2026 Predictions: Telecom

From the widening K-shaped economy to shifting customer affordability and changing price-for-value expectations, Principal Analyst Chris Antlitz outlines why telcos must rethink their pricing, bundling and financing models to stay competitive in 2026.

This conversation explores the big agenda items shaping the 2026 telecom landscape: the integration of 6G into market forecasts, edge computing’s renewed relevance, the energy problem slowing scale, and how previously hyped technologies like blockchain and the metaverse may be poised for resurgence.

Episode highlights:

•Which vendors are positioned well for the pivot from traditional SaaS to AI strategies

•The partial displacement of large language models

•Key expectations for SAP, Microsoft and Salesforce

“You have new competitive vectors coming into broadband, and you have over-investment on the fiber side because of [the] government bringing in a lot of capital to be paired with private capital. And it’s distorting the economics of, you know, how much it costs to deploy something, how many people are deciding to deploy. And that is going to have a shakeout,” said Antlitz.

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Edited by Haley Demers

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Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy

2026 Predictions: Telecom

TBR Talks Host Patrick Heffernan: Welcome to TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe’s Top Tech Firms. Where we talk business model disruption in the broad technology ecosystem from management consultancies to systems integrators, hyperscalers to independent software vendors, telecom operators to network and infrastructure vendors, and chip manufacturers to value-added resellers. We’ll be answering some of the key intelligence questions we’ve heard from executives and business unit leaders among the leading professional IT services and telecom vendors. 

I’m Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst, and today we’ll be talking about 2026 telecom predictions with Chris Antlitz, Principal Analyst for TBR’s Telecom Practice. 

Adjusting to a K-shaped economy: What it means for the telcos 

Chris, let’s talk about telco predictions for 2026. What do you see as the most important both economic trends, but then also how that reflects for the telco companies themselves going into the new year?

Chris Antlitz, TBR Principal Analyst: Yeah, so I’d say one of the biggest themes we see in the economy is this whole notion of a K-shaped economy, this recovery coming out of COVID. And the bifurcation continues to widen, essentially. And we see that across a number of indicators across the economy. And really, the telcos, it’s about how do you adjust to that? Your customer base is- their needs and what they can afford is shifting. And they’re going to be- the telcos need to adjust to that new reality. So that’s one of the big predictions we have for 2026 is how do they adjust their plan pricing? What kind of new offerings do they come out with? How do they do bundling? How are they doing financing for devices? Those things, I think we’re going to see some changes there for 2026.

Patrick: Okay. And part of that, I think in your predictions talked about a price war around broadband. Can you maybe talk a little bit about what that’s going to look like or where you think that’s going to have an impact across, of course, it’ll have an impact on the companies themselves, but does that ripple into other parts of the ecosystem?

Chris: It does. So, I think when we think about the broadband market, there’s two things to think about. One is the economic considerations, and the other thing is the competitive dynamics. So, on the customer side, we just talked about the bifurcation of the customer base, and that’s not just for consumers and households, that’s also for businesses. We see that. So, it’s about reassessing what’s being purchased and price for value. So, like if someone’s maybe paying for a premium plan, maybe they trade down. Everybody needs internet. That’s an essential need. 

Patrick: Right.

Chris: So, we’re not saying there’s going to be mass disconnects. We’re not saying anything like that. But what we are saying is that there’s going to be a reassessment of price for value. And you might see share shifting, you might see more bundling taking place for people to save some money. And they’re just going to reassess like what do they actually need and be assessing like what other options are there for getting high-speed internet access. 

And then the second side of that is the competitive dynamic. So, we’ve had a lot of distortions in the broadband market with all the government largesse coming in to try and fund digital divide related programs, build more fiber, more fiber, more fiber. And then you also have other vectors of disruption. You have fixed wireless access coming in, which is high-speed internet. And you also have satellite internet. Like Starlink is legit. 

Patrick: Right.

Chris: That is high-speed internet you can get. And you can actually go to big box stores now and buy a Starlink kit. You can go to Home Depot, Best Buy, they carry Starlink dishes now you can, or CPE devices you can buy and set up at your home. So, my point is that you have a lot of- you have new competitive vectors coming into broadband and you have overinvestment on the fiber side because of government bringing in a lot of capital to be paired with private capital. And it’s distorting the economics of, you know, how much it costs to deploy something, how many people are deciding to deploy. And that is going to have a shakeout, right? So, you’re going to have a situation where you have too many people chasing the same households and businesses. And the price points that people are expecting to pay for what they’re getting is also adjusting. So, you have those forces at play in the broadband market. And we’re going to see that really become more pronounced in 2026.

