The purpose of this CXTech Week 32 2024 newsletter is to highlight, with commentary, some of the news stories in CXTech this week. What is CXTech?  The C stands for Connectivity, Communications, Collaboration, Conversation, Customer; X for Experience because that’s what matters; and Tech because the focus is enablers.

You can sign up here to receive the CXTech News and Analysis by email or by my Substack. Please forward this on if you think someone should join the list. And please let me know any CXTech news I should include.

Covered this week:

• Podcast 83: TADSummit Innovators, Lyle Pratt, Vida
• Podcast 82: Truth in Telecoms, TCR for Sale Again
• Truth in A2P SMS Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5
• People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Podcast 83: TADSummit Innovators, Lyle Pratt, Vida

I’ve known Lyle Pratt since BetterVoice, over one decade ago. Lyle will be presenting at TADSummit in October.

Better Voice was acquired by Inteliquent (now Sinch) in May 2016. Its core retail and white label products continue to operate. They enabled small businesses to easily create a customized phone or voicemail system, BeterVoice was one of the first web-based phone systems.

BetterVoice was initially built on Twilio’s API. As BetterVoice grew they moved to FreeSWITCH, and built out the platform focused on small and medium business needs through a channel.

The thing that always impressed me with Lyle is the go to market focus. It steered the platform’s development. They focused on ensuring their service solves the problem in a way that’s easy for the customer to adopt. For example, recognizing the importance of channel for the SME to implement easily and have someone local to help.

Through Lyle’s time in Inteliquent and Sinch he realized many of the platforms he’s built. For example, IVR (Interactive Voice Response) are going to be replaced by LLMs (Large Language Models) over the next 5 years.

This led him to found Vida that provides lifelike and realistic AI voice and messaging agents for SMBs, SMEs, Developers, and Individuals via its in-house proprietary platform. Answer calls and texts with AI that always works and is never busy.

Lyle framed the current status of LLMs with hallucinations as simply it’s a new employee and training takes time. Things are rapidly improving within the core frameworks as well as performance improvements from training, guard rails, prompt engineering, integrations with industry specific platforms, etc.

For the constrained use cases SMB face, it’s good enough today. Vida uses FreeSWITCH, Drachtio, and OpenAI. Because of the GTM focus its built with partner management from the get-go to make it easy for UCaaS (e.g. NetSapiens) to adopt. Use cases include plumbers, tree services, car servicing. and healthcare. With integrations into the most used scheduling and industry specific software like Cox Auto and Athena Health.

Restating a point Karel from Voxist made a couple of years ago at TADSummit, the models are getting to the point that S2T (Speech to Text), LLM, and T2S (Text to Speech) have become a highly performant atomic unit. There is no need to have english text in the middle when voice is used, its intent and response immediately within the model.

Vida is going to be fun to monitor, they’ve hit the ground running. With a clear plan on complementing UCaaS platforms with a built for purpose AI agent. We’ll have an update from Lyle at TADSummit in October, where you can ask him questions directly.

Podcast 82: Truth in Telecoms, TCR for Sale Again

The talk on Wall Street is The Campaign Registry is for sale, again. The bankers, Lazard, have created a data room to explore TCR’s results, and private equity groups (who are ripping off America) are searching for as much info as they can gather.

This exposure of information prompted Johnny to use a picture on Linkedin of someone with their pants pulled down.

Given Von Coalition‘s request to the Federal Communications Commission to remove the The Campaign Registry given its conflict of interest in being owned by Tata Communications / Kaleyra. https://alanquayle.com/2024/05/von-coalition-proposal-to-fcc/. This could be one of the drivers for Tata Communications to sell.

However, Johnny indicated some of the VON Coalition members have cut side-deals with TCR. This will naturally favor the larger UCaaS / CCaaS / CPaaS providers. And provides further evidence on the difficulty for smaller companies to compete in the US market. And those side deals likely mean the pressure to divest TCR has lessened. Foreign ownership has become a mute issue.

The allegations of election interference made in Bill Peters’ complaint https://alanquayle.com/2023/09/william-peters-plaintiff-versus-kaleyra-defendant/, are waiting on Bill’s arbitration to end in 2025 as far as I know. Judge Colleen McMahon described arbitration as, “Long, drawn-out, lawless litigation.”
https://alanquayle.com/2024/07/judge-colleen-mcmahon/.

