Viewpoint, Comarch Communications

The European telecommunications market is expected to grow slowly, at just 2% to 3% by 2029. Because of this slow growth and the challenges of a complex global economy, operators are rethinking how they work. The industry is now looking beyond traditional consumer cellular services, which are only growing at 3% to 4%, and is moving toward broader communication ecosystems, including mission-critical networks, satellite infrastructure, and massive IoT deployments.

These challenges and emerging trends were extensively discussed at the recent Comarch User Group gathering, highlighting the critical paths operators must take to stay competitive. The event hosted over 700 partners from 53 countries across 8 streams, including 201 connectivity experts.

Economic pressures and productivity demands

The global economy now demands high levels of investment, especially in technology. Major countries are spending heavily. China, for example, is allocating 25% of its GDP to infrastructure and technology, creating far more value than Europe’s tech investments. In this competitive environment, traditional efficiency methods are not enough. Communication Service Providers (CSPs) need to boost productivity by quickly adopting new technologies.

“Global markets are pivoting towards AI adoption, where traditional efficiency methods simply won’t be enough to keep pace with the global economy. As we emphasized alongside our partners at the recent Comarch User Group, CSPs must fundamentally rethink their operational models. We can no longer rely solely on consumer cellular services, we must pivot aggressively toward broader, more complex ecosystems and services that encompass mission-critical networks, massive IoT deployments, and autonomous multi-orbit satellite infrastructure,” commented Marcin Kaleta, CEO at Comarch Communications.

Tackling complexity with Agentic AI

One of the main challenges for CSPs is handling the growing complexity of their networks. Right now, up to 40% of network outages are caused by human error, and 88% of digital transformations do not meet their goals. To address this, the industry is moving from basic automation, which depends on humans following rules, to Agentic AI, where systems take on more responsibility within set policies.

Client case studies presented at the Comarch User Group this year highlighted that changing systems to support intent-based actions allows for as much as 30% to 40% cut in Network Operations Center costs and a 10% to 20% faster Mean Time to Repair (MTTR). However, only 6% of CSPs have the data streaming abilities needed to fully use advanced AI models, meaning that technical readiness is still a big hurdle.

Massive IoT deployments and API Economy

Integrating Massive IoT into 5G networks brings new physical and technical challenges. The old way of constantly checking devices drains batteries and can overload the network. During the inaugural IoT Connectivity Forum at CUG 2026, experts detailed that switching to an event-driven setup and using the 5G RedCap standard makes it easier to manage connected devices. Standardizing CAMARA interfaces and Network Exposure Functions (NEF) also helps operators move toward an “API economy.” This change enables them to monetize network Quality of Service (QoS) through targeted microservices, making CSPs more than just simple data carriers.

Overcoming technology debt with modular systems

To take advantage of these new revenue opportunities, operators need to address their existing technology debt. Old, monolithic systems often slow down IT teams and pose significant risks when changes are made. Instead of replacing everything at once, the industry is moving to composable Business Support Systems (BSS) using the TMF Open Digital Architecture. This modular approach allows for targeted upgrades, such as adding cloud-native billing engines that can scale resources as needed.

Jacek Prokop, BSS Product Marketing Manager at Comarch Communications, highlighted this topic, referring to monolithic legacy systems as a “silent killer”. To mitigate the risks of migrating away from these monoliths, he introduced the concept of operational digital twins within a modular architecture present in Comarch Communications’ Composable BSS suite: “We are giving you a secure, isolated sandbox where you can clone and test your real production data, like orders and products, without ever touching the live system.”

Sovereign networks in the face of global instability

Geopolitical instability has made connectivity more than just a basic service – it is now seen as a key part of national sovereignty. There is a clear gap in space infrastructure: the US has many more satellites and launches them much more often than Europe. To reduce this dependency, programs like the European Union’s IRIS² are investing €10 billion in building a secure, multi-orbit satellite network. Running this kind of infrastructure requires ground software that can manage complex data and mission control autonomously, without relying on other countries.

