The Biggest Pain Points in Telecom Infrastructure Today (and Why They Matter)

Author: Chris Balandran

Listening to the WIA Connect(X) panel, one thing became very clear: the industry’s biggest challenges are not theoretical. They’re operational, daily, and deeply felt.

Data integrity is the foundation, and the risk

Jamie from AT&T didn’t hedge when asked about risk:

“The models are only as good as the data that’s produced by them. If the data is flawed, the decisions will be flawed.”

That statement alone explains why so many automation efforts stall. When data is trapped in PDFs, inconsistently captured, or manually reconciled, every downstream workflow becomes slower and riskier.

Standardization gaps slow everything down

Clint highlighted a surprisingly basic but critical issue:

“Every tower company measures tower height differently. We need standard capture so we’re measuring apples to apples.”

Without standard inputs, automation cannot scale. Validation logic breaks. Scenario modeling becomes unreliable. Teams spend more time reconciling differences than moving projects forward.

Manual review is the bottleneck across the ecosystem

From carriers to towercos to vendors, manual review is consuming enormous time and effort.

Jamie described AT&T’s historical quality audits this way:

“We were reviewing hundreds of hours of video or photos. It was incredibly manual.”

Sean from Pathwave echoed the same issue from the contractor side:

“Documentation assembly can take six to eight hours of back-office time for a single job.”

These pain points are not edge cases. They are the norm. And they are exactly why the industry is pushing toward exception-only workflows, where automation does the heavy lifting and humans step in only when something looks wrong.

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