The federal case for Bill’s complaint is unlikely to start until the middle of 2025. Fired in 2022, and still waiting for resolution in possibly 2025 on the arbitration. And possibly 2026/2027 on the federal case, so unlikely to be a driver for the sale.

SMS spam continues to rise in the US (article has 2024 numbers), https://www.slicktext.com/blog/2022/10/17-spam-text-statisitics-for-2022/. Clearly TCR is not having the claimed impact.

Why would Twilio touch this? The programmable comms market is moving to enterprise services / workflows, see RingCentral, Zoom, and all the CX/Contact Center providers. Away from SMS APIs, to omnichannel, that is SMS, RCS, and IP messaging. TCR is one piece of a increasingly complex picture.

Google has its own methods for RCS brand and RBM (Rich Business Messaging) approvals. TCR with its likely heavier regulations should they buy it and US-only focus seems a bit of a stretch.

In a recent discussion it was pointed out we’re witnessing the tragedy of the commons in SMS. Aggregators are focused on making money through passing SMS spam onto customers, enabling fraud of businesses, etc. See Truth in S2P SMS series for a review across the 30 year history of SMS. It doesn’t need to be this way. However, the end customers (businesses and consumers) have no say. Change is only going to happen if carriers take back control of SMS.

As Robert Vis of Bird said “CPaaS is done!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2BIxOEwAto. The world is moving on, just some companies / organizations are tied to declining business models. Juniper Research forecast SMS revenue will shrink 28 per cent from $66 billion in 2024 to $47 billion in 2029. This is of note because an analyst firm is saying something other than everything in awesome, which is rare.

So the result is Tata Communications either is worried it may lose TCR after the election, or wants its money back as its realized the challenges with Kaleyra, and TCR sale is the easiest and quickest way to achieve that. Likely its the later driver.

Johnny asks for anyone in the know on the frame job of Bill Peters to come forward. Once the complain goes to court, the frame job is a crime, potentially someone could end up in jail.

Truth in A2P SMS Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5

Here are Part 1 and Part 2 in the series.

The First Phase of SIM Farms (2000-2015)

Once carriers sorted out international SMS interconnects, the in-country ‘free’ routes disappeared, the SIM farms were reused for the emerging category of A2P SMS. Farms with 64-128 SIMs could be used, the equipment was available from a number of Chinese vendors. 

The cards used were generally domestic prepaid SIMs. They were bought from many locations, e.g. local supermarkets, in low numbers to avoid suspicion. Once set-up, auto top-up was enabled, and they were used to deliver bulk A2P SMS services.

Operators in some countries noticed this revenue leakage, for example, France and Italy started to require official identities to be presented to buy SIMs. Which is still the case today, in France I recently provided my passport as proof of identity to buy a local SIM.

There were also business post paid SIM card bundles, which required no official ID, just a fake business, this avoided the top-up issue. With greater volumes bulk A2P services were available for free, or at least the first 1000 SMS were free, as they gathered the mobile numbers being used in the campaigns, and sold them onto data brokers. Examples of companies that allegedly provided this type of service in addition to many other SMS services was CardBoardFish, which was bought by Mblox (2014), which was bought by CLX/Sinch (2016).

SIM farms remain in broad use today, many aggregators have an association with SIM farms either with a clandestine division, a group of engineers in a corner somewhere, or a third party special operations group. Exploiting the P2P route remains essential for many aggregators to come close to achieving ‘Twilio-like’ margins.

While carriers have improved their detection of SIM farms, they remain in use today.

Non-interworking Agreements and Gray Routes (2005-TODAY)

Early global aggregators brokered deals with small carriers selling them global title leasing, that is an SS7 identity to appear almost like a carrier. Carriers have many unused global titles, this monetized an asset that is part of IR.21 (GSMA Roaming Database). The global titles enabled aggregators to route through smaller carriers. With a few smaller carriers, aggregators could achieve roaming across 200-400 carriers (there were about 650 carriers in those days), which is close enough to global coverage.

Large carriers want to provide excellent global coverage for their customers around the world, and this must include small countries such as Jersey, Channel Islands, Isle of Man, Barbuda in the Caribbean, etc. There is not enough traffic for a bilateral agreement, roaming agreements were put in place, and in some cases AA.19 agreements also put in place to define the pricing for the roaming agreement. But AA.19 agreements took time to roll-out across the industry as the assumption was mutual forgiveness.