Preparing core architecture for the next decade

As the industry faces economic pressures and the need to improve productivity quickly, it is important to focus on core architecture rather than individual use cases. Building modular systems and supporting operational independence will be key for operators who want to profit from new ecosystems.

Looking ahead, CSPs need to ask themselves an important question: Is our data architecture strong enough to support autonomous agents and sovereign networks so we can stay competitive in the next decade?

Hundreds of millions of people around the world maintain family, work, and community ties across borders. The United Nations estimated the number of international migrants at 304 million in 2024. This large, dynamic population relies heavily on cross-border communications. Consequently, international calling serves as an essential infrastructure for staying connected with families and households split across borders. 

Yet for decades, the pricing, reliability, and user experience of international calls from traditional operators lagged behind domestic mobile services.

Pricing was often difficult to interpret, rates varied widely by destination and plan, and call quality was inconsistent on certain routes. This gap created the conditions for a new category of providers to emerge — cross-border communication apps, including international calling apps for expats and diaspora communities.

The telecom operators’ diaspora market gap

In 2024, the World Bank estimated record remittances to low- and middle-income countries at $685 billion, larger than foreign direct investment and official development assistance combined. World Bank projections also put remittances to low- and middle-income countries at $690 billion in 2025, reinforcing the scale and persistence of the cross-border relationships behind the market.

Many traditional operators prioritized ARPU from domestic subscribers, while international calling was handled mainly as a source of margin. In practice, it was rarely developed as a service built around the needs of expat communities.

Apps built specifically for diaspora communities underserved by traditional communities took a different view. They competed on price transparency, destination breadth, and reliability to reach mobile numbers in countries where generic VoIP termination alone was not enough. The result was a better kind of international calling service, and it helped define the international calling app market around repeat cross-border communication needs.

What cross-border communication apps got right — three structural lessons

The rise of cross-border communication apps offers more than a competitive warning. It shows how specialist providers earned repeat usage by addressing practical problems that legacy international voice services had not fully resolved. Three decisions stand out.

1. Pricing transparency as a trust mechanism

Cross-border calling apps displayed per-minute rates, making the cost clear before a call was placed. That reduced friction in a category where users had often been exposed to unclear usage charges and bill shock. International calling rates transparency became a trust mechanism for diaspora users making repeat calls to the same destinations.

2. Ecosystem thinking beyond the call

The most durable platforms in this space combined international calling with complementary services, knowing that diaspora communities had multiple needs.

That same understanding helps explain why diaspora mobile top-up services and mobile recharge abroad became natural extensions of the calling relationship. One study published in the International Journal of Data Science and Analytics found that international airtime top-up transfers are heavily used by expats to support families in their home countries.

The call was only one part of the service. The stronger platforms added messaging, domestic calling plans, and mobile top-up around international calling. Mobile top-up lets users send credit or data to a family member’s prepaid SIM abroad.

3. Routing quality for emerging-market destinations

Dependably reaching a mobile subscriber in Guatemala, Nigeria, or the Philippines requires a different termination strategy than calling a landline in Western Europe.

This is because real-time voice is sensitive to delay, congestion, and the quality of the interconnection path. A 2025 IETF RFC document on congestion control notes that workloads such as Voice over IP can face performance issues from congestion, and that network evaluation should account for added latency or increased packet loss.

For cross-border communication apps, routing quality was not a back-end detail. It was part of the user experience. Platforms that invested in direct carrier relationships and redundant routing paths for high-demand corridors were better positioned to deliver reliable call quality than generic VoIP alone.

They treated termination as a corridor-specific problem rather than defaulting to the cheapest or most convenient available route.

With diaspora communication, quality is measured less by technical architecture than by whether a call connects, stays connected, and is clear enough for a conversation.

