limited variables, easier problems, and no black swan events, but that's not the real world in which real businesses operate, and this is especially true of AI. When deployments fail, it usually isn't because of the model. They fail because everything around the model changes.
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Steve Saunders:
Different processes, data, governance, and people. Scaling doesn't test the technology. It tests the architecture.
Shashank Mane:
We want to make it real, and the way we make it real is help our clients move from a pilot purgatory phase to a scale deployment phase where you're really adopting AI at an enterprise-wide, and that is where you'll actually start getting a competitive advantage. If you don't do that, then that competitive gap, it's just going to widen and it's just going to become unbridgeable.
Steve Saunders:
Well, the next lesson follows naturally, doesn't it? If every new customer requires a new integration, you haven't built a platform, you've just added another project to your list.
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Steve Saunders:
The objective here goes beyond automating deployment. It's about eliminating unnecessary work. Integrate once, that's the key phrase. Once the interface is stable, the underlying network can continue evolving without forcing every customer to evolve with it.
Roger Timmerman:
We are offering services across state lines already, and there are other examples of that. So there's the Utah Association for Public or Municipal Power Systems, UAMPS in Utah, that's a consortium of cities that do power. Now, there are all these independent power systems in multiple states and they share some resources, but there's kind of established examples for how cities or consortiums of cities can work across state boundaries.
We've made the argument, like, "We could do these partnerships anywhere in the country. It doesn't need to be in our region." We're not doing the boots-on-the-ground. Those cities have their own local resources, but there's ways to help each other to give a larger marketplace to the private companies that want to operate in this sort of a model.
Steve Saunders:
And that's the true meaning of extensibility. It isn't about adding features, it's about making change almost invisible to the customer.
Egon Steinkasserer:
I would say it depends. There is no single answer. I would say the economics, the business models, they make our life more complicated. It needs more effort to build a sovereign solution. It needs more effort to find a vendor that is actually still willing to play in that field.
And the other is there is always opportunity also to simplify the life of our customers. So actually taking the burden of complexity away is one of our big ambitions and being able to do this in a way like a local customer would expect it, that makes a difference compared to globally sourced and globally created solutions that aim towards an abstract marketer, abstract user, an abstract customer.
Steve Saunders:
Traditionally, telecom was about selling connectivity. Well, Carrier 2.0 increasingly delivers capabilities. Now, that matters because services are consumed individually while capabilities can be reused, combined, and extended to solve entirely different business problems and of course to scale revenue. The network becomes more important, yes, but it also becomes more valuable because it exposes functions that applications, developers, and enterprises can consume on demand. And that is a fundamentally different business model from the one that carriers have operated for decades.
The technologies behind Carrier 2.0 have already proved themselves. Private 5G, cloud-native networking, network APIs, AI, and automation, they're no longer experimental.
John Puskar:
So there's something called sort of the SAS, so the spectrum manager, if you will, that dynamically manages that. So Federated Wireless is the leading company here in the United States that does that. They're a member of our coalition. And believe it or not, the number one thing, if you go into the survey that we did, was what do manufacturers care about? Downtime and uptime. It's like they cannot have a single second of downtime. It costs them millions of dollars.
And so what's interesting in the study is just the reliability of this spectrum is one of the reasons why so many folks have actually turned to it from an enterprise and manufacturing, automotive, precision agriculture perspective. And so as the system really works really, really well, there's really been no incidents of cause interruption or anything like that that we've seen from the research.
Steve Saunders:
The challenge was technical, but now it's operational. How do you deploy those capabilities without redesigning the business every time? That's where architecture matters. Customers don't buy architecture, but architecture determines whether customer success can be repeated. The companies that scale aren't the ones with the cleverest pilot. They're the ones that make the second deployment easier than the first.
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Peter Venkman: We came, we saw, we kicked its ass.
Steve Saunders:
That's the transition taking place across the communications industry. Carrier 2.0 isn't defined by faster networks or more sophisticated AI. It's defined by architectures that become simpler, more efficient, and more valuable every time they're deployed.
The winners in our industry will be those that grow revenue in proportion to the value that they create, not simply the volume of the traffic that they carry. Carrier 2.0 isn't built by repeating projects. It's built by eliminating the need to repeat them.
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