There was a time when working in telecommunications meant being inside an industry that seemed to grow almost naturally.
More customers. More coverage. More rollouts. More investment. More projects.
Today the feeling is different.
And I am not talking only about Chile.
In conversations with people across the industry, in Latin America and Europe, the same themes keep coming up: less capex, fewer large projects, more operational pressure, restructurings, consolidation, and ever-smaller teams.
Yet at the same time, networks have never been more important.
Traffic keeps rising. Customers consume more data than ever. Streaming keeps growing. The cloud keeps growing. Artificial intelligence is starting to push even more demand onto infrastructure, connectivity, and datacenters. Changes keep happening. Incidents still happen. Networks remain critical.
So an uncomfortable question appears:
what is really happening to the telco industry?
I am not a financial analyst or an economist. But I have spent years close to operations, rollouts, and complex telecom projects in both Latin America and Europe. From that experience, one thing feels clearer and clearer:
the work did not disappear.
What disappeared was the margin.
Chile: more pressure, less room to get it wrong
In Chile, over the last few years, the industry has gone through a complex mix of consolidations, restructurings, and extremely aggressive price competition.
Millicom’s arrival at Telefónica Chile came with a major headcount reduction. According to press reports, Millicom disclosed a reduction of roughly 35% of headcount in Chile after taking control of the operation, equivalent to about 1,130 people, based on staffing reported at the end of 2025. (La Tercera)
That number is not small.
When more than a thousand people leave one telco operator, the impact is not confined to that company. It hits the whole market.
Because many of those professionals have experience in similar areas: operations, networks, rollouts, field services, engineering, OSS, PMO, infrastructure, support, vendors, coordination.
And all of that happens in a context where the general feeling is that there is less large investment, fewer greenfield projects, and less room to absorb all that talent.
At the same time, ClaroVTR has also gone through integration and reorganization after its merger. It is not an isolated case. It is part of a broader trend: consolidate, remove duplication, simplify structures, and chase efficiency.
The problem is that networks do not get simpler because there are fewer people.
Quite the opposite.
Customers expect more speed. More stability. More coverage. More availability. More capacity. Fewer failures. A better experience.
While paying less.
And that is probably one of the industry’s big structural problems.
Cheap broadband has an invisible cost
In Chile today you can already find home fiber plans at very aggressive price points, often around CLP 14,000 or 18,000 per month, depending on promotions, coverage, and operator.
From the consumer’s point of view, that sounds great.
And in part it is.
But operationally, the equation is far more complex.
Because behind that customer there are still field technicians, support, routers, ONTs, backbone, power, monitoring, maintenance, crews, platforms, licenses, call centers, datacenters, and 24/7 operations.
And a single technical complaint with a home visit can wipe out the margin of several months of that service.
The paradox is brutal:
networks are more important to daily life than ever, but the base connectivity service seems to be worth less and less.
And the customer does not see all the complexity behind that operation.
For the end user, the emotional value is often no longer in “having internet.”
It is in Netflix. YouTube. TikTok. Spotify. Gaming. The cloud. AI.
The network became invisible.
Until it fails.
Telcos build the infrastructure, but others capture much of the value
That contrast is probably one of the most interesting things to watch in today’s industry.
Telcos still invest billions in fiber, mobile networks, backbone, datacenters, power, critical operations, and regional infrastructure.
But a large share of digital economic value seems to be captured by platforms that run on top of those same networks.
Netflix, for example, reported annual revenue of roughly USD 45 billion in 2025, with meaningful growth versus the prior year. (Netflix shareholder letter)
And that is not a dig at Netflix.
It is simply a signal of how the market changed.
For years, telcos were the center of the digital economy. Today they often function as the silent infrastructure underneath far more visible, more global, and in many cases more profitable platforms.
That completely changes the pressure on the business.
Because networks are still expensive to build and operate.
Very expensive.
But the market keeps pushing prices down.