When a route did not implement an AA.19 agreement, it is called a non-interworking agreement based on MSUs (Message Signaling Unit) that provides the structure for transporting SMS in an SS7 network. Also known as gray routes because there is no AA.19.

Gray routes remain important to the whole A2P industry, without this mechanism accurate routing would be difficult without API access to routing information. SMS to this day relies on signalling/SS7 based access which is often used for gray routes to ensure the market has accurate routing information

Across the gray routes various commercial models were deployed. For example, Western Europe on the basis of ratio deals: x non interworking SMS = x/10 credit against commercial routes into for example Germany. Various P2A (Person to Application) sources, e.g. sports lines, dating, and betting; generated MO (Mobile Originated) fees were used on a revenue share basis to subsidize international A2P traffic into established commercial routes.

Some of the SMS aggregators know of the existence of routes without an AA.19 agreement and exploit them to send A2P traffic into say Vodafone UK from the small carrier. The traffic is real, its UK banking confirmations. Vodafone UK does not want to block this traffic as it would impact their customers roaming in the remote destination and it appears to be a real banking transaction. So the data is allowed to pass, even though it is outside what would be considered “normal” traffic from the small island nation.

It’s a game of whack-a-mole, the aggregators know the thresholds a carrier operates upon. As long as the leakage is less than say $300k per month, no action is taken. Remember these high risk routes have the most genuine traffic, if the carrier checks with the bank for a transaction confirmation, it will be confirmed as genuine.

SS7 access for aggregators also posed a significant risk as access to such resources exposed critical billing identifiers e.g. Global titles, which could then be manipulated. Resulting in large volumes of traffic that could be billed incorrectly to operators who did not originate the traffic. Access to SS7 connectivity also exposes sensitive subscriber information, such as IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity).

It is claimed some island nation carriers received 20-30% of their revenues through aggregators taking advantage of these non-IW agreements. Normally the revenue share is 10-30%, with 15% being the average. There is complicity with some smaller carriers, or people within the small carrier, and the SMS aggregators.

For some carriers, particularly in Africa, A2P SMS is simply not a concern as the % of revenue is so small, perhaps 2%. The focus is P2P voice/SMS and internet access.

Peak use of this type of situation was 2007/8, over the course of the subsequent decade it’s been in decline as AA.19 agreements have become widely implemented. 

Critically, the aggregators know the thresholds a carrier operates upon. As long as the leakage is less than say $300k per month, no action is taken. Revenue leakage through this method is hundreds of millions each year across carriers, with billions over the past decade.

SIM farms and non-internetworking agreements raises an interesting conundrum, the purchase of these SIMs raises the carrier’s market share in their home market, see example below 27k SIMs from one raid. Which made carrier reaction times slow as the SIM farms raised their market share. We’ve seen recent arrests, for example in Thailand where the Thai Bureau of Narcotics Control Board and the Customs Department found, see CXTech Week 22 2024:

• 96 SIM boxes
• 4 STARLINK receivers
• 27,019 Hong Kong SIM cards
• 6,770 Thai SIM cards

AA60/63 inter-operator agreements became popular 2011/12 onwards, and remain in operation today.  AA60s and 63s are about MT (Mobile Terminated) and are the first official A2P PRD (permanent reference docs) that the GSMA created specifically so a price could be determined between operators for A2P traffic, or to distinguish between unit charges for P2P and A2P SMS.

Aggregators became more sophisticated in their use of SIM Farms. Using them internationally with spoofing, we’ll explore this in Part 4 of the series.

SIM Farms 2.0, AIT (Artificially Inflated Traffic), Firewalls, Exclusivity, and Beyond (2015 – TODAY)

SIM Farms 2.0 are international SIM farms, see recent example in the previous post in this series from Thailand. A simple example is thousands of UK SIMs are used in Belgium for traffic into France with spoofing to make it look like German traffic.

Just like the Thai example was Hong Kong SIMs operating in Thailand for traffic somewhere the authorities did not discover / disclose. The numbers are spoofed, the content appears valid, the game starts to become too complex for the carriers to follow, and they cede control of SMS to “experts.”

Aggregators present themselves as the experts, with a subjective, one-sided story on the thefts and risks the carrier and their customers are being subjected to. Hence the rise of aggregator firewall deployments and A2P exclusive deals. It’s a protection racket. The aggregator now has open CDR (Call/Communication Detail Record) access to the carrier and can engineer the traffic as required.

