BT and Verizon have signed an agreement to combine their international enterprise operations into a 50:50 joint venture — a new platform serving more than 3,000 multinational customers across 180-plus countries, representing close to $4 billion in combined annual revenue. Congratulations. BT has been a CPaaSAA member for several years, and this is a genuinely big moment — for BT, and for the wider ecosystem we’re all building together.
This isn’t a one-off, either. Back in May, we wrote about BT International’s launch of UC Edge — already a genuinely interesting move at the time, and everything we said about it still holds true. These guys are on a roll, and this joint venture just gives that momentum a much bigger stage.
Building Global Fabric Was a Real Feat
A lot of the commentary since the announcement has focused on deal mechanics — the scale, the equalisation payment, the inevitable comparisons to Concert twenty-five years ago. We’ll come back to that. First, the part worth celebrating properly: Global Fabric, BT’s SD-WAN and cloud connectivity platform, is being positioned as the orchestration foundation for the new venture, and getting there wasn’t easy. Building genuinely AI-ready network infrastructure — not just designing it on a slide, but actually shipping it and getting it working in the real world — is hard. BT has done it. That’s an achievement worth recognising on its own terms, regardless of what happens with the JV from here. Credit to Colin Bannon and the team behind it.
Ignore the Cynics
Here’s where we want to be direct. A lot of the reaction to this deal has reached straight for Concert — the BT/AT&T venture that struggled twenty-five years ago — as though history simply repeats itself and nothing has changed since. We’ve seen the same reflex before, almost word for word, applied to Network APIs: “we tried this a decade ago and it didn’t work, so it won’t work now.” That’s an easy thing to say and a lazy way to think. The world has moved on. Telcos are changing, customer demand is changing, and the AI era is creating exactly the kind of infrastructure need — trusted, sovereign, intelligent routing of both voice and data across borders — that didn’t exist in anything like this form ten or twenty-five years ago. Learning from past mistakes is smart. Assuming the past always repeats itself is not. We’d rather back the people building something new than join the chorus telling them it can’t be done.
There’s a broader pattern behind that cynicism worth naming. Look at how the AI and IT world operates right now — hundreds of billions committed to AI infrastructure, entire companies built on conviction that ambition alone will pull the technology and the market forward. Nobody there writes off a hard problem as impossible before it’s even been tried. Telecom deserves some of that same energy, and it’s genuinely good to see it show up here. As the old line goes — whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right. Betting against ambitious builders because “telco has never been good at this” is just the past-repeats-itself reflex wearing a different outfit, and it’s exactly the mindset that keeps this industry stuck.
BT and Verizon aren’t the only ones doing this, either. Proximus Global — an Accelerate member of CPaaSAA — has been on a similar path over the past couple of years, combining assets into something genuinely new rather than chasing scale for its own sake. These are two real examples of ambitious global telco plays where combination comes with an actual story of innovation attached to it, not just cost-cutting dressed up as strategy. That’s worth being genuinely excited about.
Why This Matters So Much Right Now
Sovereign, trust-first infrastructure that can route both voice and data intelligently across a fragmented, tightly regulated global environment is becoming one of the most important pieces of the puzzle in this new world order — data privacy rules, the Cloud Act, and a growing list of jurisdictions that all want their own answer to where data lives and who can access it. That’s precisely the kind of infrastructure this industry has been saying it needs for years. Seeing a global-scale player emerge that’s actually built for that, rather than just talking about it, is exactly the kind of progress worth getting behind.
Real Proof It Works
BT already has the receipts to back this up. The Five9 partnership has delivered real, measurable outcomes — latency down more than 30% across multiple regions, call drop-out rates falling from 18% to under 1%, and a Five9 Customer Outcome Award for BT Business earlier this year. With Global Fabric maturing and the new joint venture giving BT a bigger platform to build from, there’s real reason to believe BT can bring more partners like Five9 onto this network, for more brands, at more scale.
What’s Next
There’s still a lot of work ahead — building this out globally, proving the model at scale, and yes, there will be real challenges along the way. We won’t pretend otherwise. But the direction is right, and it’s the direction the whole industry needs right now. The critical questions — what could go wrong, what to watch for — are conversations we’re happy to have directly with BT, as a member and a partner. Publicly, our job is simpler: to celebrate this, support it, and help it succeed.
This is exactly the kind of story that belongs at CASA26 in Amsterdam this September — not as an aside, but close to the heart of it. The ecosystem is working out, in real time, how intelligence and trust get built into the network itself, not just the layers running on top of it, and how that has to connect with APIs, platforms and everything else this industry needs to get right for an AI-driven future. BT and Verizon just built something that sits squarely inside that conversation. CASA26 is where we don’t just talk about that future — it’s where the ecosystem actually builds it together.
My lifetime in IT and telecoms has been dedicated to innovation, building bridges and creating change. From the early days of cloud communications to working with operators on innovations and business development, and currently emphasizing APIs, CPaaS/CX and AI, my journey has been one of continuous evolution.
As founding partner at CPaaS Acceleration Alliance and The Next Cloud I'm privileged to help global telcos and techcos thrive in a fast changing world - through events, community building, strategy and global business development. I thrive on challenges and change, strategizing in cloud communications, and bringing people together for mutual success. Travel and continuous learning are my passions.
I believe the global communications industry is pivoting to prioritize customer experience and impactful solutions over mere technology and platforms, and we can tackle societal challenges by merging the strengths of corporates and innovators within new ecosystems.
Comments are closed