BOSS Revolution international calling as a case study

The BOSS Revolution international calling model is a useful case study in the cross-border communication app category. IDT launched the brand in 2008 as a low-cost, PIN-less international long-distance calling service. Since then, it has grown to 6M+ active subscribers and processes 36M+ mobile top-up transactions annually (across more than 280 carriers in 95 countries). It also has a 25K+ retail distribution network.

What largely fueled the BOSS Revolution calling app growth was a combination of app-based international calling access, strong features, and complementary services. It offers international diaspora communities services that support their wider needs. Users can make international calls, send mobile airtime to relatives abroad, and use related services such as money transfer from the same ecosystem.

BOSS Revolution illustrates the bundle logic and user-experience-first approach that made a defined product category rather than a legacy add-on.

The operator opportunity in migrant communication services

Traditional operators are not structurally excluded from the cross-border communication market. In many cases, they already have the assets that specialist apps had to build around. They have network relationships, billing infrastructure, distribution, customer trust, and experience operating regulated communications services.

The issue is not access to the market. It is whether operators treat migrant and diaspora communication as a product design challenge, not a pricing exercise. The tools to do that already exist, which makes this a practical telecom operators diaspora market opportunity rather than only a defensive response to specialist apps.

eSIM technology is lowering entry barriers for MVNOs by eliminating physical SIM distribution and enabling digital-first launches. This allows MVNOs to partner with major carriers to target specific diaspora communities without building a massive retail footprint from scratch. Consequently, an MVNO diaspora strategy provides carriers with a practical, precise route to serve niche markets. Finally, API-driven platforms seamlessly connect airtime, data, and payment flows across these international borders.

The strategic question is whether operators will use those tools to compete, partner, or continue leaving the segment to specialists. Cross-border communication apps have already shown that the demand exists. The operator opportunity is to treat migrant and diaspora communication as a designed proposition for a defined audience, not as prepaid international calling plans or a legacy international calling line managed at the edge of the core business.

The communities that international calling apps were built for were never hard to find. They were simply not treated as a priority.

Press Release

Major global sporting events have always attracted opportunistic fraud. The 2026 FIFA World Cup, played across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, is no exception. Every major cybersecurity vendor, and the FBI itself, has published warnings about the surge in FIFA-branded scam domains ahead of the tournament. That coverage has focused almost entirely on fan-facing fraud such as fake ticket sites, counterfeit merchandise stores, and phishing emails targeting supporters. But what CUJO AI’s Security Research Laboratory has unearthed is a separate, targeted campaign employing fake FIFA job portals designed to harvest corporate credentials from would-be job applicants. 

The targeting mechanism no one is talking about 

The researchers identified 21 domains posing as FIFA recruitment pages. These sites presented as professional-looking careers portals, carrying official FIFA branding, stolen recruiter profiles with photographs and job titles, and an invitation to schedule a 30-minute phone call via Google Calendar (Figure 1). Examples included fifa-careerhub[.]com, fifa-careerportal[.]com, and fifajobs[.]com. 

Figure 1: A fake FIFA recruitment portal presenting official branding, a stolen recruiter identity, and a Google Calendar booking prompt. 

When attempting to sign in with a personal email address, the form returned the message “Please use your work or business email” (Figure 2). Personal email providers that triggered this response included: gmail.com, googlemail.com, yahoo.com, msn.com, icloud.com, live.com, hotmail.com, outlook.com, protonmail.com, and aol.com. This mechanism was clearly designed to coerce victims into exposing their corporate login credentials and is inline with the campaign’s objective to access corporate Google Workspace accounts. 

Figure 2: The email validation error returned when a personal email address is submitted. The JavaScript filter accepts only work or business email domains. 

What happens after the email check passes 

Applicants who passed the email check were then sent to a page impersonating a Google Calendar booking interface, where they were prompted to sign in with their Google Workspace account. This page hosted a malicious sign-in service that then sent the victim’s login credentials to a backend server hosted on “fifa2026back”. The backend domain was accessed via an obfuscated string that replaced each letter “a” with the characters “eq”, a technique commonly used to avoid detection by automated keyword-matching systems. 

