If you’ve spent any time negotiating telecoms contracts, you might know the feeling quite well. You sign a deal that looks great on paper – think competitive pricing, solid Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) and a roadmap that ticks all of your boxes.
But three years later, you’re sitting across from the same vendor and the dynamic has changed. What next? Switching costs are astronomical and your team has built everything around the proprietary stack.
Is it worth handing a single vendor the keys to your whole communications infrastructure with no realistic experts? Here’s what the industry experts think.
Our Experts
- Christian Pyrros: Managing Director at erfolk
- Kristian Torode: Director & Co-founder of Crystaline
- Dr. Thomas King: CTO at DE-CIX
- René Wheeler: Managing Director at SOLAAS Ltd
- Sayali Patil: AI Product Manager at Splunk
- Deepak Shukla: CEO of Pearl Lemon Web
- Prianca Ravichander: CCO & CMO at Tecnotree
- Guru Venkatesan: CEO of SimpliContract
Christian Pyrros, Managing Director at erfolk
“We’ve seen telecom costs drop 50% on certain hardware, bandwidth and services needs overnight. This is why lock-in is so dangerous and I recommend and support all our clients to get a strong combination of risk mitigation and quick pricing decreases (“flex pricing”) in all their procurement contracts. It does take some threading the needle; vendors will of course push to make the maximum profit they can on each contract and they’re doing that with a combination of very attractive prices/features on one side, and hidden “gotchas” in the fine-print for certain corner-cases, which will blow up your costs 300-500% unexpectedly.
We use special tools at Erfolk.com to analyse your past requirements and predict upcoming needs, to do a cost model and regression analysis, so we have very effective data for requisitions and negotiations. I also recommend avoiding blanket all-in-one contracts and strategically using a-la-cart services where it makes sense. Yes there is a bit of extra procurement overheard here, yet it saves a lot of expense in the long term. As well we are looking to avoid risks on the hardware side, as supply chain and logistical issues on certain hardware and components have been costly in recent years. Balance of risk mitigation and cost reduction is key.”
Kristian Torode, Director & Co-founder of Crystaline
“Vendor lock-in remains one of the biggest risks in telecoms procurement because it restricts a business’s ability to evolve as its needs change. Many organisations still rely
heavily on a single provider for voice, connectivity and mobile, which can make
switching providers or integrating new technologies both costly and disruptive.
The challenge is that telecoms requirements rarely stay static. As businesses grow,
they often need more flexibility, but being tied into long-term contracts or limited
provider ecosystems can lead to higher costs and reduced performance over time.
This is why it’s important to take a more flexible, multi-supplier approach to
procurement. Even when working closely with major networks, businesses benefit from
solutions that aren’t built around a single provider. This ensures they can adapt, scale
and introduce new services without being constrained.
Ultimately, avoiding vendor lock- in is about maintaining choice, which is critical to building a resilient and future-ready communications strategy.”
Dr. Thomas King, CTO at DE-CIX
“Locking into a single vendor has arguably become one of the biggest gambles in modern telecoms procurement, because it shapes and restricts decisions long after the contract has been signed. What starts as a convenient setup can harden into something far less flexible, where the cost of change climbs with every passing year as businesses seek to go ‘off the rails’ and pursue new services and capabilities.
Migration fees swell, dependencies deepen, and instead of asking more from their connectivity, organisations find themselves meekly asking what they can realistically change. That loss of freedom has real consequences, especially when it comes to capitalizing on technologies like AI. Network infrastructure can make or break AI inference, which is heavily dependent on efficient, low-latency network paths and some degree of control over how data is exchanged.
A tightly bound provider relationship narrows those options, limiting access to particular routes, partners, and narrow ecosystems while increasing exposure to outages, pricing shifts, geopolitical instability, and moving priorities beyond the organisation’s control. A more distributed, provider-neutral approach opens up the landscape, introducing diversity, restoring control, and allowing networks to evolve alongside the services they support, rather than holding them back.”
René Wheeler, Managing Director at SOLAAS Ltd
“As telecoms networks grow more complex, procurement decisions made today can quietly become constraints that last a decade. Vendor lock-in where an operator becomes technically or contractually dependent on a single supplier has emerged as one of the most significant risks in modern network investment.
The stakes are high. Proprietary APIs, closed hardware ecosystems, and tightly bundled software stacks can make switching vendors prohibitively expensive. Operators find themselves paying premium renewal prices simply because migration costs are too great to justify alternatives.
