International Telecoms Week took place in Washington DC last week, bringing together over 150 speakers and thousands of attendees from across the global telecoms and digital infrastructure ecosystem.
By Hal Hampton, VP of North American Sales, Openmind Networks
Openmind Networks were in attendance once again meeting with clients and partners. Here we take a look at some of the key themes that came up in meetings, presentations and panel discussions.
Network APIs: The $X Billion Question Nobody Has Fully Answered Yet
One of the most energised sessions of the week was the Voice & Messaging Leaders’ Summit panel “What will it take for telcos to unlock value from network APIs?” — and the title itself tells you where the industry stands. The capability is there. The potential is significant, with network APIs enabling developers to access mobile identity, location, quality-on-demand, and fraud signals at scale. The business model, however, remains a work in progress.
Speakers including representatives from Vonage, Google, XConnect, and BTS explored the conditions needed for telcos to successfully monetise programmable network capabilities. The consensus was clear: standardisation (through frameworks like CAMARA) is a prerequisite, but commercial agreements, developer ecosystems, and operator willingness to move beyond wholesale connectivity are equally critical. The GSMA Open Gateway initiative featured heavily as the structural backbone — but execution gaps between MNOs remain a challenge.
The thread continued in the “From data to dollars: How telcos can own mobile identity” session, where Meta, T-Wholesale, and PROXIMUS GLOBAL made the case that telcos sit on an underutilised gold mine — trusted subscriber relationships and real-time network data that no hyperscaler can replicate. Turning that into recurring API revenue is the next frontier.
Rich Messaging Infrastructure: RCS Has Its Moment
The CPaaS panel “From fragmented to flawless — the omnichannel CPaaS advantage” brought together Sinch, Syniverse, Infobip, and Telin to address what end users now expect: seamless, branded, conversational experiences across every channel. The direction of travel is unmistakable — and RCS is emerging as the infrastructure backbone that makes it possible.
At the “Rich Messaging in Action: Redefining Customer Interactions” panel at the Voice & Messaging Leaders’ Summit our own Kristian Nylund took to the stage with Netnumber, iBasis and Mobilesquared to point to the latest infrastructure developments among operators globally. Kristian spoke about recent projects we here at Openmind have been working on with global telco brands to give them greater control and visibility of RCS.
With Apple’s adoption of RCS now bedded in and Google’s ecosystem firmly committed, the focus at ITW shifted to the operator layer: how MNOs monetise RCS Business Messaging at scale, how interoperability is maintained across networks, and how messaging infrastructure needs to evolve to handle richer, more dynamic content. The partnership session between T-Wholesale and Google Firebase on “scaling digital trust through strategic partnership” was particularly relevant here — highlighting how carrier-grade messaging infrastructure underpins authentication, onboarding, and identity verification for global digital services.
For operators still playing the wait-and-see game with RCS , the message from Washington was plain: modernisation is no longer optional.
Autonomous Networks: The Infrastructure Is Getting Smarter
“Powering autonomous networks that think, adapt, and drive growth” — that was how one GrowthX presenter framed the pitch for AI-driven network digital twins, and it captured something that ran through multiple sessions across the week. The “Data talks: Maximising your network investment” panel on the NextGen Networks stage explored how automated networks require the ability to optimise resource allocation, conduct predictive maintenance, and manage the increasingly complex balance between physical and cloud infrastructure.
The broader autonomous networks narrative was threaded through the AI & Data Infrastructure track as well, with sessions on sovereign AI, edge-cloud architecture decisions, and the emergence of AI corridors as national infrastructure priorities. What was striking at ITW 2026 was the maturity of the conversation — less about whether AI will transform network operations, and more about which architectural choices made today will determine competitive advantage in 2028 and beyond.
The “Connectivity 2030 — anticipating the future” keynote from Nokia’s VP of Technology set the scene well: enterprise demand is evolving faster than most carriers are moving, and the window to position AI-powered network intelligence as a differentiator is open now.
Fraud Prevention: From Compliance to Competitive Differentiator
Fraud dominated the Voice & Messaging Leaders’ Summit in a way that felt urgent rather than routine. The opening keynote panel, “Trust under threat: Winning the war against voice and messaging fraud,” drew together the FCC, iBASIS, Sinch, PROXIMUS GLOBAL, and TransUnion — and the conversation quickly moved beyond grey routes and robocalls into the deeper structural problem: fraudulent activity is eroding both revenue and customer confidence at scale, and regulators are running out of patience.
With the FCC’s Deputy Division Chief on stage alongside industry leaders, the regulatory pressure on carriers to implement stricter verification, call authentication (STIR/SHAKEN), and AI-powered anomaly detection was palpable. The emerging consensus was that fraud prevention is no longer just a cost-of-doing-business problem — it’s becoming a commercial differentiator. Operators that can offer provably clean, verified traffic and messaging routes are increasingly valued by enterprise customers and CPaaS providers alike.
Artificial intelligence featured prominently as the mechanism through which the fraud problem becomes tractable at scale — real-time detection across billions of events is simply beyond the reach of rules-based systems.
Operator networks as self managing and self cleaning
ITW 2026 reinforced what many in the industry have known for some time: the telco infrastructure layer is becoming dramatically more valuable — but only for operators willing to modernise it. Network APIs, RCS infrastructure, autonomous operations, and AI-driven fraud prevention are not separate workstreams. They are converging into a single strategic question: how does the operator network become programmable, trusted, and intelligent enough to serve as the backbone of the AI-powered digital economy?
The answer, if ITW 2026 is any guide, is that the window to get ahead of that curve is right now.