Victims were likely directed to these pages via social media posts and phishing messages framed as outreach from FIFA recruiting contacts. Research published by Group-IB covering the broader 2026 FIFA fraud landscape documents similar referral mechanisms across multiple campaigns targeting the tournament. 

WHOIS records for the 21 identified domains revealed that most were registered via name.com between April and May 2026. All registrant countries in the dataset were the United States. 

By the time of CUJO AI’s analysis, most of the domains had been replaced by parking pages serving generic search links through a commercial domain monetisation service (Figure 3). This pattern is common to short-lived phishing campaigns where infrastructure is stood down after the active window closes, with registered domains held for future use or left to generate residual ad revenue. 

Figure 3: A parked page returned by one of the identified domains, indicating the active campaign phase had concluded. 

A broader pattern: the same kit, different brands 

The phishing kit deployed in this operation was not specific to FIFA. The same infrastructure and approach have been used in campaigns impersonating Heineken, Hilton, Coca-Cola, Netflix, PepsiCo, Delta, and Spotify, each using a different stolen recruiter identity sourced from LinkedIn. Arctic Wolf identified at least ten FIFA-specific phishing domains active as of late May 2026. 

The timing of domain registrations is shown in Figure 4, based on WHOIS creation dates across the identified domain set. The concentration in April and May 2026 aligns with a measurable increase in FIFA-related threat traffic observed across CUJO AI-protected networks during the same period. 

Figure 4: FIFA-related scam domain registrations per month, based on WHOIS creation dates. 

The operator’s position: visibility before the credential is submitted 

DNS lookups to these fake job portals, and the subsequent traffic to credential-harvesting backends, passed through network operator infrastructure regardless of whether the operator was aware of the campaign. Every subscriber who searched for a FIFA job and clicked on one of these domains generated a DNS query on the operator’s network before any interaction with the malicious site had taken place. 

This is precisely where the benefits of network-layer intelligence shine. Operators who can see DNS resolution patterns in real time, and who have access to aggregated threat signals across large network footprints, are afforded the opportunity to identify and block these domains before a single credential is entered. Operators without that visibility are dependent on endpoint security, which in a BYOD or remote-work context may not be deployed on the device the employee is using when they fall for the scam. 

Regulatory pressure is moving in the same direction with NIS2 and the UK’s Online Safety Act both pushing operators toward more active roles in the detection and blocking of harmful traffic on their networks. 

What this campaign reveals 

For operators, the takeaway of our research is that phishing campaigns are becoming more selective, more targeted, and more focused on corporate access than ever before. 

Every interaction with these domains began on the operator’s network. Long before credentials were entered, DNS requests, domain lookups, and traffic patterns provided signals that a campaign was active. Operators with visibility into those signals have an opportunity to disrupt attacks before they reached enterprise accounts. 

The 2026 FIFA World Cup will be remembered for the matches played on the field. But for network operators and security teams, it may also be remembered as a case study in how modern phishing campaigns identify, qualify, and target victims long before credential thefts occur. 

This Industry Viewpoint was authored by Gerry Christensen

The outbound enterprise calling landscape is standing on the precipice of its most profound structural shift since the inception of the STIR/SHAKEN framework. For years, the telecommunications industry has wrestled with a fractured trust ecosystem where bad actors thrived on malicious anonymity, and legitimate businesses were forced to pay a premium just to prove they weren’t scammers. … [visit site to read more]

Chinese vendor Huawei has announced a patent licensing royalty rate of US$0.50 per device for products compliant with the Wi-Fi 7 standard, as it seeks to provide greater transparency around its intellectual property licensing framework.

The company said the rate would apply to consumer-grade Wi-Fi 7 devices and that licences could be obtained either through bilateral agreements or via patent pools under FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms.

