Telecom beyond connectivity: where operators should look for growth in 2026-2035

TL;DR

A common view says telecom growth ended when coverage was completed. The reality is different. Connectivity has indeed become baseline infrastructure, and exactly because of that, a second business layer is forming above it where the money already exists. Public reporting indicates Uzbekistan’s telecom market reached 24,873 billion UZS in 2025 with year-on-year growth of +18.3% (UzDaily, 22 April 2026). This is not a mature market without growth; this is a market where demand is shifting from bytes to the operator’s ability to be part of the customer’s trust, payment and decision chain. The board conversation should not be “how do we sell another tariff” but “where in the P&L are we relocating revenue toward 2030”. This article covers five concrete growth layers, two recurring traps, and an honest list of conditions that justify postponing the topic.

Where Uzbekistan’s market actually stands

Any serious discussion about telecom growth has to start from facts, not from rhetoric about digital transformation. Public sources draw a fairly clear picture. According to the Digital Government Portal of Uzbekistan, internet coverage has reached 99.5%, user penetration is at 94.2%, average mobile data speed is 51.42 Mbit/s and fixed-line speed is 91.79 Mbit/s (dgov.uz). The Ministry of Digital Technologies reports that 98% of populated areas have mobile internet, around 65% of households have high-speed broadband, and the average per-Mbit/s tariff is around 30,000 UZS (gov.uz).

What this means is straightforward: the era of “let’s bring connectivity where it didn’t exist” is over. What used to be the growth driver is now baseline infrastructure. And this is exactly where the fork in the road appears for the operator. One option is to keep competing on tariffs and watch ARPU drift down with saturation. The other is to look at the operator’s own assets differently.

The operator already owns things that other digital economy players spend years and large amounts of money trying to build: millions of customers with the habit of monthly payments, a direct communication channel, identification at the SIM level, and a real physical infrastructure of branches, dealers and a contact centre. These assets do not turn into money automatically. But it is around them that a second business layer is forming — one still far from commodity.

Five growth layers where the money already is

Layer one — customer data turned into action. Not “we have a DWH” or “we are building Subscriber 360” — those are infrastructure steps. Money arrives when each customer event (a top-up, a package expiring, a sudden traffic increase, a roaming trip, a missed auto-payment) has an owner, a rule and a response channel. This is an operating model, not a platform. The maturity test is simple: can the operator answer how many hours pass between a customer event and an offer, and who carries P&L responsibility for the response. If the answer is unclear, any analytics investment will keep producing dashboards instead of revenue.

Layer two — trust as a product. From April 2026, Uzbekistan introduced strict biometric verification requirements for digital banking operations — Face ID for registration, password recovery and login from a new device in the apps of banks and payment organisations (Central Bank of Uzbekistan, 4 December 2025). This shifts the balance of players. The operator owns the SIM, the number, the device, the behaviour, the geography. If it embeds these signals into the verification chain between bank and customer, it stops being merely a connectivity provider and becomes part of the trust layer. This is not about a telecom-bank, this is about anti-fraud and risk-based authentication where the operator has a unique position.

Layer three — B2B and SME. Small and medium business in Uzbekistan is growing faster than coverage, and its needs — connectivity plus POS, plus a cashier system, plus backup, plus cybersecurity, plus SIP telephony — are currently spread across a dozen different vendors. An operator that consolidates this into a single account, single contract and single support point captures part of the SME budget that used to flow to specialised providers. This is not “another channel for SIM card sales”, this is a separate product line.

Layer four — network experience as a commercial asset. Until recently, network quality data lived in the engineering function and reached commercial teams only through complaints. The logic is changing: connecting QoE to billing and sales channels means turning a quality drop into a proactive compensation or a relevant offer rather than another support ticket. Public reporting from Beeline Uzbekistan shows weekly downstream data volume rising from 2,000 TB in 2020 to over 23,600 TB in 2025, with the share of 4G traffic moving from 57.7% to 93.4%. This capacity growth does not equal customer satisfaction growth; the gap between “there is a signal” and “it works fast at peak hour” is exactly where CMO and CTO finally find a shared language.