Take an example of a small carrier who normally sees $1.2M monthly in A2P traffic. With AIT the aggregator can claim they can more than double the carrier’s revenues from all the web brands (Facebook, Google, Meta, Amazon, etc.), by bringing their traffic to the carrier. Well, we’ve seen the outcome of this, the brands have moved to other forms of transport, such as email (that shows how bad things have become).

We’ve seen cold-contact emails proposing SMS generated traffic partnerships with a list of brands with OTP (One Time Passcode) they can use. It’s AIT as a Service (AITaaS). The knowledge has become widely available.

AIT has been around for quite some time. In 2005 Telenor Pakistan was one of the first applications of AIT to quickly ramp up the network and claimed subscribers. Using SIM farms for SMS and calling.

And today carriers are considering aggregators for the Camara Network API aggregation! 5G network availability is 10-15% in many countries. No developer will use Network APIs for such low availability. Private 5G like private 4G/LTE can use provisioning and statistical multiplexing for high capacity use cases. It works. I remain saddened by Ericsson, Nokia, Vonage, and all the shills and sycophants refusal to engage in an open discussion on Network APIs. It’s a repeat of OneAPI.

I would like to give some in the A2P ecosystem a clean bill of health, they try, but because the ecosystem has refused to implement SMS governance / certification, A2P revenue assurance, and published pricing, there will always be fraudulent traffic. It does not need to be this way.

Taking Back Control

A2P Messaging product manager for EE, Kevin Britt, revealed in a Linkedin post that starting from 10th July 2024, the operator will block all banking and logistics-based SMS unless it’s submitted via a single dedicated A2P Trusted bind.

The move will allow BT to implement more aggressive and robust blocking controls with the comfort of having no false positives.

Britt urged businesses to make sure they speak to their supplier to check they are prepared as a bespoke setup could be required.

He said that Commify, Infobip, Sinch, Stour Marine, Twilio, Vonage, and Webex CPaaS Solutions firms have confirmed they are ready for the change,

The move comes as Britt says BT has seen an 83% reduction in A2P SMS smishing on its network since March 2023.

Britt commended fellow BT employees and partners:

• law enforcement actions supported by colleagues dedicated to investigating and mitigating smishing;
• bespoke firewall developed by BT’s Messaging Operations team; and
• the SMS partners who comply with the Code of Conduct that BT introduced in September 2023.

Some of the key commitments in the anti-smishing code that BT introduced last year include:

• blocking messages where the Sender ID includes one of a series of words often exploited by scammers, such as ‘bank’, ‘caution’ and ‘package’;
• restricting who may use names associated with specific reputable organizations, such as ‘Mastercard’, ‘Student Loans Company’ or ‘Uber’;
• limiting the special characters permitted in a Sender ID to eliminate the risk of criminals using lookalike characters to mimic genuine organizations;
• blocking messages from numeric IDs that do not begin with a UK dial code;
• blocking short codes that do not follow permitted formats; and
• blocking suspected spam or fraudulent URLs included within the body of a message.

From my perspective the combination of picking the right partners, creating a traffic light warning system (openness in publishing who is on the naughty list to your partner ecosystem – and yes even some of those listed partners could be in the naughty list), adding liquidated damages clauses to agreements and implementing sender ID registry in combination provide critical protections around BT’s firewall, not a third party’s.

Sending spam to a carrier is a breach of contract, we must find a way to encourage the implementation of SMS governance / certification, and liquidated damages looks as good as any.

A firewall can be good or bad, depending on the situation. In the bad old days firewalls came with revenue targets. Rather, BT owns and operates its firewall for the benefit of their customers.

Kevin is, in my opinion, an impressive ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’. Creating a template for the carriers, and the industry should celebrate BT’s success.

A2P Revenue Assurance

Over the past ten years carriers have become increasingly reliant on aggregators to help address the problem of A2P fraud. Given the complexity of number spoofing across numerous international AA60/63 inter-operator agreements.

This path has not always led to successful outcomes. Given the rise of AIT (Artificially Inflated Traffic) to the point brands have moved to other forms of transport, such as email (that shows how bad things have become) and passkeys.

An international group of ‘poachers turned gamekeepers’ will now perform an external, silent evaluation over one month of popular use cases from 30 to 40 brands that are driven by both bots and people. No internal network access is required.

They will deliver a quantified status report across the use cases on the extent of revenue leakage. After which, optionally, a plan can be created to remove those sources, and protect against further leakage. No internal network access is required, the carrier has full operational control.

