The Accumulated Weight of Progress
Telecom networks don’t start with complex. They become complex organically, often out of necessity.
Over the past two decades, most telcos have evolved through rapid technological transitions:
- From 2G – 3G – 4G to 5G
- From hardware appliances to virtual network functions (VNFs)
- From on-premise OSS/BSS to cloud-native, API-based service layers
Each new generation was layered over the previous one, rarely replacing it entirely. This created deep technical debt in the form of aging routers, legacy signaling nodes, isolated subscriber databases, and overlapping monitoring tools.
This is the quiet legacy of growth: legacy telecom infrastructure that still runs mission-critical operations but doesn’t talk to newer components, doesn’t scale well, and isn’t documented thoroughly anymore.
The result? Every upgrade or optimization must tiptoe around what’s already there. Even launching a new mobile plan can touch six or more back-end systems, many of which were never built to work together.
Multi-Vendor Environments: Flexibility or Chaos?
Diversity of vendors is meant to encourage innovation and avoid lock-in. But in practice, it often creates a jungle.
One telco we worked with had over 40 vendors providing infrastructure, security, billing, customer management, and transport. Each system had its logging format, incident workflow, SLAs, and upgrade cycles. Teams were forced to maintain custom connectors to get data from one system to another.
This is a classic case of multi-vendor network management gone unmanaged.
Key challenges include:
- Protocol mismatch: Some systems use SNMPv2, others Netconf/YANG, others REST APIs.
- Security inconsistencies: Different authentication mechanisms across vendors create security holes or friction.
- Lack of unified observability: Events and metrics are fragmented, with no single pane of glass to act on.
- Redundant functions: Multiple vendors solving the same problem in different ways, wasting resources.
The operational cost of putting all this together is enormous, not just in money but also in engineering hours, testing delays, and incident response time.
Complexity’s Real Impact: The Operations Frontline
Let’s leave the architecture room and go to the NOC (Network Operations Center) floor.
Here’s what telecom network complexity looks like on a Tuesday:
- A customer reports intermittent latency. The Tier 1 agent escalates.
- Tier 2 engineers pull logs from four systems. The timestamps don’t match.
- A root cause is suspected—possibly a vendor edge device misbehaving—but confirming it requires looping in the vendor, who uses a different ticketing system.
- Meanwhile, the incident clocks 4 hours of downtime for a major client.
This isn’t a one-off. These are daily network operations bottlenecks—born from fragmented tooling, unclear ownership, and fragile data flows.
Even automation struggles. Most AI/ML models in telco operations depend on clean, correlated data. But complexity introduces noise, so automation fails, and humans jump back in.
Why Complexity Is Now a Strategic Risk
Beyond technical delays, complexity erodes a telco’s ability to compete.
Want to roll out a new B2B slice using 5G Standalone? Great. But if your BSS is hardcoded to your legacy provisioning engine, it’ll take months to customize the workflow. Meanwhile, a leaner competitor or an MVNO will beat you to market.
Want to run predictive maintenance on your core routers? If the telemetry system is siloed and 20% of nodes don’t report health consistently, your model won’t be reliable.
In short, complexity slows down agility. It drains innovation budgets on maintenance instead of transformation.
What NTQ Europe Has Helped Telcos Unlock
At NTQ Europe, we’ve supported telcos that were unsure if their systems were slow or just tangled.
We started with discovery: mapping dependencies between systems, identifying duplicated functionality, and benchmarking inter-system latency. Then we built shared data layers (often using open-source tools like Apache Kafka, ELK, or Prometheus), creating an abstraction layer that let teams act on unified insights.
In one case, we reduced incident triage time by 38%—not by adding AI, but by aligning logs, alerts, and workflows into a single response pipeline.
Because telecom network complexity doesn’t need a silver bullet, it needs visibility, modularity, and leadership ready to prioritize simplification over “just adding one more system.