Huawei described the move as part of its commitment to creating a transparent and predictable licensing environment while supporting continued innovation across the wireless ecosystem.

Wi-Fi 7 is designed to deliver higher throughput, lower latency and improved reliability compared to previous generations, supporting emerging applications and next-generation digital services.

Huawei claims to be one of the largest holders of declared standard-essential patents related to Wi-Fi 7, having spent more than a decade developing technologies that contributed to the standard. The company added that its patent licence agreements had covered more than 1.2 billion consumer electronic devices worldwide by the end of 2024.

The vendor has been active in patent pool licensing initiatives. In 2022, Huawei joined the Sisvel Wi-Fi 6 patent pool as a founding member and has since extended its participation to the Sisvel Wi-Fi Multimode pool, which covers both Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7 technologies.

Huawei said the multimode pool offers vendors a streamlined approach to accessing essential patents across multiple Wi-Fi generations through a single licensing platform.

Huawei Chief Intellectual Property Officer Alan Fan said: “Huawei continues to facilitate collaborative licensing models that balance the interests of innovators and implementers, further reinforcing its leadership in shaping a transparent and efficient global Wi-Fi licensing environment.”

News

India’s largest mobile operator is targeting a landmark public listing as it ramps up investments in AI, cloud and next-generation digital infrastructure.

Reliance Jio’s MD and Chairman Mukesh Ambani has announced that the company will file the initial public offering (IPO) papers with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) later today.

The IPO could raise around $3.8 billion, according to analyst estimates, making it India’s largest IPO to date.

“The proposed listing of Jio will demonstrate to the world that India can build technology companies of global scale, global capability, and global value,” said Ambani at the company’s Annual General Meeting.

Backed by the billionaire Ambani, Reliance Jio Infocomm burst onto India’s mobile scene in 2016, with its discount prices triggering a major price war. Since then, the company has soared to become the country’s largest mobile operator with over 500 million customers.

The listing is expected to be closely watched by investors seeking exposure to India’s fast-growing digital economy. Jio has expanded well beyond mobile connectivity in recent years, building out a portfolio that includes fibre broadband, enterprise services, cloud offerings, digital payments and connected devices.

AI was also a significant focus of the meeting, with Ambani calling for India to continue its efforts to embrace AI and develop its own platforms, saying that the country should be a creator of AI as well as a consumer.

Jio is investing heavily in AI, with Ambani saying earlier this year that the company would invest around $110 billion over seven years to build India’s AI backbone infrastructure.

The company’s JioBrain platform, which it uses for network planning, predictive maintenance, resource optimisation and customer service automation, notably won the AI Innovation award at the World Communication Awards 2025.

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It’s being widely reported that Indian telecommunications company Reliance Jio is planning to develop and launch its own low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation of 1,600-1,650 satellites at an altitude of about 650 kilometres in the next two to three years.

The aim of the project, whose cost has been estimated at between US$10 billion and US$15 billion, is to offer broadband and direct-to-device (D2D) services, according to local news reports, albeit this has not apparently been confirmed by the telecom giant.

Nevertheless what does seem inarguable is that the company has submitted a proposal to this effect to regulator the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe), which is evaluating the configuration and technical architecture.

As India’s Economic Times news service points out, if the proposal becomes reality it will be the first time an Indian company has entered the LEO segment.

It will have a lot of catching up to do. Starlink has 10,000 or so satellites already in space, way ahead of rivals like Amazon Leo (about 300 in orbit on the way to 3,200) or Eutelsat OneWeb (over 650 satellites in space so far). India’s Bharti Group, a Reliance rival, is the second largest stakeholder in Eutelsat OneWeb after the French government. 

Of course, the fact that Jio is an Indian company means its LEO plans might be well-received, at least locally, at a time when countries are worrying about digital and data sovereignty, not to mention national security considerations, including worries about operators using interlinked satellites (as Starlink apparently does) for providing internet services.

