Telecommunications Web App - Help change the industry

Hello Ottomator community! I was pointed here by Cole to ask for community help. I hope everyone is doing well. My name is Tim Carter, and I’m a telecommunications professional/entrepreneur with a passion and hobbyist for telecom, AI and ML. I have spent my career in the telecoms, building much of US and Canada’s networks on the Core and RAN side, along with several data centers and MSC’s. In 2012 I started a business in Canada building infrastructure for the major telcos across Canada, only to find that the industry is very unregulated and very “old boys club”. After the pandemic, it became almost impossible to make a profit as I was setup nationally and had huge CAPEX debt load and high fixed OPEX making it very difficult to down size to adapt to the crippling industry (carriers stopped building wireless and are focusing on fiber back haul to support higher bandwidth to every market, along with AI bandwidth load increases). Along with that, Canadian business in general suffered from high interest rates, struggling economy and the highest inflation in history. All these things led to me losing my business and being left with massive debt load and facing bankruptcy. Sorry to whine here, just trying to give some context to my situation.

The main reason there is so much blood on the floor, is that companies my size are being replaced by single crew/tech size companies that have no overhead and can undercut and still make a profit (many work out of their house and work around the clock to make it work), making mid size companies like mine lose market share at an unprecedented rate. The major telcos here (Rogers/Telus/Bell) are going direct to these size guys and driving pricing through the floor. Unfortunately for folks like myself, carrying all the overhead for a proper operation can’t compete with their prices, and the telcos starting bringing out 15+ of these size companies to every bid opportunity. Needless to say it made for a very stressful couple of years before I needed to close my doors.

Now that you have some context as to who I am and where I come from, here is my request. I am trying to build a web app that fills a void in this industry that allows contractors like myself to stop carrying the overhead and just manage the contracts and directly work with crews / techs all over the country by building in a project management based web app that utilized AI tools to dissect scopes of work (from PDF’s, Docs and SS’s), build budgets, time lines, BOM’s, schedules, etc, and auto assign them to users (tech / crews) based on their geolocation, skill sets and availability. It also encompasses health and safety processes and scope of work knowledge bases (chatbot right on their phone) to assist in the daily work, troubleshooting, and completion packages (AI photo recognition), along with AI assisted testing requirements in the field (interface via web-app to software driven test gear). The idea is to eliminate the need for people to travel all over the country away from their families and into remote markets that already have similarly skilled people living. As the industry is highly unregulated, it would also build a community of workers that would be able to take back the control of how much a job should cost and be able to eventual mandate a specific price point. Right now, the telcos dictate how much each task is paid, or invite so many contractors out they scare them into pricing very tight and most likely too low quotes to make a profit. The telcos also stopped paying any change orders for the dozens of reasons a project can be delayed (weather, telco support service delays, equipment delays, etc). There are several other features I have detailed for this web-app however not essential to the MVP.

I honestly believe this would be a great opportunity to help change the industry and give some power back to the folks that actually build the infrastructure and networks. Could be a great impact on the mental health of these workers too, as many of them struggle because of the road lifestyle that is unavoidable the way things are setup.

If you’re able to help with building some of the workflows, UI/UX or backend to make the AI assistance and database/knowledge base RAG systems work better, it would be amazing. DM or reply if you think you can help. I have limited programming background, although I did a lot of SQL and MML in my career. Just looking for a helping hand to get be through some of the struggles I’m in. I’ve been using bolt.new, cursor, bolt.diy, n8n, and local ollama with qwen or deepseek (7b), and some other API calls to assist in my project.

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Thanks for posting here @TimothiousAI! I would suggest moving potentially moving this to the general category as well which gets a lot more views. Just in case you don’t get a lot of eyes on it here since I’m still working on developing out this category.

Thanks @ColeMedin. I’ll move it over there to get a bit more support. Appreciate the feedback. :slightly_smiling_face:
Is there an easy way to do this, or just delete and repost over in General?

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Yeah of course!

I would just repost in General

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Hi Tim, this is Mash from Toronto. What you described about the big telecoms really resonates with me!
I come from data/BI background and lately got hands on with AI automation and agents.
I’d be happy to have a call and discuss how can I help with this project. I tried to DM you here but to no avail.

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Hi Tim, sorry to hear about your struggles. My name is Jerry Napolitano. I have a Class D low voltage electrician license. I install access control and video security systems. I started my career in the 90’s working for Lucent technology doing QA on voice-mail audix systems. I rewrote Lucent QA procedures and handles ISO 9000 Audits. Then i worked for Intel Corp in QA. Got sick of the office and decided to go in the field. Now that i hit 50 im looking to get back on the desk. This November i got laid off due to lack of work. We were a small company that got bought out by a Motorola radio company and it went down hill from there. I decided to dtart learning No Code platforms and I took some programming when i was younger. I use cursor and Windsurf to do most of my programming and n8n for AI agent automations. I wouod definitely like to help with the AI Voice agent part of the build. This is an incredible idea to have AI as a sidekick to help with tech troubleshooting. My email is jerry@gerardiai.tech and my website is https: //gerardiai.tech which i programmed myself. Im learning GHL as a CRM and outreach too. Please let me know if theres anything i can do to help. Best of luck either way. Hope to hear from you.

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Tim, I am a AI Engineer with a telecom in the US. I would suggest a conversation or a document that details what your MVP is to accomplish. I will be happy to review and provide some help in your dev effort. em getpat@gmail.com

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Hi Pat - Thanks for the reply. I had some issues with cursor and 3.7 sonnet last week (like the rest of the world) so I’m just going to clean up some things today to see where the build stands and will reach out soon for some support/collab. Appreciate the offer and will def take you up on it.

hey, im a former tower climber in the usa, the telecom industry was horrible id love to help improve it if i can this sounds interesting

I would be curious to read this as well, i have 25+ years in the tech industry (wan and infra engineer core) with about 1/2 of that in various telecom related fields working with carrier facilities, MSP’s and tier providers as well as several exits from ground floor up in this space.

A lot of what you describe is carried on the backend by BSS/OSS systems today as well as FSM (Field Service Management) platforms that are widely used for management of just these aspects Fieldpulse is one of the more well known ones and SNOW is used quite a bit as well for this.

Most of the tier providers have , while if you have worked in the industry you know how slow they are to evolve, there own systems in place to manage this.

I guess my ask would be who is your target audience/market in particular as the way i see it your opportunity to capitalize is going to go head to head with these type systems to become a value / service add vs facilitating lower COGS because of OPeX being offset.

Just some random thoughts off what you posted - defiantly interested to hear as you likely have more direct experience in this space