- AWS’ Jan Hofmeyr argued telcos need to stop treating themselves as uniquely complex
- Instead of over-indexing on how special they are, telcos can instead learn from broader API and cloud-native ecosystems
- The takeaway? Telcos risk slowing innovation by reinventing the wheel with industry-specific APIs and specifications
DTW IGNITE 2026, COPENHAGEN, DENMARK – If there’s one thing you don’t expect to hear at a telecom trade show it’s the criticism that telcos are living in a bubble. And yet that sentiment was one that came up twice in Fierce’s conversations with executives and analysts here in Copenhagen.
“I think telcos should stop thinking they are unique,” AWS VP and Head of Telco Jan Hofmeyr told Fierce. “Especially you see it here at DTW, there's this the constant push to define telco standards, telco frameworks, telco, telco.”
Hoymeyr noted the usual reason telcos give for writing their own standards is that they sit at the heart of a complex ecosystem of critical infrastructure and application enablers. But there are plenty of other highly complex and highly regulated industries (hello, finance) that aren’t pushing as aggressively to define their own standards.
“I think they need to see how they can leverage what are being built across industries, and the bar for building something that’s unique to the industry needs to be very high,” Hofmeyr added.
Hofmeyr’s comments came in response to a question about what misconception telcos need to let go of to move forward. Implied in his response, of course, is the idea that all this focus on defining telco-specific standards is holding operators back.
His statements would have been interesting enough as one-off commentary, but they actually marked the second time in one day that such a sentiment was shared with Fierce. The first instance came from Disruptive Analysis founder Dean Bubley, who during a conversation about network APIs earlier in the day said telcos tend to get hung up on “how special we are” and tend to forget that they’re actually part of a much broader ecosystem.
Like Hofmeyer, AvidThink founder Roy Chua acknowledged that telcos are unique because of the scale and criticality of their networks. But from an API standpoint, “many of the things the telcos are trying to do with the networks aren’t necessarily unique,” he added.
Instead of wasting time trying to reinvent the wheel, telcos should spend more time looking outside their bubble to see what others are doing with APIs and just borrow from that.
“There’s probably a lot to learn from what other people are doing out there,” Chua said. And one of those things is allowing the market to dictate what kinds of network APIs it wants rather than inventing a bunch that developers aren’t interested in.
“The telco APIs that have gotten traction are the ones that they were already selling in the first place,” Chua said, using fraud prevention as an example.
Chua also pointed to Working Group Two (WG2), which was acquired by Cisco in 2023, as an example of the kind of innovation telcos can tap into when they look outside their own circles. WG2 built a product that on the outside looked like a 3GPP-compliant mobile core, but under the hood ditched legacy mobile core interfaces in favor of cloud-native principles.
“They got to market much faster than trying to write a mobile core in the old spec,” Chua said. “So, it is possible...When you throw away all the inside stuff that is unnecessary, you can get there much, much faster.”
Looking ahead in a world where AI is accelerating development and deployment timelines, telcos can’t afford to dally around in their special spec bubble. And at this point, arguments about scale and regulatory restrictions are starting to feel like “an excuse why we don’t innovate,” Chua concluded.