Want to Unstick European Telecoms? Unthinkable.

How European Telecoms feels, thanks to Bing Image Creator and Max Escher

To ignite radical telecoms innovation and investment in Europe, join our multi-stakeholder group to explore ideas that challenge technology, leadership, strategy, and market structures. Come to the Unthinkable Lab: How to Unstick Telecoms in Europe in London on 8th April.

Europe feels threatened and stuck

2025 has been a shocking year for Europe. Russia continues to grind forward in Ukraine at terrible cost, the US has made plain that it will no longer underwrite its historical support, while China launched DeepSeek and now a second wave of low-cost AI from Baidu and doubtless others.

Europe is therefore faced with a massive demand to up its defence spending and somehow reorientate itself industrially to be more self-sufficient and to compete on a global scale.

This follows a long period of reliance on global technologies, and most critically for telecoms, hardware from China and software from the US, neither of which now seem entirely neutral to European eyes.

Stuck in the middle with…who?

Telecoms is a microcosm of society and the economy in Europe as elsewhere.

Plurality is the soul of both the beauty and the fragility of Europe. There are about 50 countries in Europe (including Russia) and 27 in the EU, not including the UK. An average EU country has a population of 17m, with Germany being the largest at 83m. The EU overall has a population of 449m.

Compare this with: China's population of 1.4bn; US 340m; and India 1.4m. None of those nation-states are completely culturally homogeneous either, but the scale difference is evident.

Differences between EU countries are based in language, culture, history, wealth, alliances, religious bases and much else – climate included. So, talking about Europe can be challenging because it can be hard to make generalisations.

Perhaps the strongest commonality is that these nations, including the UK and other non-EU European nations, want to retain their identities and their relative freedom to self-govern and live in peace.

The news of growing detachment from some of the major players outside European identity is certainly a wake-up call, and a force for greater unity.

European Telecoms: a fraternity of frustration

The telecoms industry in Europe reflects these larger dynamics with a character of its own, somewhat focused on the institutions of EU regulation in Brussels. For decades, the best ROI on telecoms spending has been from lobbying the EU.

This has resulted in a sometimes whiny industry tone during the last few years: complaints of unfair returns to tech players, and more recently calls to protect the telecoms “champions” of the region.

The prevailing geo-political climate has encouraged European regulators to be more sympathetic to calls for consolidation, which now makes sense in such a fragmented and reasonably mature market.

Less in evidence is a roadmap to innovation and investment – positive ideas and actions on ways forward to generate a resilient and thriving economic ecosystem.

European telecoms: ‘stuck’ and pessimistic

In Europe, customer satisfaction is often lacklustre, operators and investors struggle to find returns, successful new products and services are elusive, and growth seems a distant dream for many.

Operators are highly dependent on an increasingly concentrated supply chain, disrupted by geo-political tensions, and innovation is piecemeal and rarely scales.

Moreover, despite the CEO’s outward bravado, and a relatively comfortable position amidst the global economic turmoil and an acceptable Q4 results season, behind closed doors there is a different feeling. It is hard to find innovation that transforms economies and energised positivity. This is a huge contrast to the energy and optimism I now see in much of South Asia and the Middle East in particular, and the rest of the world more generally.

How to change the narrative?

Opportunities for change exist. Radical new business models, industry structures and technology approaches can liberate change and drive growth, and with the right models, investment and growth are possible.

The questions are, what are they, how do you make these models work, and what is stopping their adoption? Where are the catalysts?

This is what Dean Bubley and I are trying to ignite in the Unthinkable Lab a unique and interactive event designed to challenge conventional thinking in the European telecoms industry in a multi-stakeholder environment.

We want to explore exceptional possibilities, both ‘good’ and ‘bad’, safely and constructively, and understand how they might be reached or prevented. We believe that building better understanding between the stakeholders can be the key to unsticking much needed change.

We are independent, share a belief that something can change, and have disagreed together successfully for 17 years. Who better to drive Europe to consider the Unthinkable, and find new ways to change?

Who should join?

We want to bring a multi-stakeholder group together to explore ideas that cross technology, leadership, strategy, and market structures. This includes CTOs, CSOs, leaders of Strategy and Transformation, and finance and regulatory folks from the telecoms world.

We will be running the session under the Chatham House rule – so comments should not be attributed personally, and will be engaging in structured and facilitated discussions with the aim of producing and evaluating new ideas. We will keep a strict eye on legals and anti-trust too.

If you feel it is time for change, please join us. The details and agenda are here.