This new category of protecting A2P revenues and taking back control is proving A2P revenue assurance meets market needs. It’s not just for carriers, you could use this for evaluating downstream aggregators as well. Imagine if such results were published for the whole industry, like the OpenSignal reports on 5G network performance. Accountability in A2P SMS is essential, not hiding on the SS7 network using gray routes to spam to people.

If you’re ignoring this A2P SMS series, or covering, up or enabling the spamming of the general public, you must ask yourself one question, “Are we the bad guys?’ Spamming the elderly, children, the tired , overworked, or distracted is simply beyond inappropriate behaviour in telecommunications, it should be criminal.

Mitigations: SMS Governance / Certification and Published Rates

Augnet was founded to address the lack of governance / certification in SMS messaging, see interview with Daniel Gill. 

Dan Gill is the CEO and founder of Augnet. Check out their team, it’s impressive. Augnet addresses the lack of governance in SMS messaging using a vast network of real devices (both SDK in apps and SIM app). He faced this problem through the sale of Skype where he headed up carrier relations across voice and SMS. There simply were no certifications in the SMS supply chain, things like performance measurement were challenging, almost guess work, DLR (Delivery Receipts) can be faked. Hence it’s open to abuse by the industry itself and any bad actor with a little bit of knowledge.

The routing manipulation uses AIT to lower the performance of competitors’ routes through pumping traffic, so an enterprise like Amazon favors your routes. Spend money on AIT, but win more higher margin revenue. There’s a battle taking place over all the A2P SMS routes. Trust in the A2P SMS ecosystem is only one hop, your partner may connect with companies you do not trust. There’s no accreditation, and often conflicts of interest. There needs to be a source of Truth that is measurable and constantly updated.

It is impossible today for any aggregator to prove 100% of their traffic is white. They may claim 100%, but it only takes one person in any of the organizations that route traffic, or a bad actor that appears a solid aggregator for one country. And that leads to the critical issue of how to monitor AIT traffic entering your network. These are the problems Augnet addresses, plus some really interesting capabilities around encryption, authentication, geofencing, SMS over IP and network awareness.

Trust in SMS is a critical issue, barriers to bad actor entry are low. AIT has enabled fraud on a scale we have never experienced over SMS. When Dan shared how trust could be like a HLR look-up, “is this # a real device over a trusted route”. What shocks me is Augnet is coming up to 6 years old, and it is not broadly adopted. The industry needs to act now, else A2P SMS will continue to lose credibility.

I am shocked that the people causing and covering up these AIT problems claim they are the ones who can restore trust in SMS. Once trust is lost, it can only be restored through external mechanisms.

Uku Tomikas is the CEO of Messente, they focus on business messaging. No claims of being a CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service), just a pure focus on helping customers be successful using messaging for their business communications.

Customer trust is a core value for Messente. They build that trust through decade long relationships and advising customers on how to optimize their use of messaging to achieve their business objectives. Specifically, on ensuring local brand registration, on best practices for gathering and cleaning customer data, on campaign best practices, on frankly sharing their costs and margins.

Messente will not play games to offer a ‘special’ SMS rate. Uku pointed out he would rather SMS rate pricing be publicly available, so he could focus on Messente’s value-add. Ira Cohen was name checked as a great guest for the TADSummit Podcast when this point came up, as he too agreed with Uku. While the rest of the industry did not.

Implementing Augnet and publishing / harmonizing SMS rates seem like straight forward things the industry could do to begin the process of restoring trust.

RCS Fraud – it’s here

This year I started to receive RCS spam, using group chat to appear like RBM (Rich Business Messaging). Google Guest Cloud provides a low cost entry point for creating such messaging. We’re still in a wait and see mode with respect to RCS. Its ability to allow a crook to copy the look and feel of a brand is an issue, however, it’s still early days.

Current Situation

SMS is in decline as web brands move to other tech (email, in-app, passkeys, IP messaging). Juniper Research forecast global SMS revenue will shrink 28 per cent from $66 billion in 2024 to $47 billion in 2029.

Carriers need to maintain revenues so have raised prices as less traffic makes it harder to meet volume commitments and find traffic to inflate. Brands are using SMS less, yet spending the same / more. 

This situation has happened before, around 2012/2014 Skype reached peak usage, by 2014 traffic was migrating to WhatsApp with group chats. Even though Skype was using less SMS/calling, it was paying more as prices rose.

