If history tells us anything it is that unit economics always goes south. Right now, the tech industry is talking like AI revenue will follow AI demand – a little delayed, but smart-ish, and almost exactly: more prompts, more tokens, more value. But that is not the way this goes. The great infrastructure booms of the digital age – bandwidth, compute, storage – were metered and monetized, and none of them hockey-sticked into perpetual profit growth. Demand spiralled upwards and value spread outwards, and went elsewhere across platforms and applications – while the price for an internet session or a CPU cycle plateaued and declined.

So we should take Huawei’s address about telco tokenomics with a pinch of salt – and maybe just as a pitch to rally the troops ahead of the 6G investment cycle.

Because if that’s the grand plan – billing by the token – to revitalize telco economics, then it seems pretty lame. Yes, it is something telcos should do, as a way to meter unpredictable AI traffic on their networks, and it sure sounds clever (novel and alliterative), but it is only another unit metric for connecting workloads – which in the end no one will care very much about, just like their minute, SMS, and megabyte bundles. It is not a long game, and it assumes, somehow, the token itself is valuable – that AI creates token demand, which can be monetized by telcos in token transport and access. That is the bull case. For frontier model builders, tokens are the whole business model.

They largely / hardly-enough monetize through token-based subscriptions and licenses. But we have also been here before; this stuff usually gets commoditized. Will tokens be abundant and cheap like bytes of data and CPU hours or more scarce and valuable, and fought over, like oil. More than that: which will they be for telcos, which have a history of confusing traffic growth with revenue growth. More probably, they become an internal wholesale metric, while customers pay for agents, workflows, solutions – and outcomes!!! That’s the bear case. Ask the IoT crowd, or the private 5G one – which have re-learned how to sell critical tech, in ways funny talk about tokenomics does not address.

Telcos should be careful about assuming that just because model companies charge by the token today, tokens are where long-term value resides – especially while the whole AI market is being continually optimized for cheaper inference, smaller models, local execution, and token efficiency. In fact, every major force in AI is pushing against token scarcity. I mean, that’s the real play for telcos, right, as we have written in these pages for a year at least – how they are embedded into the edge-creep, as inference moves to devices, machines, appliances in edge infrastructure – and as the token model starts to look like the old cloud model: initially valuable, quickly commoditized.

See the interview last week with Orange from FutureNet World, and the review this week of Nokia at DTW – about cross-domain edge-to-cloud telco platforms anchored in critical services, sovereignty, and trust – rather than just connectivity. And actually, Huawei and China Telecom are on firmer, if more familiar, ground when they talk about AI-native orchestration. Strip away the token rhetoric and what remains is not really a new monetization unit at all, but the same drawn-out shift: connectivity absorbed into a broader services fabric. Which is where the story is: not about a “token economy” that rescues telcos, but a subtle re-rating of networks as part of the AI execution environment – hosting inference, enforcing policy, enabling locality, and binding distributed compute together.

James Blackman
Executive Editor
RCR Wireless News

RCR Top Stories

Huawei at MWC: Huawei told MWC Shanghai that telcos must prepare for a new era of AI-driven token monetization, requiring AI-native networks, integrated computing, and new business models as the industry advances toward 6G.

AI-native 6G: AI-native 6G needs unified network-cloud architectures capable of orchestrating connectivity, compute, and intelligence simultaneously. So says China Telecom at MWC Shanghai.

Nokia agents: Nokia and Google Cloud are building six Gemini agents into Nokia’s Assurance Center suite, with a “glass box” approach that keeps engineers in control of high-risk network decisions.

AN maturity: Autonomous network maturity varies by operational domain, with progress determined less by technology than by data quality, integration readiness and governance foundations. Nemanja Prekovic at Avenga explains.

Smart telcos: AI is pushing telcos beyond network autonomy. Wipro explains how the industry’s next transformation will create intelligent, adaptive organizations designed to learn, decide, and grow in real time.

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Insights and Opinion

AI in India: Reliance Intelligence is ramping up its AI ambitions with a sovereign compute platform in Jamnagar, multilingual AI services, and partnerships with Google and Meta aimed at lowering AI costs in India.

Telco controls: Telco vendors are rushing agentic AI into OSS and BSS stacks – hard, at DTW Ignite this week. Nokia is working with AWS and Databricks to build the data, cloud, and control layers for autonomous networks.

LLM framework: A new telco LLM agent framework called TelcoAgent forecasts seven 5G KPMs across 200 cells and ties each diagnosis to 3GPP standards, aiming for explainable, auditable network automation.

D2D for all: Satellite D2D tech is proven, but ubiquitous D2D coverage depends on interoperability, argues Lee McKnight at Syracuse University. Cooperation between carriers, satellite operators, and regulators is essential, he says.

Golden opportunity: Telcos have spent years being told they’re irrelevant. Cloud players ate their lunch, OTT players took their money. That narrative is now dead – replaced by an opportunity most telco boardrooms haven’t understood yet.

What We’re Reading

Qualcomm DCs: Qualcomm is targeting data centers as part of a broad diversification strategy, with focus also on automotive, IoT and other AI infra, raising its 2029 non-handset revenue outlook to $40bn.

Level 4 blueprint: e& UAE and TM Forum have a blueprint for Level 4 autonomy by 2030, using AI, closed-loop automation, and cross-domain intelligence to improve efficiency, customer experience, and sustainability in network operations.

IoT to hit 5.9bn: Omdia says cellular IoT connections will reach 5.9bn by 2035, driven by 5G tech such as RedCap, with expanding growth in automotive and higher demand for data-driven connected services.

$3.5bn for AWS-3: The FCC has concluded its AWS-3 auction, raising over $3.5bn and allocating 200 mid-band licenses for commercial use. Strong bidding suggests demand for future auctions, including the Upper C-Band for 5G/6G.

Singtel recycles: Singtel has sold a 2.8% stake in Gulf Development for about S$1bn, as part of its ongoing asset recycling strategy to unlock value, generate gains, and redeploy capital toward future growth investments.

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