Adil Belihomji joined OXIO as CTO back in August 2023 after a long career at Verizon, spanning nearly two decades. Evan Kirstel, a B2B and telecom online influencer, invited Adil onto his popular podcast to talk about all things telecom. The duo discussed OXIO’s vision, the reason behind Adil’s move to the company, AI and customer experience, and what the future might hold for the telecom industry. In this blog, we’ll give a pared-down recap of their insightful conversation.
Evan Kirstel: Can you give a snapshot of OXIO’s vision around changing the game in telecom and disrupting the traditional telecom methods?
Adil: When you look at the traditional telecom industry, you have a blueprint for MNOs and MVNOs, and then you have your systems integrators (SI’s) and MVNE’s that come into the picture to connect those two types of organizations together. That has been how telecom has worked up until now.
We’ve seen industries that have been disrupted, think Amazon and Uber, and this hasn’t happened in telecom yet. Innovation at that scale hasn’t existed predominantly because of the legacy nature of telecom as an industry.
We are now seeing industries like retail and fintech, who are seeing the potential power of moving into the telecom world, but have no idea on how to do it.
What we’re doing at OXIO is propelling telecom into the future by bringing in new and exciting concepts that allow retailers or any of these other industries thinking about telecom, to provide connectivity experiences in their own space. We’re doing this in a way that means they won’t have to go to an SI or MVNE, they’ll be able to connect into our portal where they’ll have access to the services they need around voice, SMS and data.
We believe we’ve made a great platform that’s flexible, secure and customer-obsessed. This really changes the game for new entrants. It’s made easy for them with an out-of-the-box solution. We believe that’s the path of the future and the new age of telecom.
Evan Kirstel: You talk about launching services in under 3 months. What’s the secret in being able to move so quickly, compared to the 18 months to 2 years which is typical in telco land?
Adil: We look at ourselves as an MVNX, if you will. We have the platform that is connected to various MNOs, whether that’s in the US, Mexico or general LATAM region. OXIO provides a turn-key solution where MVNOs can quickly sign-up and create their plans and offerings and start providing the best customer experiences.
We actually come in with our own core, we are not an SI, that hooks into an MNOs core and allows you to get voice, SMS and data. That means we own our own network and it gives us the flexibility to then provide a customized solution to MVNOs. You don’t have to think about the OSS/BSS layer or provisioning- that’s a legacy mind-set. You can just have the OXIO platform that gives you that turn-key solution with all of the things you need in order to provide connectivity to your customers.
All our customers have to worry about is what experience they’re providing to their customers. They don’t have to worry about the complexities of telecom, as OXIO manages that for them. Customers can then just focus on the customer experience where connectivity is tied to their core product and services offering.
Evan Kirstel: Talk about your approach to multi-carrier networks vs a traditional single carrier set-up. How do you manage all of that complexity with multiple carriers?
Adil: When we start to think about connectivity across MNOs , we create separate profiles that allow us to be on carrier A vs carrier B, and depending on cost, connectivity and coverage, we can dynamically move the end consumer on to the right carrier at the right time.
We have the capability to profile a SIM in a way that enables the end user to jump from carrier to carrier within one country as well as globally. If you think about an MVNO targeting international travelers, or an MVNO who wants to offer cross-border plans, or an MVNO who wants to give access to plans to family members who live abroad- this type of offering is great. There are so many more offerings that could be created that reside on top of legacy MNO connectivity. You could have a single SIM that works across borders so the end user is not getting surprised by roaming charges as your connectivity is already predetermined.
That is what customers want. They want to know what to expect so they don’t get a bill shock after going on vacation.
We believe that we have that secret sauce where we can enable the multi-carrier option and have the components available to customers to roam across multiple carriers- you could also trigger that based on AI, or you can trigger it based on the settings you can actually create within the OXIO portal.
When you’re connected to the OXIO core, when we start plugging into multiple carriers around the world, you would effectively always have that local rate within the country you’re traveling in.
Evan Kirstel: The other thing you talk about is AI and personalization, something traditional telcos haven’t really done much with. How do you see telecom data in terms of personalization of services and customer experience?