At SolaaS.it, we believe the answer lies in open, standards-based architectures. By designing solutions around open interfaces, disaggregated network functions, and vendor-neutral software layers, operators retain the freedom to select best-of-breed components, renegotiate contracts from a position of strength, and adopt emerging technologies without rearchitecting their entire stack.
The shift toward cloud-native and open-source networking from Open RAN to disaggregated core is making this more achievable than ever. But it requires procurement teams to prioritise interoperability and long-term flexibility alongside initial cost.
The question for every operator is no longer can you afford open architectures it’s whether you can afford to ignore them.”
Sayali Patil, AI Product Manager at Splunk
“Vendor lock-in in telecoms procurement is not primarily a commercial risk. It is an architectural risk that compounds quietly until an organisation realises it cannot change direction without rebuilding from the ground up.
The problem I kept seeing across five years building enterprise network infrastructure at Cisco was that procurement decisions made for short-term efficiency reasons, standardizing on a single vendor stack, accepting proprietary integrations, deferring interoperability requirements, became structural constraints that made future technology transitions significantly more expensive than the original savings justified.
The shift toward AI-driven network management has made this worse. Organizations procuring AI-integrated telecoms infrastructure today are not just buying connectivity. They are embedding decision-making dependencies into their operational layer. When the vendor controls the model, the data pipeline, and the management interface simultaneously, the switching cost is not a contract negotiation. It is a full infrastructure re-architecture.
The organisations managing this risk most effectively are building interoperability requirements into procurement criteria before deployment, not after. Open standards, API accessibility, and behavioural observability across vendor boundaries are the procurement disciplines that keep options open as the technology landscape continues to shift.”
Deepak Shukla, CEO of Pearl Lemon Web
“I have watched businesses sign long contracts thinking they are getting stability, only to find themselves stuck later on when pricing shifts or service drops. Switching then is not just inconvenient. It is slow, expensive, and honestly a bit of a headache.
A lot of it comes down to how tightly everything is wired together. Systems, infrastructure, software, all layered in a way that works nicely until you try to pull one piece out. Then suddenly you are dealing with data that does not move cleanly, tools that do not quite match up, and teams that need to relearn processes they had just settled into. That part often gets overlooked at the start.
And then there is the money side. Vendors are well aware that leaving is hard, so over time the pricing tends to reflect that. Not always aggressively, but enough that businesses lose a bit of leverage without realising it.
The safer approach is to build in flexibility from day one. Open standards help. Shorter contracts help. Even just asking harder questions upfront can make a difference later. It saves a lot of stress down the line.”
Prianca Ravichander, CCO & CMO at Tecnotree
“In today’s software-driven telecom economy, agility is crucial. Yet, vendor lock-in remains the single biggest threat to this agility, paralysing modern procurement and stifling innovation.
For operators, being locked into rigid infrastructure means that they cannot scale in an AI-driven era. For decades, the industry focused on scaling networks and selling bandwidth. Today, value is generated by networks that can understand, decide, and act in real time. When communication service providers are bound to single vendor systems, they lose the freedom to pivot. System upgrades become dictated by a vendor’s proprietary roadmap, crippling a telco’s ability to transition into an AI-native operation or monetise intent at the edge.
Modern procurement must move away from prioritising a single major vendor toward a best-of-breed approach. This means investing in companies that can deliver cloud-native, AI-embedded microservices and demanding strict adherence to open frameworks such as those delivered by TM Forum.”
Guru Venkatesan, CEO of SimpliContract
“Vendor lock-in in is not really a sourcing problem, but a gradual contract governance problem that most teams only recognise too late. The actual risk is post-signature. Once the contract is signed, most telecom procurement teams lose structured visibility into how the relationship is evolving. Price escalation clauses go untracked in many cases. Change requests written in fine print quietly shift commercial terms in the vendor’s favour. Auto-renewals and rate cards trigger without active review. It is just what happens when contracts are filed and not monitored.
I have seen enterprises where the contracted rate and the invoiced rate had drifted significantly not because anyone made a bad decision, but because nobody was continuously comparing the two. By the time the gap surfaces, the contract has already shaped the outcome. Switching becomes expensive because the organisation is tightly tied in clauses where continuing makes more sense than negotiating or onboarding a new vendor.
The real risk is the absence of structured intelligence over how obligations, pricing, and dependencies are evolving across the life of the agreement. Enterprises do not choose lock-in. They accumulate it, clause by clause, through contracts that were never actively governed after signing.”
