Telecom Companies Face Long List of Global Privacy Regulations
Steps that EU countries are taking to protect data have major implications for the telecom sector, Sean Casey, senior vice president-product management at CSG, a software and services provider, said Thursday during a Mobile World Live webinar. Other speakers said geopolitical considerations are playing a big role in how carriers manage their move to the cloud and regulators are paying more attention to where data is stored.
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“Telecom data is some of the most sensitive data that there is,” Casey said: “Phone calls, internet transactions, there’s a lot that can be learned from that [data] and it’s very sensitive. We’re seeing a lot of countries in the EU lean into how to better protect that data.”
EU countries are also increasingly looking at telecom networks as critical infrastructure, Casey said. “That’s driving a lot of trade-offs between public cloud and private cloud in terms of decision-making,” he said. “Some of that is anticompetitive.”
Since the iPhone's introduction, a lot of revenue has shifted to tech companies like Apple and Google, Casey noted. “They face very different regulations than telecom operators,” he said. “There’s certainly a push and pull between protecting privacy, protecting critical infrastructure” and competition.
Florian Otel, GitLab telco solution manager for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, said EMEA operators complain they can’t compete with carriers in the U.S., China and other parts of Asia. “Regulations still require them to have active cores confined to one country,” Otel said. Data rules mean “strict requirements” on how they manage their networks, he added.