At MWC 2026, we caught up with George Held, CTIO of Azercell, on how the corporate’s infrastructure is popping Azerbaijan right into a regional digital hub
Talking to Complete Telecom on the WinWin studio, Held defined how Azercell’s infrastructure spine was a key basis for the nation’s future development.
“In our a part of the world, we have a saying: in order for you happiness and prosperity, you construct a highway […] In our world these days, it’s constructing a digital highway,” he defined.
Lately, Azercell has targeted on nationwide fibre deployment, together with upgrading to the newest GPON expertise.
“At first, we constructed only a regular GPON community, and now we’re bringing it to GPON with speeds of 50gbps,” mentioned Held.
This highly effective community, Held mentioned, holds the keys to capitalising on Azerbaijan’s strategic geographic place as a transit hall linking Asia, Europe, and past.
“The function which we play is simply completely unbelievable as a result of we’re connecting East and West, North and South. And by doing this, we’re making life so significantly better for folks in our international locations. We’re bringing employment. We’re bringing alternatives. And, on the similar time, we’re bringing the worldwide financial system collectively,” he mentioned.
Embracing the AI period
Past deploying prime quality infrastructure itself, Azercell is additionally implementing AI inside community administration, with a powerful deal with growing autonomous, self-healing networks aligned with TM Discussion board frameworks. These techniques dynamically reroute site visitors and optimise efficiency in actual time.
“With autonomous networks we might be ready not solely to join folks, however give totally different experiences, totally different speeds of connectivity. And a few parts like low latency convey completely totally different experiences,” mentioned Held. “We’re placing a lot of parts on the community simply to guarantee that the expertise for customers is completely uninterrupted.”
Held pointed to main stay occasions as proof factors of this expertise’s effectiveness, together with the Azerbaijan Formulation One Grand Prix and a latest Justin Timberlake live performance in Baku.
“We have been capable of change the site visitors robotically from one place to a different,” he mentioned. “This delivered unprecedented expertise to our clients.”
The identical capabilities apply to environmental disruptions, together with the tough climate circumstances confronted in a part of the nation’s most mountainous areas.
“Large winds, large quantities of snow, rain — all of them influence each day operations,” mentioned Held. “Self-healing networks deal with this by optimising site visitors, bringing the capability to the locations the place it actually issues.”
From community efficiency to industrial development
With a extra optimised and resilient AI-powered community, alternatives for income development are myriad.
“Industrial influence is totally associated to the shopper expertise,” mentioned Held, highlighting the significance of community reliability over pure speeds. “If we offered uninterrupted service, the amount of site visitors would actually see development.”
Low latency is additionally turning into a key differentiator, significantly for cross-border site visitors and AI functions.
“Latency […] is beginning to play a extremely necessary function,” he mentioned, noting its significance for rising enterprise providers and rising use circumstances. “With low latency, all AI superior functions and all of the computerized processing is performed in a way more elegant method.”
Along with higher buyer expertise throughout a raft of latest providers, AI serving as a leveller, permitting junior engineers to study extra shortly and compete with senior colleagues which have a few years extra expertise.
“Our younger engineers got here up with a actually cool AI software the place all of the paperwork [about the network] are really put in into one database they usually can use pure language processing to drag any of the paperwork, and the system provides you a response on the community,” Held defined. “It provides a likelihood for younger youngsters out of the college to ship high quality of service and compete with anyone who has been doing the job for 20 years.”
Greater than this, it provides Azerbaijan a possibility to compete on a worldwide stage.
“Innovation has no ZIP code,” mentioned Held. “AI for us is not only a gimmick. It’s not one thing which is invented in Cupertino or Mountain View. It can be invented in Baku. It really works in Baku and makes lives higher for our folks.”
