How would you describe the role of Analysys Mason and in what ways is that role evolving? Would you give a flavour of the projects the company’s currently working on?
Our ambition is to be the leading management consultancy for business-critical technology and digital infrastructure. We advise businesses, governments and investors on high‑stake decisions that involve technology.
We have a 40-year heritage in telecoms. We actually started in the 1980s on the back of the sector’s liberalisation in the UK and then in the EU. Over those four decades, we’ve helped clients in sectors that have shaped digital infrastructure and technology as we know it today.
Our strategy, regulation and policy practice allows clients to benefit from expertise in the economics, commercial potential and regulation that underpin the telecoms industry. We bring to bear expertise, but also data from our research team, which offers 110 million data points on topics including data traffic, network forecasts, 5G investments, GenAI, space and satellites.
Clients come to us when the stakes are high and when they need clarity, confidence and a partner that is trusted across the industry and government for the quality of its analysis and insight.
We’re seeing an increasing emphasis on the role of regulation in enabling growth and investment (see, for example, the recent European Omnibus package). What advice do you have for policymakers trying to achieve this while maintaining regulatory effectiveness?
I see the role of effective policy and regulation in two ways when it comes to growth and investment. First, it should try to correct market failures that may result in poor allocation of capital. In an expanding, opening market, this can mean putting constraints on incumbent ‘monopolists’ to enable investment by smaller players or new entrants. In a mature market, it could also try to prevent over-investment in the wrong type of assets, or in excessive capacity, but with a growth agenda in mind, this tends to take a back seat compared to stimulating investment.
One fundamental challenge is that legislation and regulation cannot substitute for a lack of political will and support for further European integration
This goal of ‘allocative efficiency’ coexists with other policy and regulatory goals: if you think of legislation like the Digital Services Act or the Digital Fairness Act, they have a strong consumer protection flavour to them. It is not at all clear that they stimulate efficient investment by new entrants or smaller players, because the potential costs and complexity of compliance increase legal risk for those smaller, typically less well-resourced firms, compared to larger incumbents. You could argue this can be modulated through enforcement, but I think we have some good examples of the courts having their own independent view of that, including in the context of the Open Internet Access Regulation for example.
A final angle that comes to mind relates to efforts to ‘crowd in’ private capital. Although it is not regulatory per se, it is a possible step to providing more avenues for competition to develop. This is hard to use effectively, and it ends up chasing a moving target: the InvestAI initiative aims at crowding in 200 billion Euros in private capital by the end of 2027. This is a very good starting point but is now dwarfed by capex commitments by US hyperscale firms of over 500 billion Euros for 2026.
Effective regulation needs to balance all of these constraints and shifting sands – it is difficult, but it is also what makes it so intellectually stimulating and rewarding when it does work!
What steps does the TMT sector need to take in order to complete its digital transformation?
I do not believe that any industry can ‘complete’ its digital transformation. As long as technology moves faster than investment decisions (and it does!), mature and capital intensive industries will always have more transformation to make. I think the question therefore is: how do we prepare ourselves at each stage to better support the next stage of transformation? The TMT sector is much better at this than it was even a decade ago, with advanced hybrid and multi-cloud strategies and a more agile mindset.
How do you see the current raft of European digital regulation fitting together? Where, in your view, are the gaps and overlaps?
We recently published a major report looking at initiatives related to the Digital Single Market. We interviewed many European organisations, including successful scale-ups and representatives of European start-ups.1 They are a very heterogeneous bunch, but they were clear about one thing: the complexity of the regulations they had to contend with in their own market and every time they expanded to a new country in the EU, acted as a strong barrier to scaling up and growing in Europe. Many of them favoured expanding to the US (which has its own fragmentation issues, but in some ways less pronounced than in Europe) before covering the whole of Europe.
The new and updated EU regulations on the table add to this complexity in the short term, in part because they are complex, dense, and sometimes replace or augment existing regulations. In the longer term, if they result in a more unified approach, with fewer regulatory interfaces for pan-EU businesses, and in the removal of fragmented national regulations, they might improve outcomes, but it is not obvious that this will succeed. One fundamental challenge is that legislation and regulation cannot substitute for a lack of political will and support for further European integration, nor can they find an answer to the complicated question of the balance between European sovereignty and the national sovereignty of member states.
What are the biggest policy challenges in the TMT sector and does AI offer some solutions?
The main challenge in Europe is whether and how operators can scale across borders in a meaningful way. It has been tried before and broadly failed. With fragmented cultures, languages, and national laws, there are not many meaningful synergies. European roaming could have been an interesting one, but this was initially politically contentious (as national operators wanted to protect their inbound roaming revenues) and was subsequently regulated out of existence (through roaming caps). It is an interesting example of how policies can have unintended consequences.
More broadly, many regulators I speak to are focused on important challenges: resilience, cyber security, security of supply. Much of this is related to efficient investments, and in some ways telecoms infrastructure is becoming more like other critical infrastructure, such as electricity or water networks. Managing this, whilst freeing up innovation and competition in the services that run over these networks (including media and tech services), is the main challenge I see in the short to medium term.
Can AI help? Probably: there is a lot of work ongoing on agents that can help detect and act on faults, cyber attacks, failovers and rerouting. Cost management is essential to any mature firm, so if AI helps reduce opex, it could help financial returns. The EU AI Act puts some constraints on the use of AI in networks, so we will have to see whether use cases and controls can develop jointly to make a tangible difference.
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