Wolf&Grayson EditorialThe capacity-fill deal built a generation of telecom balance sheets, and it is now the weakest position a network operator can occupy. When a hyperscaler or carrier has a gap, someone shows up with a price, wins the business, and vanishes when the gap closes. That model still works, briefly, which is precisely the problem: it produces revenue that expires on a schedule and teaches the buyer nothing except what the supplier charges. Edgar Mosti, who leads commercial strategy at Congruex, argues the industry is running out of time to fix this. AI-driven infrastructure buildouts are pulling enormous volumes of capacity into the market at a pace nobody has seen, and the operators treating that surge as a bigger version of the old volume game are the ones most likely to end up commoditized by it. The distinction he draws is blunt. Either a supplier is embedded in how its partner solves problems, or it is a phone number someone dials when they run short.
Skin in the Outcome, Not Skin in the SLA
Mosti’s test for whether a relationship will compound or stall is whether both sides carry consequences for the same outcome. “A capacity-fill relationship is transactional,” he says. “Durable revenue comes from being embedded in your partner’s commercial motion. That means you understand their roadmap, their customer commitments, and their pressure points before they do.” That last phrase deserves attention, because it inverts how most vendor relationships are managed. The standard cadence is reactive: the customer describes a requirement, the supplier responds. Mosti is describing a supplier who has done enough work on the partner’s business to anticipate the requirement, which is a different job entirely and requires a different kind of commercial team.
Where he gets specific is on the mechanics of what makes a partnership survive its first renewal. Joint accountability on outcomes comes first, because a service level agreement (SLA) is a floor, not a bond. “If the only thing tying you together is a service level agreement, the relationship ends the moment someone finds a cheaper option,” he says. Executive alignment comes second, and here his diagnosis is one most sales organizations would recognize but few act on: “Deals that live only at the procurement layer die at renewal.” Champions at the vice president (VP) and C-suite level, with personal stakes in the outcome, are what carries a partnership through a bad quarter. Third, and least intuitive, is designing renegotiation into the agreement from day one. Pricing will move, technology will turn over, and partnerships that survive are the ones where both sides “built in room to renegotiate without blowing up the relationship.” Rigid contracts feel like protection. In a market repricing this quickly, they are a fuse.
Why Domestic Playbooks Break at the Border
Cross-border expansion is where good commercial instincts go to die, and Mosti’s read on it is unsentimental. “They export their domestic playbook and expect it to work,” he says of operators moving into Mexico and Latin America. Pricing structures differ. Settlement models differ. Routing priorities differ. Even the norms governing how relationships are conducted differ market to market, which means a deal template that closes cleanly in one country can stall indefinitely in another for reasons that never appear in the financial model.
The failure mode he identifies is treating multi-national as arithmetic. “The operators who get it wrong treat multi-national as a volume play and ignore the regulatory, cultural, and commercial nuances that determine whether a route is actually profitable.” That framing matters for anyone signing off on a Latin America (LATAM) expansion, because it moves the question from how much traffic can be pushed to whether the route economics hold under local conditions at all. Mosti’s alternative sequence is to build local commercial intelligence before designing the partnership, then let that intelligence dictate the structure. It is slower to start and considerably harder to justify to a board that wants footprint numbers. It also avoids forcing a uniform model onto markets that, in his words, “will not accept it.”
The Real Question Is Who Is Hardest to Rip Out
AI demand is changing how hyperscalers source capacity, and Mosti reads the shift as simultaneously raising the floor and the stakes. Programmatic, API-driven access to capacity looks like the final step toward commoditization. He argues it is the opposite for whoever moves first. “If you are embedded at the API layer, you are not just a supplier anymore, you are infrastructure.” AI-enabled routing and traffic optimization are quietly retiring the relationship model built on manual negotiation and quarterly business reviews, because a partner integrated into a customer’s automated provisioning is being consumed continuously rather than evaluated periodically. Integration depth, not price, becomes the moat. His reframing of the strategic question is the sharpest line in the argument: “The question every leader should be asking right now is not who has the best price, it is who is hardest to rip out.”
What follows from that is a set of priorities with a closing window attached. Build relationships with hyperscalers and NeoClouds now, Mosti says, “before the capacity crunch makes you a commodity,” because the pace of their buildout means partner selection is happening in real time and the incumbents will be whoever was already in the room. Invest in the commercial layer rather than the network layer alone: “The leaders who win the next decade are the ones who can structure deals, build alliances, and create revenue models that survive technology cycles.” And stop treating partnerships as contracts. “The most durable competitive position in this market is being the partner that other people build on top of.” That is a demanding standard, and it explains why so few relationships in this sector actually compound. Being built upon requires giving up the comfort of the transaction, and most operators would rather keep the transaction.
Follow Edgar Mosti on LinkedIn for more insights on hyperscale partnerships, cross-border commercial strategy, and building durable infrastructure revenue.
