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Johnny was busy posting on Linkedin over the weekend on the roaming issue experienced by the US carriers, here are a few examples, post 1, post 2, post 3.

The roaming problem ran from June 26th to June 29th. On June 27th the US experienced its busiest travel day in 15 years, with 32 million people travelling on 54,000 flights. Internationally some of the top destinations were London, Paris, Cancun (I hope people return before Hurricane Beryl hits), and the Dominican Republic.

For cheapskates like me, there’s always the refuge of WiFi at the place you’re staying. However, likely the majority of people had bought a package of roaming days that were not working between 26-29 June.

The angle Johnny took to this situation makes sense, given his extensive experience with Syniverse. Remember Johnny took Syniverse to court and won, when he was CEO of Iris Wireless. His position is Syniverse is the most critical US telecom infrastructure. Carlyle group continues to drawn out cash from Syniverse which hinders investment.

Two points johnny makes is the need for national investment in public education on spam sms and robocalling. Given the ability of RCS to imitate the look of brands on the internet, SMS spam is going to get more effective. The roaming problem is another example of what under investment can lead to. There is no other company in the telecom ecosystem that can bring all US carriers to their knees at the same time.

Johnny calls out ‘The Real John Wick,’ as the leader that can drive the investment necessarily to solve critical infrastructure issues with Syniverse. Here is the link to Johnny’s post on the Warren Buffet’s negative view of Private Equity.

Johnny posits someone needs to free Syniverse from the PE folks, buy them, so it can start investing again. The 26-29 June roaming outage, the lack of action on spam SMS and robocalling, are just 2 recent examples of the continued lack of investment in the most critical infrastructure in US telecoms.

There is no point playing the blame game, rather identify the root cause of the lack of investment, and take urgent action.