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Salience is on the ground in Nairobi, as government stakeholders and development partners align on the technical, financial, and governance roadmap to advance national connectivity.

Stay tuned, more videos and interviews are coming soon.

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The discussion focused on tower fiberization, open-access FTTx, and more efficient management of state-owned fiber assets. A breakout session identified key benefits, risks, and practical next steps to advance these proposals.

There was strong interest and active participation, highlighting momentum to support the new government’s forward-looking digital agenda.

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Bringing together IPAs from all 21 COMESA Member States, alongside investors, policymakers, and development partners, the forum enabled high-impact B2B and G2B discussions on growth sectors, market entry strategies, and sustainable collaboration.

The agenda featured ICT-focused high-level forums on ICT and BPO investment, as well as discussions on investing across the artificial intelligence stack, highlighting the growing importance of digital transformation across the region.

A great opportunity to connect, exchange insights, and support Africa’s ongoing economic transformation.

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Connectivity will no longer be something you buy or even use. It will be something that breathes.

You’ll step into a park, and the environment will already understand your context, not your identity, but your intent. A bench warms as you approach, anticipating your arrival through a quiet exchange between your health systems and the city’s network. The air subtly adjusts around you, shaped in real time by a mesh of sensors, satellites, and edge intelligence working in concert.

No device is opened. No service is invoked. The network does not respond, it anticipates.

Your AI companion, a persistent presence shaped across your wearables, your car, and your home, will have quietly secured a slice of the city’s 6G fabric to run a real-time language model that helps a tourist nearby ask you for directions. No device was unlocked. No plan was checked. The network simply facilitated the moment, then dissolved the connection like a thought.

When you need to work, your reality will gently fracture. A private, quantum-encrypted workspace will materialize around you in AR, hosted on a sovereign cloud in another country, delivered via a seamless chain of satellite, local fiber, and personal body area network, all orchestrated by an AI that you trust more than your own memory.

The old metrics like bandwidth, latency, subscriptions will sound like ancient concerns: like discussing the “horsepower” of electricity. The new metrics will be fidelity, trust, and flow. How faithfully can the network represent the physical world in digital space? How implicitly can it be trusted with your context? How effortlessly can it enable moments of human connection, discovery, and care?

In this world, the most valuable operators won’t sell connectivity. They will sell certainty; the mathematical guarantee that the right connection will exist at the precise moment it needs to, anywhere on Earth or above it. They will be silent architects of ambient possibility, the engineers of serendipity.

The infrastructure won’t be in the ground or the sky. It will be in the context, and the winner will be the one who designs the protocol for how the world introduces itself to you.

The Core Thesis: What must be true for this world to exist?

The next period will witness the Great Unbundling of telecommunications. The legacy, vertically integrated model (own the network, sell the service, bill the customer) will be dismantled. Value will migrate upwards to experience platforms and downwards to cloud-native infrastructure, leaving traditional operators squeezed in the middle.

This isn’t just evolution; it’s a rearchitecting of the industry’s very foundations. The winners won’t be those with the most towers, but those who control the most valuable layers of intelligence and access in the new stack.

The New Telecom Stack: The architecture underlying the Sentient City

The Great Unbundling

The telecom industry is not evolving – it is unbundling.

For decades, operators thrived on vertical integration: owning infrastructure, controlling the network, and managing the customer relationship. That model is now breaking apart. The stack is fragmented into distinct layers, each with different economics, and each being captured by different players.

• At the top, experience is owned by platforms that control user context.
• At the bottom, infrastructure is becoming a capital-efficient utility.
• In the middle, traditional operators are being squeezed.

This is not just a shift in value; it is a shift in control.

Customer ownership moves up. Capital efficiency moves down. And in between, intelligence becomes the new battleground. The implication is clear: you can no longer compete across the entire stack.

You have to choose where you play – and rebuild for it.

The Four Battlegrounds

Battleground 1: The Operating System War

• The Future: AI as the network OS, enabling zero-touch, self-optimizing infrastructure.
• The Bottleneck: Legacy OSS/BSS systems aren’t just old; they are active inhibitors. They cannot represent network state in real-time, which is the fundamental prerequisite for an AI OS.
• The Strategic Move: The first operator to successfully abstract its network capabilities into a real-time digital twin will create an unbeatable advantage.

