Stacuity recently attended Comfone ConneXions, one of the key events in the interconnect and roaming calendar. As well as connecting with partners and customers across the ecosystem, Stacuity’s Global Business Development Director, Mark Searle, took to the stage to share his perspective on one of the most pressing challenges facing mobile operators today.

In his session, Mark stepped back from individual technologies to look at a broader and accelerating shift across the mobile industry: while data traffic continues to scale globally, the constraints governing that traffic are becoming increasingly local and dynamic.

Mark opened by framing a fundamental mismatch. Over the past decade, the industry has done an exceptional job of building global connectivity; devices can connect from almost anywhere, and data moves seamlessly across borders. But the environment around that connectivity has changed significantly.

He identified three structural forces driving this shift:

Regulation — Data sovereignty requirements, data residency rules and lawful intercept obligations are multiplying. Governments and regulators increasingly want assurance that data relating to their citizens and industries is handled within specific jurisdictions.

Application behaviour — Traffic is no longer just about throughput. Real-time services — from fintech transactions and automotive applications to gaming and IoT control systems mean that latency, determinism and routing efficiency now directly impact user experience.

Commercial pressure — Basic connectivity has become commoditised. The question for operators is how to create premium, differentiated services on top of that connectivity and find new ways to monetise it.

Critically, Mark highlighted that these three forces are beginning to converge, all pointing towards the same requirement: greater, more granular control over how traffic is handled.

Most packet core architectures were designed around centralisation, traffic aggregated, processed centrally, then routed outward. Routing is typically static, tied to APNs or predefined configurations, and making changes requires significant planning, integration effort and operational overhead.

That model works when traffic patterns are predictable and requirements are relatively uniform. But that is not the world operators are navigating today. The result is unnecessary backhauling of traffic, an inability to enforce local compliance, and missed opportunities to differentiate services.

This is where intelligent traffic steering becomes a key part of the solution. Rather than routing traffic based on static configuration, a policy-driven control layer enables decisions to be made dynamically, based on device location, the application or service being accessed, applicable regulatory requirements, and commercial policies.

Mark contrasted this with traditional models: routing moves from being static, centralised and uniform to being dynamic, distributed and highly granular. Operators can act at the level of individual devices, specific applications or defined service tiers, and crucially, changes are driven by software and policy rather than infrastructure.

Four Key Outcomes

Mark outlined four areas where this capability unlocks real value:

Mark described how Stacuity has built this concept into a distributed, software-defined platform delivered as a service. A centralised control plane handles policy decisions while a distributed user plane sits at the edge.

Traffic is steered through a policy-driven traffic director that determines in real time how each flow should be handled, providing global reach with local control through a single integration model and an OPEX-based commercial structure.

Bringing the discussion back to the Comfone ConneXions audience specifically, Mark was clear that intelligent traffic steering is not about replacing existing interconnect models, it’s about enhancing them. IPX provides the foundational connectivity layer; intelligent steering adds decision-making on top of that, enabling smarter handling of roaming traffic, more granular policy enforcement across interconnects, and new enterprise and wholesale service opportunities.

Stacuity already has integration experience with Comfone and with existing Comfone customers, meaning there is a practical, proven path to adoption for operators already operating within the Comfone ecosystem.

As Mark summarised: the industry is moving from a world where connectivity was the primary challenge, to one where control becomes the differentiator. The question is no longer whether we can move data — we can, and we have been doing so for years. The question is whether we can control it effectively, and monetise that control.