At MWC Barcelona, Jonathan Wagner, CCO of Alianza, shared insights on how telecom carriers can modernize their networks and create new revenue streams. With $3.6 trillion spent on network upgrades over the past decade, carriers now face a critical challenge—monetizing those investments. Wagner emphasized that user experience, not just bandwidth, will define success in the 5G era. Alianza is leading this shift by helping carriers integrate AI, cloud, and automation to enhance both customer experience and network operations.
Wagner also introduced Alianza’s Telecom 4.0 model, which enables carriers to leverage cloud-based resiliency, elasticity, and automation. With the recent acquisition of Metaswitch, Alianza is poised to accelerate network transformation, allowing service providers to modernize at their own pace while maintaining their brand and customer relationships. Want to learn how AI and cloud are unlocking new opportunities for telecom? Watch the full interview now.
Steve Saunders:
Welcome back to FNTV at MWC25. I'm Steve Saunders, and I'm delighted to be joined by Jonathan Wagner, Chief Commercial Officer of Alianza, a leader in cloud communications and a company at the center of the trend for helping carriers find new ways to monetize their voice and data networks. Jonathan, how are you working with carriers to help them find new ways to make money?
Jonathan Wagner:
Well, first of all, thank you very much for having us out. We're having an incredible show. Hopefully, you are as well. I think what we're doing is we're looking over the market and we're helping carriers recognize that they've got a gap to fill. The research has shown that they've spent $3.6 trillion over the last decade modernizing, upgrading their networks, and what we've benefited from as consumers of those services is a 1,000% increase in network speeds. In the United States, for instance, Google Fiber, we can get an 8-gig connection. Some would say we have enough. Some even describe this as a bandwidth glut, but what hasn't kept up have been the user experiences.
So we see that communications consumers these days have a choice. They can go to an over-the-top provider that answers the call of a cloud speed innovation. They can use things like self-service portals, they can get near real-time innovation delivered to them. These are things that service providers tend to struggle with. So in order to compete, we see that the service provider needs to take a new and fresh look at the user experience. It's not going to be the pipes that sort of restore the telcos. It's going to be the user experience that will.
Steve Saunders:
That's fantastic analysis. Carriers need to learn their lesson. They mistook 5G for 4G, where 4G just increased the capacity and people were happy to pay for it so that they could get video correct. But we're not in that era now. We're in the 5G era. Are you adding features into your portfolio which carriers can look at and say, "Hey, I could use that for, I don't know, virtual reality or video conferencing or things like that," because the end user will pay for something they can't get right now?
Jonathan Wagner:
Yeah. I think the interesting thing is we look at innovation on two different vectors. There's one, which is the innovation that can be driven to the end customer, and we see a lot of that innovation being driven up-market. The unified communications players, the contact center players have really shoved AI-based functionality up there, whether it's real-time translations or any of those features or call transcripts at the end of a meeting. But none of that has found its way down into just regular voice calls, much less anything in the residential market. So we really take a look at how we can drive AI to Main Street or AI to dial tone. That's really where this resurgence is going to come.
Steve Saunders:
So you are saying there's life in the old voice network yet.
Jonathan Wagner:
Yeah. Voice isn't dead yet.
Steve Saunders:
No. Well, I mean it's fundamental. That's what we're doing here.
Jonathan Wagner:
Of course, of course.
Steve Saunders:
But I think that is interesting that you really are trying to invert the attitude of, I think, a lot of carriers where it's like it's all about the data and the data application, so that's very interesting. But AI can enable that transition, that transformation. How does that work?
Jonathan Wagner:
Yeah, of course. I think it's looking at those use cases that make us better, smarter, make us get our jobs done easier. And earlier, I mentioned that there were two vectors. The first one obviously being the user experience. The other one is what are the functionalities that artificial intelligence or machine learning or cloud computing can do to help service providers operationalize their networks or run better, smarter networks, be able to be more resilient, be able to solve customer challenges quicker? That's really where we come into play. We are service provider-focused. We know what it takes to run and operate a network and what it takes to delight customers. And so that's why we believe we're the chosen partner to help sort of curate a path for service providers as they go and take advantage of these new technologies.
Steve Saunders:
Tell us about your telecom 4.0 Model, because there isn't a lot of high-level understanding of how the new telecom network works. Just give us 30 seconds on it if you can.
Jonathan Wagner:
Oh, you're asking a sales guy to give you 30 seconds? Okay. I think in the telco 3.0 world, we saw where the features were divorced from the underlying access when we moved to voiceover IP. Now, again, as telco networks evolve, they need things like resiliency, they need things like elasticity, they need things like self-healing networks. These are the benefits that you get by modernizing your network, by taking advantage of the cloud. And it's not just a public cloud. We also have been having meetings today with some innovative European operators that are deploying their own private cloud instances to take advantage of the functionality, because they realize the current telco 3.0, or even some of these are deploying telco 2.0, they're just stuck in a cul-de-sac of technology.
Steve Saunders:
Yeah. And you bought Metaswitch, which is a company I'm very familiar with. What role will that play?
Jonathan Wagner:
Oh, the Metaswitch acquisition closed yesterday, we announced it yesterday, so we're super excited. It really augments our portfolio, it expands our portfolio. One of the things we recognize as we're dealing with service providers is the migration step is sort of the hardest step that service providers have to go through, and it's typically a big band-aid that you have to rip off. However, we believe that with the Metaswitch assets, the great incredible technology that we acquired from Metaswitch, we can actually take advantage of the cloud speed innovation, be able to meet these customers where they are on their journey, modernize these building blocks that the service providers have relied on for years to deliver these services. And I think we can do it in a way that can allow them to preserve their brand, preserve their user experience.
Steve Saunders:
Well, I talked to some of the Metaswitch team at the football on Sunday, and I can tell you they feel like they're in a happy place now.
Jonathan Wagner:
That's good.
Steve Saunders:
So they're in a good company with Alianza, and thank you so much. What a clear and crystal clear vision that you have for helping these carriers monetize their service. Thanks, Jonathan.
Jonathan Wagner:
Great. Thank you, Steve.