Patrick: So, too many companies chasing the same number of households, even as those households are changing their buying behavior, in particular on the down leg of that K economy. 

Who is best positioned for 2026 and beyond, and who is in trouble

So, real quickly then, of the companies you cover, which are the ones that you think are best positioned for what you just described, for those conditions you just described?

Chris: So, we look at the, so there is bifurcation in terms of which broadband providers are relatively better positioned than others. So, I would say T-Mobile is really well positioned. AT&T in some of their markets is well positioned. 

Patrick: Okay.

Chris: The companies that we’re more concerned about is the cable-cos. And we’re concerned about the incumbent satellite companies, the guys that are running MEO and GEO satellite constellations, not LEO. 

Patrick: Okay.

Chris: So, Starlink is LEO. That’s the new disruptive vector because LEO, you get tremendous more capacity out of a LEO constellation compared to the others, and the latency is much lower. So, your QoS is way better with Starlink service versus an incumbent satellite company that’s running, you know, more legacy solutions. So those are some of the companies that we’re a little more concerned about in terms of share loss and having to engage in price cuts.

AI vs. telcos timetable clashing 

Patrick: And you brought up, I mean, in my mind, you brought up something that I know you wrote about as well in a separate document about AI and the change cycle or the innovation cycle, the development cycle that AI is on relative to the telcos, which are more generational, AI is 18 months or even less. And one thing you talked about was sort of the uplink demand more than the downlink demand, how that is a real shift. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how that changes where you think things are going to go in 2026?

Chris: So, the telecom industry moves really slow. And when I say telecom industry, I’m also talking about the standards bodies and all of the major ecosystem aspects of telecom move slow. So, they typically move in 10-year cycles for the wireless technology. The AI ecosystem, by contrast, is operating at an 18-month cycle of innovation. So those don’t- that doesn’t work. 

Patrick: Right.

Chris: So, something’s going to have to give. You can’t have the AI ecosystem telling the telecom ecosystem, hey, we need you to do things differently or make upgrades like on a year and a half or so cycle if they’re not used to doing that and the numbers don’t work for them, right? 

Patrick: Right.

Chris: So, something’s going to break in that equation. And what I think is going to happen is the hyperscalers, they’re not going to be held back. If the telecom industry doesn’t move faster and start to align with what the hyperscalers need, the hyperscalers are just going to go around them. And we see this today. This is not a radical assessment. Like, look, just this last few weeks, we’ve seen Google and Amazon come out with their own answers to NVIDIA GPUs, right? 

Patrick: Yeah.

Chris: Running, doing AI workloads on their own custom silicon.

Patrick: It’s faster and faster. So yeah.

Chris: Exactly. Because NVIDIA is not aligning with their timetables. So- and the cost points, obviously, the performance and what they’re optimizing for. So why wouldn’t they do that in telecom, in networks? They absolutely would. I would say they are in some very specific areas. But the telcos, the telecom industry is lumbering along and the rest of the tech ecosystem is moving, is doing circles around them. So, something needs to break there. And I think 2026, we’re going to start to see some evolution pains.

Patrick: Okay.

Chris: Even if AI is in a bubble, which I think it is, the reality is AI is going to change everything at some point. 

Patrick: Right.

Chris: So even if we go post-bubble, it’s still going to reconverge and come out of that. So, the investments that need to take place for the underlying infrastructure is still going to have to happen. 

Patrick: Right.

Chris: And it’s going to be operating at tech cycles that are much faster than telecom, regardless of if it’s in a bubble or not, the AI.

Patrick: And I feel like we’ve been talking about, you and I have been talking about the slow change in telcos and the threat in the telecom space and the threat from the hyperscalers for a few years now. So, it’s really, it’s AI that sort of has changed, has accelerated how quick we’ll get to that breaking point.

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. Well, AI, and you said uplink before, right? You mentioned uplink. 

Patrick: Yeah.

Chris: Like that’s just one example of how the network needs to change for an AI economy. Because if you look at the traffic, the type of the traffic composition and what resources are required for AI traffic versus more traditional network traffic, which is usually video downloads. 

Patrick: Right, download, yeah.

Chris: It’s completely different. 

Patrick: Yeah

Chris: So that requires a different architectural framework for the network. 

