Confessions of a Telco Executive Week #1

Why I Started This

Over the last few years, I’ve had more side conversations than I can count. Dinners, hallway chats at conferences, late-night WhatsApp, quiet coffees before big vendor meetings, all variations of the same thing. “This whole launch is a joke.” “Our board has no idea what’s happening.” “We keep doing this, and nobody believes in it anymore.” People from every level of telecom, operators, vendors, engineers, marketers, HR heads, all pulling me aside to tell me what they can’t say out loud.

So I decided to build a space where we could say it.

Confessions of a Telco Executive is not a rant blog. It’s not a whistleblower site. And it’s not another strategy newsletter filled with acronyms and Gartner quotes. This is a place for insiders to speak freely. Real people. Real voices. No vendor logos. No “thought leadership.” Just the things we know are broken, and that we’ll never fix until we stop pretending they aren’t.

In this first issue, you’ll read three confessions from three different leaders across our industry.

The CFO confession is a masterclass in cold truth. No growth, no innovation, no problem: just cash, leverage, and shareholder mechanics. I don’t agree with everything in it, but you’d be foolish to ignore the logic. Most of us have worked our entire careers inside companies that look flat on the outside, but move billions quietly underneath.

Then there’s the CMO confession, and honestly.. it stings. She admits what many of us already know but still won’t say out loud: the Gs mean nothing. 5G was, in her words, “garbage.” A marketing war built on an engineering milestone. She spent hundreds of millions selling it anyway. Not because she believed in it, but because the industry demanded it.

And finally, we close with a brutal reflection from a Head of HR at a Latam vendor. Her message is simple: Telco is still a man’s world. And she’s sick of pretending the diversity dashboards mean anything when women are isolated, under-respected, and routinely pushed out of technical roles. It’s the kind of honesty most companies bury in slide 37 of a DEI report.

I don’t expect everyone to agree with everything in these pieces. I don’t either. But I do believe these are the kinds of conversations we need to be having, out in the open. If you work in this industry, you’ve felt these things. You’ve seen the dissonance. This newsletter is a mirror. Not to shame. But to reflect.

If you want to contribute a confession, anonymously, you can do it here:
👉 https://forms.gle/KWgxK3rnjQVJVXbf6
No names. No emails. No metadata. Just your truth.

Let’s create a space where we can talk about the real stuff. Not the next G. Not the next deck. The things we need to fix.

See you next week.

Sebastian Barros

Confession from the CFO office

People Don’t Get Telcos’ Financials

Every few weeks, someone posts another article declaring the decline of telecom. Usually, the headline is dramatic, some combination of “flat growth,” “unsustainable margins,” or “reinvention imperative.” I read them while reviewing our debt maturity ladder or structuring the next billion-dollar spectrum payment. The irony is always the same: the people who declare this industry broken are rarely the ones funding it.

Let’s take the growth complaint first. The telecom sector in developed markets has averaged sub-2% annual revenue growth for the last decade. In many cases, the figure is barely positive after adjusting for inflation. No argument there. The top line is unremarkable. But that’s only a problem if you believe telecom is supposed to behave like a growth sector. It isn’t. And hasn’t been for years. What we operate is capital-intensive infrastructure with declining unit prices and rising volume. Revenue growth is irrelevant if you misunderstand how we extract value.

The most common misunderstanding is net profit. It looks weak, often in the low single digits as a percentage of revenue. But net profit in telecom is almost meaningless. The income statement is burdened with legacy depreciation schedules from infrastructure deployed a decade or more ago. In many markets, spectrum amortization alone can erase half a billion dollars annually. That doesn’t reflect operational weakness. It reflects accounting rules. The cash is real. The depreciation is theoretical.

What matters is free cash flow. Telecom companies, even those considered “ex-growth,” continue to generate significant operating cash. After maintenance capex, spectrum fees, and lease payments, we still return billions to shareholders every year. This is not accidental. The system is built for cash preservation, not equity excitement. We are structured, quite deliberately, to absorb capital, recycle it over decades, and distribute the residual in the form of stable dividends.

Of course, we frequently run below our cost of capital. That, too, is true. Our ROIC is often in the 5% to 6% range, while WACC can exceed 7% depending on market volatility and interest rate conditions. In traditional finance terms, that’s value destruction. But this assumes that telecom is being funded by growth equity. In reality, most of our investor base is institutional capital with low risk appetite: pension funds, sovereign wealth vehicles, and infrastructure funds. They do not seek terminal value expansion. They seek predictable income streams, real-asset exposure, and inflation-linked returns. Telecom delivers all three.

There’s also a structural reason we remain investable: regulatory insulation. In many countries, telecom operators are quasi-public in function, even if privately owned. We hold long-term concessions, manage critical national infrastructure, and operate under regimes that, while demanding, are rarely existential. No one allows a Tier-1 operator to fail. This creates a floor under the downside risk. And in a capital allocation model, downside protection is often more valuable than upside speculation.

Critics often point to our debt levels as evidence of unsustainability. But this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of balance sheet construction in network businesses. Our leverage is not consumer debt or growth leverage. It is infrastructure leverage, underpinned by durable assets with multi-decade utility. Fiber, spectrum, tower access — these are not startup dependencies. They are defensible, illiquid assets with national strategic relevance. Our debt is long-term, often fixed-rate, and structured against predictable cash flows. It’s not fragile. It’s designed.

Despite all of this, we are consistently placed in the “must change or die” category. We’re told to behave more like software, to become platforms, to unlock new layers of innovation. I’ve sat through those presentations. I’ve seen the decks with colorful layers stacked on top of the “connectivity” base. Everyone agrees that value is migrating upward — but few acknowledge that the base still powers everything else. You can’t virtualize physics. You can’t stream without Spectrum. And you can’t do AI at the edge if the edge doesn’t have power and fiber.

I’m not here to defend the status quo. The industry has problems, structural, competitive, and cultural. But financial weakness is not one of them. What we lack is not cash, but narrative. We don’t inspire optimism because we don’t trade in fantasy. We trade in continuity. We absorb shocks. We maintain uptime. We connect. And for that, we’re considered boring.

But if boredom delivers $300 billion in free cash flow annually, then perhaps boredom is underrated.

— Group CFO, Global Telecom Operator (name withheld)