Skype has declined from its peak, CNBC wrote In March 2020, Microsoft said Skype had 40 million daily active users, a number that’s since slipped to 36 million, according to a spokesperson. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-skype.html

Telegram can bypass SMS and offer direct messaging over its platform, so called IP bypass. Criminals will pay $10 per SMS, for customer data that they can hijack an account with, e.g. 2FA.

User experience is poor because of SPAM and lack of trust, some brands are so frustrated they moved back to email. Trust must be restored, but it can not be restored by the people who created / covered up the problems in the first place. 

Hence why Augnet is important (governance and certification). Combined with openness and harmonization of pricing. A2P revenue assurance, and critically operators taking back control of the services their customers are paying them for.

Claims RCS, because of Apple’s unclear adoption, will resolve the situation ignores Apple’s iMessage strategy, and RCS’s 16 years of development and many claimed and then failed launches. Hope it is not an option, specific, quantified, and direct action is the only way to stop the rot. If action does not take place, I’ll be writing an epitaph on how the tragedy of the commons killed SMS.

As this series has shown, A2P SMS was not designed with security in mind. Its history has the common thread of a lack of coordination / control, hence bad actors could make a quick buck and move on once the problem became significant enough to warrant carrier action.

Implementing Augnet, publishing and harmonizing SMS rates, implementing A2P SMS revenue assurance, and carriers taking back control over the service their customers are paying them for seem straightforward. Things the industry could do to begin the process of restoring trust. We still have the core problem of SS7, but if we make A2P SMS fraud much more difficult, the crooks may start to look at easier targets.

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Avinash Mahto is now Platform Architect – Healthcare Commercial Cloud (HCC) at Synapxe. I’ve known Avinash since his time with Telestax.

 Johan Fantenberg is now Director, Product and Solutions Marketing at Ping Identity. I’ve known Johan all the way back to when Oracle bought Sun.

Andres Canabarro Sica is now a Senior Backend Engineer at Reddit, Inc. Below is his hack “POLLSTER APP” by Andres Canabarro, Sr. Miguel Ignacio Sica, and Herman Schenck: Do you want to launch any type of survey quickly and efficiently? Do you lack of enough clients to make your survey? Pollster App is designed just for you. Pandemic detection, marketing services and political analysis brought to you in just one click. They were joint winners of the Telestax prize. The guys started 24 hours ago with no knowledge of Telestax, and within 24 hours had created a sophisticated service.

Maurizio Marcelli is now Head of Cyber Risk Management at Pathfinder Investor. I’ve known Maurizio for a long time while he was with TIM.

Rick Centeno is now Chief Executive Officer at XXImo in Utrecht. Click –> XXImo | Leads the way in mobility for more information. I’ve known Rick for over one decade, since his time at NSN.

Antonio Diaz has joined Aprecomm as a Channel Partner Sales Director, responsible for the Americas and Europe. 

Hagen Hennes is now Account Executive at Salesforce. We first met during his time in Deutsche Telekom.

Tony Martindale is now Government Sales Director at SSS – Cybersecurity Specialists. I’ve known Tony for over a decade, since his time in OpenCloud.

Avik Datta is now with the RAW Charging team as Network Operations Director. I’ve known Avik for a couple of decades, since his time at Vodafone.

Jeff Steiner is now Head of Data Strategy at Telesign. Last year he organized TADHack Belgrade.

 Natalia Matviychuk is Head of Wholesales at GlobaHub AG.

Christian Ladstaetter is now People Lead CDC at A1 Telekom Austria Group. I’ve known Christian throughout his time at A1 Telekom Group.

Josh Aroner is now Chief Marketing Officer at Verizon Connect. We first met during his time with Oracle, well over one decade ago.

Swaminathan Venkataraman is now Chief Technologist – Product Management (HPE Aruba Networking Telco Solutions) at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Carolyn Devadawson is now Internal Communications Business Partner at GBG Plc. I’ve knwon Carolyn for over one decade, since her time with LiveWire PR.

Paul Nikfarjam is now Business Development Executive – Sr. Client Partner at Global Solutions Group, Inc..

Jeff Yee now leads AI Consulting at Vizaport. I’ve known Jeff since his time with AT&T and their MediaNet and mMode content services.

You can sign up here to receive the CXTech News and Analysis by email or by my Substack.