Adil: No dig on the MNOs of the world, but when you think about how they’ve moved into AI- they have created systems on systems on systems where they’ve then found use cases within those systems and then they’ve built AI on top of them. You now have multiple brains telling them how an action should be performed. This means when you walk into a store, it’s like the first time they’ve met you. You then walk out of the store and call customer services, and again, it’s like the first time they’ve met you.
Evan: Except for Apple, they do this well.
Adil: I could argue that there could be a time when others can compete with Apple on the customer experience.
When you’re able to have a 360 degree view of your customer adding the components that feed in from the telco layer, you can start gathering data that comes from the telco side and exposing that data through our APIs. You can think of it like a digital twin where you can be very aware and very context sensitive to what your customers are doing, or what they want to do. You can add AI models on top of this too.
This allows you to go down and market to a segment of one, instead of marketing to an audience of tens of thousands, and you as the brand know what your customers have done and what they’re planning to do next, so you can interact with them in a meaningful and data-driven way.
We’ve got an example based in Mexico, that’s a ride share App. We know where the customer has traveled based on their location gear that they’ve created. We can effectively help them with the connectivity of the retailer and with the connectivity of their own App, giving them a heaped view of what’s happening within their customer base. From this, they can figure out where they’re required most in terms of rideshares and where they’re required most from a retail standpoint.
Using this data from a personalization and delivery standpoint and helping brands – most will already have churn models in place, but that’s what I’d call plain vanilla. You need to graduate to experiences that are differentiated from others and that can make a real difference to the customer.
It’s not just about buying and selling, it’s about giving them the best possible experience at any given point in time.
When you provide capabilities for MVNOs to actually build out AI-driven plans e.g. try before you buy, where MVNO’s learn about how their customers use their mobile plans during the trial period, so that the MVNO can then tailor the end plan to their specific usage needs based on this data.
The mobile plans OXIO is able to create are very different to those of traditional MNOs. MNOs want a kind of certainty around their ARPU that means they don’t offer huge flexibility and variations to the plans MVNOs can sell. If you flip that on its head and provide certainty to the customer, you will generally get certainty on the ARPU.
If you think about the AI models, and try before you buy, and the customizations of the plans and service, OXIO can actually provide that flexibility and control to the MVNO, so that they can tailor the services that they want to offer to their end customer. That gives them that clean flexibility of actually having plans, services and models defined in a way where you’ve got an AI model created, the plan that you actually offer and then adding in whether it’s unlimited or has certain domains or Apps zero-rated etc. It’s a fantastic way of getting things done.
Evan Kirstel: Why OXIO? You could have gone and done anything you wanted with your career and background, so why join OXIO?
Adil: I’ve had the pleasure of being with Verizon for a very long time and really loved it there as it gave me the opportunity to grow in my career and see various aspects of the telecom industry, whether that be on the OSS side, the network side, or the products and service side. Building out the sub-brand of Verizon really opened my eyes to what the telco of the future might be and what state-of-the-art telecom might look like.
Looking at OXIO and their vision, and speaking with Nico who is OXIO’s CEO, the vision was very similar to how I saw the future of telecom and how I saw the landscape changing. With 5G, 5GSA, the enterprise world and with all of the other things we could potentially see, I feel like we’re on the cusp of dynamic change in the industry.
You really need a platform that makes it simple enough for people to have a turnkey solution. If you don’t have that, you’re always going to be in that legacy spiral of one year to sixteen months of trying to deploy any type of service.
OXIO has that secret sauce. To build on top of that secret sauce with my experience, and the experience of people on the team like Glenn Teuber from GoogleFi, we have this acute opportunity of turning the industry on its head and having a solution, much like disruptors AWS or Uber that are out there.
Having the capability of having strong and reliable connectivity, having unrivaled flexibility, being completely customer-obsessed – those are all strong characteristics of a strong player in the market and that’s where I feel OXIO is heading. Having that global footprint as well, has not been done before, which is what makes this even more exciting.
Watch the full podcast episode below:
Parts of this podcast conversation have been updated to improve the readability of the content.
