There were nights when the screens behind you told one story and the network told another... weather blowing up in one region, traffic surging where it wasn't supposed to in another, mass calling events pushing the boundaries.
In the middle of all that, somebody on Tier 3 would yell across the floor. That usually meant the problem had crossed out of the hardware and into my lane...
“Send it to translations!”
If you've ever been anywhere near telecom, you already know... this isn't about the big outage everyone sees. It's about that window right before it, when everything technically still works.
Each vendor is green. Each system is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
And yet calls start taking paths they shouldn't, SMS starts behaving just a little off, routing decisions stack in ways nobody planned for. You're staring at STPs, GTT, number ranges, vendor handoffs... and you can feel it before you can prove it — something is lining up wrong across systems that were never designed to see the whole picture.
- • Signal Transfer Points (STPs): Routing traffic without global state visibility.
- • Global Title Translation (GTT): Address resolution operating on local assumptions.
- • Vendor Boundaries: Every individual dashboard shows green while the transaction dies.
AI feels familiar to me because I've seen this pattern before. When everything is “right” in isolation, but wrong when it all connects. When speed hides the problem instead of solving it.
The real work isn't reacting after it breaks — it's catching it while it still looks normal... and knowing where to look before it turns into something nobody can unwind in real time.