Layer five — partner ecosystem with clear economics. Wallet, marketplace, insurance, device financing, content subscriptions — these are not telecom products, they are partner channels in which the operator brings the customer base, trust and a delivery channel. The discipline that matters is settlement, revenue share, audit trail and quality control. Without it, partners take the margin, the operator carries the risk, and within a year the project is shut down. A disciplined partner platform is a separate, actively managed asset that pays back over an 18-24 month horizon.

Two traps that are easy to fall into

The first is the super app. The idea of “everything in one application” looks logical. In practice, the operator does not have the use frequency that makes a super app pay off. The customer opens the operator’s app one to three times a month, which is not enough to justify a feature scope of 30+ services. A super app pays off where there is daily use and a strong merchant network. Without those two ingredients, the super app becomes an expensive showroom, while real conversion happens through three to five core scenarios that can be delivered on a third of the budget.

The second trap is starting from a fintech licence. When the board sees fintech margins, the temptation is to begin with a banking licence. This inverts the logic. The first step should be a proven use case with clear economics through a partnership with a bank, and the licence should follow once volumes and the product are mature. Treating the licence as the starting point means several years of investment before any real revenue, and most of that investment is compliance, not product.

When the topic should be postponed

Not every operator is ready for this conversation. If the main competition is still about coverage in the regions and network stability, infrastructure is the priority, not the layer above it. If master data on customer, number, contract and device does not reconcile between billing, CRM and the app, and reconciliation is done manually, any project on top of the core will keep running into data issues. If there is no product owner with the authority to change campaign rules and make P&L decisions, initiatives will stay in approval mode and the market will move faster. If the regulatory framework for personal data and consent is not in place, every launch will be processed reactively through legal.

These constraints are not failure, they are a maturity map. One of the healthiest board conversations sounds like “this topic is too early for us, let’s spend six months getting the data in order”. That is a strong management decision. The weak version is launching the initiative knowing the data is not ready and later attributing the failure to the vendor.

What to discuss in the next 30 days

Rather than starting with a roadmap, it is simpler to start with three diagnostic questions for the committee.

First: where in our P&L is current growth coming from that does not depend on tariffs and coverage? If the answer is “nowhere”, this is not about a new product, this is about a missing operating layer.

Second: which three customer events today create an offer opportunity, and what is the unit economics of the response to each? If the company cannot answer in numbers, that is the first investment to make, not a super app.

Third: which partners could sell through our channel and bring back part of the margin? If there is no list, the operator is still looking at itself as an operator rather than as a platform.

Once these three questions are answered, the roadmap writes itself. Without them, any plan risks repeating the fate of projects that had budget but lacked the management linkage between business, IT and finance.

How SamaraliSoft can help

Telecom Growth & Data Readiness Audit — a diagnostic without a vendor agenda. We look at where the operator’s next profit actually sits, which data and events are accessible without core migration, which two or three use cases can move into pilot in 12-16 weeks, and what minimum management discipline must be in place before a vendor is hired. The output is a short committee deck, not a 200-page strategy. The operator makes the decisions; our role is to gather the facts and remove the illusions.

Related reading

• /en/cases/telecom-subscriber-360/ — a real Subscriber 360 case for a regional operator
• /en/industries/telecom/ — telecom industry overview
• /en/architecture/telecom-around-core-architecture/ — why the BSS/OSS core should not be replaced
• /en/insights/telecom-wallet-trap/ — when wallet becomes a trap

Sources

• Digital Government Portal Uzbekistan — digital indicators 2020-2025
• UzDaily, 22 April 2026 — telecom market reaches 24,873 billion UZS
• Ministry of Digital Technologies — 98% coverage, 65% households
• Central Bank of Uzbekistan — biometric verification for digital banking, 4 December 2025
• MNP.UZ — mobile number portability