The End of Telco Gs
sebastianbarros.substack.com
Dec. 12, 2025, 5:53 a.m.
For the last twenty years, the Telco industry behaved like a controlled ecosystem in which one species dominated most of the investment, energy, and attention: radio. The G cycles were our Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. 3G, then 4G, then 5G—each presented as a new epoch, each delivering meaningful improvements, but none altering the underlying organism. More antennas, more mid-band, higher-order MIMO, better silicon, better spectral efficiency, yet the same radio architecture adapting within the same ecological niche. Approximately 70% of operator capex was allocated to radio networks, and approximately 60% of operator opex was related to radio performance, energy, and maintenance. What sustained dinosaurs' dominance for so long were stable environmental conditions. In telecom, the equivalent was data traffic.