Europe Built the Networks. Now Comes the Hard Part.
A new report from Kearney paints a sobering picture of European telecom. Despite billions invested in fiber and 5G infrastructure, return on capital employed across European operators has fallen from an already-low 6.7% in 2014 to just 5.9% in 2023. Wireless revenues declined 10% between 2016 and 2024, even as the broader consumer price index rose 31%. And the countries with the weakest telecom health are home to 70% of Europe's population.
The diagnosis is clear: Europe's telecom problem is no longer one of building networks. It is about turning infrastructure investment into customer value.
The Gap Is Not in the Ground
Kearney's research identifies what they call the "slow take-up trap." More than 70% of homes across Europe have been passed with fiber, yet fewer than half are actually connected. Countries like the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland have built the infrastructure but haven't converted it into customers, revenue, or returns. Meanwhile, operators in leading markets like Portugal, France, and Spain show that when commercialization works, it works well: fiber take-up of 84% and ROCE of 11%.
The gap is not in cable deployment. It is in the commercial model sitting on top of it.
This is a BSS problem. It is a product catalog problem. It is a customer experience problem. Operators who built for coverage are now being asked to compete for customers, and many of them are doing it with systems that were designed for a different era.
Four Places Wavelo Helps Operators Close the Gap
1. Commercializing fiber faster
The Kearney report is direct: operators need to stop treating fiber as a build exercise and start treating it as a commercial one. That means getting the right offers to the right customers at the right time, running targeted migration campaigns, and making it easy for customers to upgrade.
Wavelo's platform is purpose-built for exactly this kind of go-to-market agility. Operators can configure and launch fiber plans, set up promotional offers, and run migration incentive programs without months of IT work. When an operator can move from product concept to live offer in days rather than quarters, the commercialization gap starts to close.
2. Growing customer lifetime value
Kearney's data shows that even in the top-performing markets, operators are leaving significant value on the table, with only 34% of customers who have both fixed and mobile services buying them from the same provider. In the bottom markets, that drops to just 28%.
Customer value management (CVM), the report argues, is one of the few strategies that can simultaneously grow revenue, expand margins, and improve customer experience. But most operators are still running static campaigns on legacy systems that can't personalize at scale.
Wavelo gives operators a modern commercial foundation to execute CVM properly. That means dynamic bundling, real-time offer eligibility, and the ability to act on customer behavior without waiting on a back-office ticket queue. The result is higher ARPU, lower churn, and customer relationships that actually deepen over time.
3. Launching new digital services
Operators across Europe are under pressure to move beyond connectivity and into adjacent services: digital content, IoT, managed services for SMBs, and more. The problem is that launching a new service on legacy BSS can take six to eighteen months and carry real risk of breaking something else in the process.
Wavelo's cloud-native platform separates product configuration from core infrastructure, which means new services can be stood up, tested, and iterated on quickly. Operators don't have to choose between stability and innovation. They can have both.
4. Simplifying legacy operating models
The Kearney report is resolute on this: cost structures designed for national monopolies are not suited to the competitive, software-driven environment operators face today. More than half of operator capex is spent maintaining legacy infrastructure and outdated processes. That leaves less for the investments needed to drive future growth.
Wavelo is designed to work alongside existing systems, not against them. Operators don't have to rip out what's already in place to start moving faster. Wavelo's cloud-native platform can coexist with legacy infrastructure, taking on new commercial workloads incrementally while reducing the operational weight over time. The result is a path to modernization that doesn't carry the risk or disruption of a full replacement, and that can free up resources to focus on innovation and growth.
The Commercial Platform Is the Competitive Moat
What the Kearney data ultimately reveals is that the operators performing best are not necessarily those with the most network. They are the ones who have figured out how to sell it, retain customers on it, and grow revenue from it over time.
Infrastructure is the price of admission. The commercial platform is where the competitive game is actually played.
European operators have an enormous opportunity in front of them. The networks are largely in the ground. The customers are there. What is missing, in many cases, is the modern commercial infrastructure needed to capture the value that physical infrastructure should unlock. And for many operators, the barrier is not ambition — it is the perceived risk of transformation itself.
Wavelo is built to reduce that risk. Operators can modernize incrementally, working alongside existing systems rather than replacing them wholesale. Wavelo helps operators commercialize fiber, grow customer lifetime value, launch new digital services, and simplify legacy operating models — without the disruption that has historically made transformation feel like too great a risk.
For Europe’s telecom market, both the challenge and the opportunity lay ahead. And the operators who get the commercial model right — without losing years to risky overhauls — will define what the next decade looks like.