The human impact almost nobody talks about
When a large telco cuts hundreds or thousands of positions, the problem does not end at that company.
It also saturates the telco labor market.
Suddenly, many professionals with similar experience are looking for opportunities at the same time.
PMs. Engineers. Network specialists. Operations people. Field teams. Support roles. Vendors. Technical coordinators. Rollout leads.
And if at the same time there is less capex, fewer projects, and less hiring, the result is obvious:
a lot of talent available, but less room to absorb it.
That drives more competition for roles, more uncertainty, more outsourcing, more temporary contracts, and more pressure on the teams that remain.
Because the work still exists.
Networks do not stop because there are fewer people. Incidents still happen. Change windows are still scheduled. Rollouts still move forward. Customers still complain when something fails.
The difference is that fewer people now have to sustain operations that are as complex as before—or more so.
Europe: the same pressure, different scale
What is interesting is that this pressure is not only felt in Chile or Latin America.
In Europe I have seen very similar dynamics.
The difference is scale.
Here the customer may pay more than in Chile, but costs are also much higher: salaries, vendors, power, operations, regulation, datacenters, support, and service levels.
And SLAs are often brutal.
Operational expectations are extremely high. Less tolerance for error. More process. More reporting. More demand on availability, continuity, and response times.
In that context, restructurings, smaller teams, and leaner operating models also show up.
I saw it up close in environments related to Liberty Global, VodafoneZiggo, and Infosys—not as a one-off, but as part of broader pressure: sustain critical infrastructure with less margin, less slack, and more demand.
VodafoneZiggo, for example, announced in 2025 a reduction of 400 positions after losing more than 40,000 customers in the first quarter of that year. (Broadband TV News)
Liberty Global has also continued moving toward a more focused structure and possible spin-offs of subsidiaries, as part of a broader group reorganization. (DatacenterDynamics)
It is basically the same story as in Latin America, with different numbers.
In Chile the pain shows up in aggressive pricing, commercial war, and low margin per customer.
In Europe it shows up in the cost to operate, regulation, market maturity, efficiency pressure, and SLAs.
But the underlying question is the same:
how do you sustain infrastructure that is more and more critical when the economic model squeezes from every side?
So what could the way out look like?
I do not have a closed answer.
And probably nobody has it completely.
The industry is evolving.
But I do not believe telcos can stay stuck selling ever-cheaper connectivity alone.
Because if the business shrinks to competing on price, margin will keep falling.
And if margin keeps falling, pressure on teams, operations, and investment will keep rising.
One possible path is to recapture more value inside the digital infrastructure.
Not only moving bits.
Also offering capabilities closer to the end customer: edge computing, regional datacenters, compute services, critical connectivity, low latency, security, cloud integration, enterprise services, and infrastructure ready for artificial intelligence.
Because at this pace, it does not seem reasonable to assume that all future demand for AI, data, and processing can concentrate in a few central points.
AI will probably live in many places at once.
In large datacenters. In public clouds. In private infrastructure. At the edge. Close to enterprises. Close to users. Close to devices. Close to where data is generated.
And there telcos could have an opportunity.
They have network. They have reach. They have sites. They have infrastructure. They have critical operations. They have physical proximity to the end user.
But capturing that opportunity means moving beyond the traditional role of connectivity provider.
It is not easy.
It takes investment, strategic focus, partnerships, technical talent, real automation, and a more ambitious vision than simply selling more megabits for less.
But maybe that is where part of the answer begins.
An essential industry, but under pressure
I do not think telecommunications is disappearing: AI, the cloud, streaming, and much of the modern economy lean on faster, more resilient networks. The counterweight is financial and operational pressure on those who build and operate them. If the limit is no longer only technical but economic, the open question is whether telcos will reinvent their role in time—or end up trapped in an industry that is more critical every day, but less and less profitable.
Claudio from ViaMind
Dare to imagine, create, and transform.
— Claudio
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