Patrick: Right.

Chris: Well, now the telcos have to go figure that out and optimize for that. Like that requires CapEx. So, something’s going to break in that equation.

Patrick: Yeah. It reminds me of being with you at a Nokia event pre-pandemic and hearing them talking about download and upload and just to some degree at that point, not even caring about the upload part. That wasn’t even a part of the equation. 

Chris: Yup.

Patrick: That wasn’t where the emphasis was. So, it’s crazy how much that’s changed. 

What to look for in TBR’s 2026 Telecom portfolio

Speaking of change, so as we go into 2026, the telecom portfolio overall at TBR, what are the things that you’re, other than what you’ve already talked about, you know, AI and changes for the telcos, you know, broadband and all that, fixed wireless access. What are the other big topics, big issues that you’re going to dig your brain into in 2026?

Chris: So, next year, we’re going to start baking 6G into our forecasts. 

Patrick: Okay.

Chris: So, we do five-year forecasts. So, five years out, 6G will be a thing. 

Patrick: Right.

Chris: So we have to start planning and starting to loop that into the forecasts. So that’s a big change for next year. I would say that’s the biggest change for next year from a portfolio standpoint.

Patrick: And then what about issues that you think you, or have we already touched on everything you think you’re going to be focused on? Are there any other issues or anything that you sort of put off and said, well, that may or may not happen in 2026, but at least we’re going to keep an eye on it?

Chris: So, edge computing is something we’ve been covering. The market didn’t develop as the way that people were originally expecting. 

Patrick: Yeah.

Chris: But edge computing is absolutely relevant still, especially in an AI economy. The power is such a problem. That has to get figured out. It is a stumbling block for the entire industry.

Patrick: 100%.

Chris: And if- that needs to get figured out and a few other things need to get figured out in order for edge computing to really scale. But the power is one of the biggest things. And that’s, you know, the hyperscalers are looking at this. Like they’re actually investing in energy solutions for this. 

Patrick: Right.

Chris: And they’re spending many billions of dollars on that, just that one problem. 

Patrick: Right.

Chris: So, we’ll see what happens in 2026. There’s a lot of hope in the nuclear renaissance, but the reality is you’re dealing with NIMBYism and you’re dealing with cost overruns and you’re dealing with delays, timetable delays. 

Patrick: Right.

Chris: So, it takes, usually takes about a minimum of eight years to get a new nuclear plant up and running, minimum. Much more like 10 or a little bit more than that years on average for the states. So, those things need to be factored in. Like there’s no quick fix to the energy problem.

Patrick: Right. I think the earliest I’ve heard was 2027 and that just seems wildly ambitious, wildly ambitious.

Chris: Yeah.

Patrick: But I’m glad you brought up edge, because I feel like 2026 is going to be the year that a lot of previously hyped technologies come back, previously hyped emerging technologies come back. We’re looking at blockchain and how much blockchain is starting to percolate up again in the services space, and edge as well. So, it’ll be interesting. Chris, thanks very much.

Chris: Yeah, actually, before we end though, just on that last point of things coming back, the Metaverse [specifically AR/VR] is coming back. 

Patrick: *laughs*

Chris: So, I want to make sure we fit this in.

Patrick: I hope you’re right.

Chris: So, I was at an event a few weeks ago, and- actually the 6G Summit in Brooklyn, and they had a Meta representative there, and he was the head of product for their glasses. 

Patrick: Yeah.

Chris: And I knew that was getting a lot of traction, but the stuff that they have on the roadmap, and what they already have out in this newest generation of glasses. It’s become- it’s moving from novelty and early tech adopters. It’s going to start moving into the mainstream next year. That’s a big change.

Patrick: That will be massive. Yeah.

Chris: It’s a big change. So, and don’t count Apple out. They are still in that.

Patrick: It’s crazy to count them out. Yeah. 

Final thoughts

Excellent, Chris. Thanks very much. We’ll do this again soon.

Chris: Cool.

Patrick: Awesome. 

Next week, I’ll be speaking with Alex Demeule about his 2026 Cloud predictions. 

Don’t forget to send us your key intelligence questions on business strategy, ecosystems, and management consulting through the form in the show notes below. Visit tbri.com to learn how we help tech companies, large and small, answer these questions with the research, data, and analysis that my guests bring to this conversation every week. 

Once again, I’m your host, Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst at TBR. Thanks for joining us and see you next week.

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