This is not an IT project; it is the core strategic project.

Battleground 2: The Perimeter War

• The Future: Seamless Fixed-Mobile-Satellite convergence.
• The Bottleneck: This isn’t just a technical integration challenge. It is a geopolitical and regulatory nightmare. National borders, spectrum sovereignty, and security laws conflict directly with the physics of LEO satellites and cloud-based cores.
• The Strategic Move: Success belongs to those who navigate regulation as a core competency. Partnerships like “Starlink + Local Telco” are not commercial deals first; they are regulatory Trojan horses.

Battleground 3: The Interface War

• The Future: Handsetless, ambient communication.
• The Bottleneck: We are waiting for the “iPhone moment” for AR glasses. It won’t be better batteries alone; it will be unignorable, must have application (likely in social, healthcare, or enterprise productivity) that demands the new form factor.
• The Strategic Move: Stop betting on devices. Start betting on context aware applications that leverage your network’s unique capabilities (ultra-low latency, precise location). The device follows the app.

Battleground 4: The Business Model War

• The Future: Dynamic, personalized service bundles.
• The Bottleneck: Legacy billing systems aren’t just rigid; they are philosophically opposed to the future. They cannot conceptualize, let alone price, a “session” that moves from satellite to 5G to Wi-Fi with guaranteed latency for a cloud AI agent.
• The Strategic Move: The business model must be built on new transactional systems from day one. This is why cloud native operators (Jio, Rakuten) have a decade long lead. For incumbents, this requires a greenfield “reinventing” for billing, isolated from the legacy tumor.

The Three Prime Examples & Their Likely Fates

The Strategic Inflection Point: Now

The decisions made in the next 24-36 months will determine which archetype each player becomes for the next decade.

For the Traditional Telco Leader, the mandate is stark:

Author

Vasko Najkov

Principal Consultant

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Our regional client footprint has expanded to Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania and Comoros as well as extension of services with new clients coming from the energy sector. This followed more engagements with EU funds and regional private equity investors.

We look forward to continuing to support transformative initiatives that drive long-term impact across Kenya and the wider region.

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Ethiopia hosts over one million refugees under one of Africa’s most progressive refugee policies. Expanding reliable broadband infrastructure in refugee and host community areas is critical to enabling humanitarian operations and unlocking access to communication, education, financial services, and other essential services. Digital inclusion is not just about connectivity, it is a foundation for resilience, economic participation, and long-term integration.

As part of this initiative, our team is currently on a mission in Ethiopia, working closely with the ECA project team and meeting key stakeholders from both private and public domains. The objective is clear: translate assessment insights into actionable, high-impact interventions that accelerate deployment, strengthen coordination, and ensure sustainable connectivity solutions that meaningfully improve the lives of refugees and host communities alike.

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At Salience, we are incredibly proud to have supported Beyon throughout the analytical and bid preparation journey behind this win. From financial, technical and commercial analysis to strategic positioning and bid development, this was a true team effort so we are very happy with the successful selection.

The announcement, made in Kuwait by KAPP, marks the next phase in establishing a project company under a 50-year Public Private Partnership agreement. Under this agreement, Beyon will design, finance, build, operate, and maintain Kuwait’s nationwide high-speed fiber broadband network, with a total investment exceeding $2.8 billion over the lifetime of the partnership.

As someone who has been involved in a number of regional national fibre broadband initiatives and successful implementation in Oman we are looking forward to Kuwait’s new developments!

Proud of the Salience team behind this success story.

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At Salience, we’ve spent the last three years turning orbital ambition into grounded reality. Our track record now includes:
– LEO Satellite Ventures: Delivered demand and commercial studies for major LEO projects across the MEA region.
– National Strategy: Developed the business case for a new Middle Eastern satellite venture.
– Infrastructure Rollout: Supported the deployment of Satellite Ground Stations in the Middle East.
– Market Intelligence: Performed deep-dive LEO demand studies for the African continent.

What’s next?

We are currently securing advisory projects for National Space Programs and the development of new
launch pads in developing countries, including transaction advisory for commercial spaceports.

As the “Telco to TechCo” evolution hits orbit, we are here to ensure your strategy is bankable and your
infrastructure is ready for take-off.

Watch this space. We are taking off.

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