For decades, telecom has been powerful, but opaque. Networks have delivered five-nines reliability and global reach while being locked behind rigid contracts, legacy systems and operator-centric economics. But building on them? That required contracts, regulatory negotiation and months of manual provisioning. Telecom became a moat controlled by operators, not innovators.
Then came the software-first wave. API-driven, developer friendly connectivity platforms emerged that promised to fix the issue with simplicity, abstraction and speed. “We’re not a telecom company,” they said, but then they went too far in flattening telecom’s complexity. In some ways these companies succeeded by making it easier to start. Ultimately they stripped away the things that made telecom powerful. Most MVNOs today still launch with pre-set SKUs, carrier imposed pricing and little ability to differentiate beyond brand.
OXIO was built to break that ceiling. We make telecom consumable, like software, without sacrificing its value.
Telecom should be consumable like software
At the heart of OXIO’s Telecom-as-a-Service (TaaS) platform is a simple but radical idea: telecom connectivity should be programmable and as easy to consume as software. We’ve built an abstraction layer over our own core network that exposes lifecycle management, analytics and global connectivity through simple APIs. Rather than compromising what makes telecom powerful, we’re exposing it in a way that it’s never been seen before. In doing so, we’ve eradicated endless spreadsheets, carrier negotiations and multi-month project timelines that have made the industry difficult to deal with and impossible for some to even enter.
OXIO customers don’t need to be telco experts in order to build and scale MVNO or M2M products. MVNOs, enterprises, fintechs, and M2M/IoT players interact with OXIO the same way they use modern software platforms – via automation, APIs, and real-time data.
They build their own offerings and their own go-to-market as if they were an MNO without constraint. And unlike software-wrapped resellers, OXIO didn’t just bolt APIs on top of someone else’s network – we built our own telecom core.
Where the others stopped short
To their credit, many of our competitors’ software platforms genuinely improved the developer experience. They made onboarding easier, whey wrapped telecom in cleaner APIs, and talked a lot about how they weren’t telecom companies.
But that is also the tell.
Most software-first telecom platforms say it to signal simplicity, but in practice it means they’ve chosen not to engage with the core of the telecom stack. They’re dancing over it. Repurposing what already exists. And they’re building their business on what the carriers are willing to offer.
That’s fine if your goal is resale, not reinvention, but real telecom innovation doesn’t come from skimming the surface. It comes from going deep: owning the core, rethinking the architecture and productizing the things that used to be buried in RANs, roaming agreements and regulatory silos.
At OXIO we didn’t just integrate with telecom, we are intentionally telecom and software. We became Telecom-as-a-Service to enable our customers to build what hasn’t been built yet. If you want to build the future of connectivity, being “not a telecom company” isn’t a strategy… it’s a ceiling.
In the resale model, the customer is really the MNO because the job of the software platform, MVNE or MVNA simply becomes to help that operator extend theirther reach, move wholesale capacity and acquire indirect users. Unique use cases that move the market forward and benefit enterprises, MVNOs and M2Ms become afterthoughts in favor of faster access to the same old plans.
The result is a familiar pattern of limited control, thin margins and little differentiation outside of splashy marketing.
That’s not a platform for builders. It’s a distribution channel.
What OXIO’s Telecom-as-a-Service platform preserves
Most “not-a-telco” platforms are optimized to help MNOs move wholesale capacity – not help you build a connectivity product. They may not say it, but the reality is that their customers are the MNOs. You can see this in the way they offer (and won’t offer) certain commercial models.
OXIO is built for you – the MVNO, fintech or enterprise that needs carrier-grade power without carrier-style complexity. The platform is designed to surface the building blocks that actually matter when you’re building a real connectivity business:
Flexibility – The ability to design, price, evolve and customize MVNO and M2M solutions that meet your needs and without complex rearchitecting
Cross-border scale – Connect globally and execute across borders and use cases without artificial geographic limitations
Control – Hands on administration over policies, usage, quality of service, pricing models and the end-customer experience paired with near owner-level economics to compete meaningfully against carriers
Globalization that reflects reality – Devices, users and businesses don’t stop at national borders and neither should their network
For mobility and M2M use cases, these aren’t “nice to haves.” They’re table stakes for anyone embedding connectivity into their business.
What CAMARA Enables, and what it can’t
This tension shows up clearly in industry initiatives like the GSMA’s CAMARA standard. CAMARA is directionally right: standardizing what operators are willing to expose via APIs reduces friction and improves consistency at the edge of the network. But for MVNOs and enterprises trying to build real connectivity businesses, CAMARA reveals the limits of consensus-driven innovation. By definition, CAMARA exposes only what all operators agree is safe to commoditize, not what builders need to operate, differentiate, and compete. Subscriber economics, lifecycle control, cross-border behavior, policy, and quality of service remain largely out of scope. A Telecom-as-a-Service model challenges that ceiling.
OXIO is not optimized for operator alignment; it is optimized for builder control. It’s optimized for everyone who needs the full capabilities of the telecom ecosystem to enable their business without having to go through the hassles that that need would otherwise require. We go deeper than industry consensus, owning and productizing the hardest parts of telecom so MVNOs and embedded connectivity players can operate with real authority and not just integrate against a standardized surface.
Telecom-as-a-Service gives the power to operate, not just resell
OXIO’s platform delivers the ease, speed and clarity of modern software and the economic and operational power traditionally reserved for network owners.
That means our customers don’t just resell telecom – they operate it. They create unique experiences, launch branded MVNOs, build embedded connectivity products, and power new M2M use cases without rewriting their stack or their business model.
And it matters because the businesses with real capital that are trying to enter the telecom market today aren’t MNOs trying to expand their footprint. They’re:
- Fintechs embedding connectivity into their apps
- Enterprises building global communication compliance into their workflows
- M2M and IoT providers that need consistent, low-cost, cross-border scale
They don’t want to “access a network.” They want telecom that works like software, and works for their business.
A telecom network built for the buyer, not the carrier
OXIO’s platform was intentionally designed for these new buyers. That’s why we focus on transparent and scalable commercial models, programmable control with deep visibility, global reach with local compliance, and the freedom to innovate without renegotiating the network every time.
We respect what telecom does best. Instead of flattening it, we’re working to amplify it. OXIO turned the network into a software abstraction layer enabling customers to move faster, build smarter and rely on the strengths only telecom can deliver at scale.
In the end, we didn’t choose between software simplicity and telecom power. We built a platform that delivers both.
