"We Need to Think About the Network as a Product“

Key Takeaways

• Telcos must rebrand the network as a programmable product
• Treating reliability as a feature unlocks AI-driven services
• Legacy systems need radical simplification to enable productization
• Network APIs become revenue channels in the inference economy
• Cultural shift requires product management discipline across engineering teams

Pulse Analysis

The telecommunications sector has long wrestled with the notion that its core asset—a high‑availability network—is a commodity to be hidden behind a "pipe" metaphor. Kim Krogh Andersen of Telstra challenged that narrative at the TM Forum, emphasizing that the network’s 99.999% uptime is not just a utility but a premium feature that can be sold like any software product. By exposing programmable interfaces, telcos can transition from passive bandwidth providers to active enablers of AI‑driven workloads, a move that aligns with the broader shift toward an Inference Economy where data processing occurs at the edge.

Treating the network as a product unlocks new revenue streams through API monetization, subscription‑based service tiers, and on‑demand compute resources embedded in the transport layer. Enterprises building generative AI models, autonomous vehicles, or real‑time analytics require deterministic latency and reliability—attributes that telcos can now package and price. This product‑centric approach also encourages ecosystem partnerships, allowing developers to build applications directly on network capabilities, thereby accelerating innovation and creating lock‑in effects that were previously unavailable to traditional pipe‑only operators.

The transition is not without hurdles. Decades of legacy hardware, siloed operations, and a culture built around infrastructure maintenance must be overhauled. Telcos need to adopt product management frameworks, invest in software‑defined networking, and foster cross‑functional teams that treat service design, customer experience, and revenue generation as a single loop. Companies that successfully purge legacy complexity and embed product thinking will secure a strategic foothold in the AI era, while those that cling to the pipe mindset risk obsolescence.