The argument is that this system allows data to bypass national borders and that data could potentially be routed through hostile jurisdictions or surveillance hubs before reaching its destination. Thus Jio could give India a sovereign communications layer in space.

That does leave a few unanswered questions, however, particularly about capacity and costs. LEO satellites have limited lifespans, so replacement costs need to be factored in. And what about monetisation? One assumes maritime, aviation and enterprise customers along with underserved (and not necessarily high value) rural areas would be target markets.

In addition, as the Economic Times points out, orbital slot allocation through the ITU is highly competitive, and spectrum coordination is complex.

However, Jio can claim one of the largest telecom subscriber bases in the world, so bundling satellite broadband into its existing Jio services could be a useful strategy.

There’s also convergence. Jio’s holding company, Jio Platforms, already operates across telecom, digital services and cloud infrastructure. This would add a, potentially useful, satellite layer and, with it, uninterrupted connectivity across terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks, plus new possibilities in edge computing. 

However, despite some interesting, even exciting, possibilities, the reality is that a Jio LEO satellite service is not yet taking part in a race in which other big names have been competing for some time.

Power is the binding constraint on new GPU deployments. Operators who already hold energized space are looking to convert compute demand into revenue themselves. Colocation facilities and former bitcoin miners are moving up the stack into bare metal and GPU-as-a-Service. And colocation facilities can finance the climb on better terms than the new neoclouds they compete with. … [visit site to read more]

Communication & Renewable Energy Infrastructure (CREI), a telecom energy service and asset management company and part of global corporate group two33, has received a funding boost for the expansion of its renewable energy assets across Africa.

The Facility for Energy Inclusion (FEI), a debt fund conceived by the African Development Bank and managed by Cygnum Capital, which is an investment bank and asset manager, has, along with the Norwegian Investment Fund for developing countries (Norfund), closed a US$90 million long-term debt facility to CREI.

This financing refinances the US$55 million short-term bridge facilities provided by the lenders in 2024 and adds US$35 million of new capital to support CREI’s next phase of growth.

What this means in practice is that the facility will enable CREI to scale its energy-as-a-service model across Africa, providing mobile network operators with sustainable and energy-resilient infrastructure to improve service quality and expand network coverage. This facility is expected to increase over the next 12 months to further support CREI’s continued expansion.

In collaboration with ieng Group, the flagship engineering and network deployment arm of two33 – which specialises in telecom, renewable energy and critical infrastructure – the partners say that this investment is set to transform telecom energy infrastructure across CREI’s target countries. These include Mali, South Sudan and the Central African Republic where the deployment of modern renewable power assets is expected to increase the share of renewable energy in production to nearly 50%.

By bringing sustainable, reliable energy to some of Africa’s most underserved markets, the partners say this financing marks a defining step toward a greener telecom industry – one that reduces its environmental footprint while delivering more efficient and dependable power to operators. 

Ghada Ghotmeh, Chief Investment Officer of CREI Limited, explains: “Building on strong execution across our markets, we have transitioned from bridge financing to a scalable long-term capital structure that supports sustainable growth. By refinancing and expanding the facilities initially provided by FEI and Norfund, we are building on a trusted partnership and positioning CREI to continue investing in energy solutions that power connectivity and economic development across Africa.”

Birgit Edlefsen, Senior Vice President at Norfund, adds: « This second financing to the company, a long-term facility, marks a significant milestone, extending our reach beyond Mali to now include South Sudan and the Central African Republic. It reflects Norfund’s commitment to bringing renewable energy and essential infrastructure to fragile states and challenging markets. By backing CREI, we aim to support economic growth, job creation and greater stability across the region.”

We reported in February that Finnfund, the Finnish development financier and impact investor, had made a follow-on investment in CREI to scale up sustainable telecom energy infrastructure in South Sudan.