The Next Communications Shift: Are Service Providers Ready To Capitalize?

Service providers have lived through plenty of technology transitions. Analog became digital. The PSTN gave way to IP. PBXs moved to the cloud. Hosted PBX became UCaaS. Fiber reshaped broadband.

The next five years may be different.

Two major shifts are happening at the same time. AI is changing what businesses expect technology to do. And new connectivity options are changing how those businesses get connected in the first place.

For service providers, that creates a bigger question than which technology wins:

Where should you invest today if you want your customer relationships – and your business – to be worth more five years from now?

AI Is Changing What Customers Value

AI has moved quickly from experimentation into everyday business use. McKinsey’s 2025 global AI survey found that 88% of respondents said their organizations regularly use AI in at least one business function.

Those expectations are already reshaping business communications.

Modern communications platforms are no longer expected simply to connect a call or deliver a message. They are increasingly expected to understand interactions, retrieve relevant business information, identify sentiment and patterns, summarize conversations, initiate follow-up and, in some cases, take action without human intervention.

We are already seeing that transition with Intermedia’s Ascend Intelligent Communications Platform, built for Service Providers. Capabilities such as AI call and meeting recaps, interaction intelligence, Agentic AI Receptionist and AI-assisted contact center experiences are moving communications beyond connectivity and toward intelligence and automation.

Connectivity Is Changing, Too 

Change is also happening underneath those applications. 

Starlink is demonstrating that high-performance broadband no longer always requires extending a terrestrial network all the way to a customer. Fixed wireless, 5G and future access technologies will continue expanding customer choice. 

Fiber still holds important advantages in capacity, symmetrical bandwidth, predictable performance and network control. But alternatives don’t need to outperform fiber everywhere to be disruptive. They only need to become good enough for enough customers to consider them credible. 

That changes the strategic question for an SP investing heavily in fiber. 

Not simply: 

How do we protect the value of our fiber? 

But: 

How do we make our relationship with the customer using that fiber harder to replace? 

Own the Customer – Not Every Layer of the Stack 

Recent moves by major carriers offer an interesting signal. 

AT&T and Verizon continue to invest aggressively in fiber and broader customer relationships, while Verizon has also told investors it is reducing or eliminating investment in non-core and legacy areas, including Business Wireline, legacy copper and voice platforms. 

The message for SPs isn’t to stop investing in technology. It’s to think carefully about where ownership creates differentiation – and where it simply consumes capital and resources. 

For decades, owning the network and owning the voice platform naturally went together. 

That assumption deserves another look. 

The market has already shown what can happen when communications platforms fail to keep pace with changing customer requirements. Many premises-based PBX platforms have disappeared or lost relevance, and SP-operated platforms face the same fundamental challenge: keeping up with rapid innovation across AI, omnichannel communications, integrations and automation.  

Every dollar devoted to engineering, integrations, capacity, data centers, platform maintenance and support competes with investment in fiber expansion, customer acquisition, AI, security, automation and recurring services that can improve growth, margins and customer retention. 

And AI raises the bar even higher as communications platforms increasingly require ongoing investment in AI agents, omnichannel capabilities, integrations, analytics and automation. 

That leads to an important distinction: 

Outsourcing the platform does not mean outsourcing the customer. 

The right model allows an SP to keep its brand, pricing, packaging, billing and customer relationship while a technology partner takes responsibility for the underlying platform and ongoing innovation. 

Make the Customer Relationship Harder to Replace 

Fiber combined with business communications, contact center, digital channels, AI, integrations and business intelligence creates a very different customer relationship than connectivity alone. 

It gives the SP more ways to solve problems, increase wallet share and become more operationally important to the customer. 

And because cloud communications can operate outside the SP’s own fiber footprint, communications can potentially preserve the customer relationship even when the access circuit changes. 

Great Plains Communications provides a useful example. Aging voice platforms created feature gaps, frustrated sales teams and contributed to customer churn. After moving to a fully managed UCaaS and CCaaS environment under its own brand, Great Plains migrated more than 200 customers, removed previous seat limitations and expanded its ability to sell beyond its traditional network footprint. 

That is a very different way to think about communications. 

Not as another infrastructure asset to maintain. 

As a way to extend and deepen the customer relationship. 

Own the Value 

AI is changing what customers expect from communications. New connectivity models are expanding their choices. And major providers are becoming increasingly deliberate about where they put their capital. 

Taken together, those signals suggest a simple strategy: 

Own the things that deepen customer value, increase recurring revenue and strengthen retention. Be more selective about owning technology layers that consume capital without creating meaningful differentiation. 

Fiber may clearly belong in the first category. 

So does the customer relationship. 

So does your brand. 

So does the service experience. 

And increasingly, so does the data and intelligence created through customer communications. 

But does the underlying communications infrastructure need to be owned and operated by the SP? 

That is the question worth asking now. 

Because the next five years may not reward the service provider that owns the most technology. 

They may reward the one that owns the most valuable customer relationship. 

Patrick Sheehan

Patrick is Intermedia's VP of Channel Development & Distribution.