What's Up with Tech?

We started fresh in Bermuda to prove a faster, open, cloud-native network that turns telcos from black boxes into agile platforms

• Evan Kirstel

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What happens when a carrier starts fresh, ditches the black boxes, and treats a nation like a living lab? We sat down with the CEO of Paradise Mobile to unpack how Bermuda—just 21 square miles and 65,000 people—became a launchpad for cloud-native, OpenRAN telecom that ships features in weeks, not years. The story begins with a team that cut its teeth solving “hairy, scary” projects for tier-one operators and now builds a modular, software-first network that can adapt fast, integrate with hyperscalers, and deliver real outcomes for customers who can’t wait on legacy roadmaps.

We explore why Bermuda’s demographics and economy mirror North American behaviors, making it the perfect proxy to validate not just tech but market traction. From there, we dive into concrete wins: airlines that rely on over-the-air workflows saw on-time departures rise and costs fall with tailored, SLA-backed connectivity—cockpit systems, ground crews, and routes unified across borders. Then we shift to the high-adrenaline world of SailGP, where foiling boats push the limits so hard they literally boil water, and milliseconds matter. Paradise Mobile connected hundreds of sensors, live comms, and video, feeding analysts in the U.K. and beyond with ultra-low-latency data that met and beat strict requirements.

Consumer experience gets a rethink too. eSIM onboarding in under a minute, clear “small/medium/large” unlimited plans, and global calling options make travel and remote work simple—no more roaming shock or hotel Wi‑Fi roulette. Behind the scenes, open standards and cloud partnerships replace vendor lock‑in with agility: swap algorithms like Lego, expose network capabilities via software, and co-create new products with tech leaders. With hundreds of services poised for testing and a pipeline of new markets coming online, the blueprint scales: validate on Bermuda’s device mix, then lift-and-shift code to fit local ARPU and enterprise needs from North America to the global south.

If you care about telecom that acts like a platform—not a pipe—this conversation shows the path: open, programmable networks; real-world SLAs; and a service mindset that starts with the customer and works backward. Enjoy the dive, share it with a builder who needs the blueprint, and subscribe to catch the next wave of network innovation.

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SPEAKER_00:

Hey everybody, today we are live calling to Paradise, otherwise known as Bermuda with Paradise Mobile. Sam, how are you?

SPEAKER_01:

Hi, I'm green, Evan. How are you?

SPEAKER_00:

I'm doing great. Thanks very much for joining. Uh Bermuda is one of my favorite places in the world. And uh Paradise Mobile is really uh shaking things up. Rethinking cognitivity from the ground up. Uh before all that, maybe introduce yourself, uh, your journey uh to Paradise Mobile and what was the big idea behind taking root in Bermuda, among other places?

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. Yeah. So um background is uh grew up in in Canada um in the telco world. I'm measuring decades now, not years, which makes me feel old. But uh it uh uh similar to you, Evan, uh, you know, had the opportunity and privilege to see pretty much all the Gs in the wireless space, as well as on the wireline side, uh, you know, spent about uh a decade on the wireline side as well. I started a boutique consulting firm uh in Canada in the telco space, where a lot of the core technical team um was originally pulled from for Paradise. And and our team basically became, for lack of a better word, the skunk work operators for a lot of the bigger tier ones. The the tier ones do a lot of things very well distribution, stable returns. If we had to be honest, though, where they struggle is innovation and speed to market. And that was sort of the niche that we built uh for ourselves. Whenever there was something hairy, scary, unknown that didn't fit a standard process, at some point uh someone on our team was involved. And I mean that globally, whether in Latin America, whether in North America or in the Caribbean, um, we've done some really amazing projects, um, you know, first, first of its kind, both on the network side and the go-to-market side. But I think what's um really um interesting on the Paradise story is how, to your point, Paradise started. So uh for those that aren't familiar with Bermuda, we're talking about um a relatively small market. It's it's the size of a small neighborhood of a small town you've probably never heard of. But it's 65,000 people, 21 square miles. The the interesting thing um that that um that makes Bermuda unique, though, is it does really punch above its belt in terms of um multiple pillars. If if you look at GDP per capita, it's more than the US or Canada. If you look at uh demographics, um, it models very closely to a North American jurisdiction, whether it's travel, whether it's education, whether it's income. Um, you know, the diversity is quite interesting. From an economic perspective, you have close to 74% of the Fortune 500s that actually have offices, like a real present field box people um in Bermuda. So even though it's very small, it really does punch above its belt. Uh as well as obviously the intrinsic things that most people probably know about Bermuda from the touristic perspective, that it's a great quality of life, it's safe, it's it's beautiful. Um, you know, there's a lot of jurisdictions around the world that have those picturesque, beautiful beaches. There's very few places where that's all they have.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's an amazing destination for sure. Very close. I'm here in Boston, very close trip. Um, this is making me want to get on a plane right away. But back to the um uh agenda at hand. So you you know, you started from a greenfield perspective. Um, how did you reimagine what a modern telecom could be?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. The the the reason we started uh in in Bermuda uh at the time was because there was a transition and a strategy happening both on the public and private sector to diversify some of the economy and to push certain pillars that are already strong in the reinsurance and financial services space into a digital, you know, fintech model. Um so there was sort of the foundational pieces where Bermuda already had a blueprint on how to be best in the world, you know, arguably in a niche, which was reinsurance. Um the opportunity for this space was how do we apply that same blueprint, which was you know, friendly regulation, um, the the right government incentives, you know, tax propositions to allow for a foundation. And then how do you very quickly innovate and create the space for local uh innovation to happen where you know at the time that reinsurance was established almost two decades ago, um it wasn't a hundred reinsurance companies, it was a few large ones. But now you've got hundreds of local Bermudian-born reinsurance companies that started, and you could likely argue that there's no better place on earth if you need an actuarial scientist than Bermuda for Capita. So we knew that it could work, we knew what the blueprint was. Our our strategy was how do we, you know, accelerate both public sector and private sector uh strategies? And the weakest link really was how do we build the better plumbing? And and that plumbing was to build the most agile, flexible, advanced network in the world where you can build new products and services on top of using a very different architecture and a very different business model than traditional telco.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, sounds like it. And um, as you know, traditional operators that are often burdened by legacy systems, we even have a word for it, technical debt. Um so, what freedoms came from starting fresh in terms of services and innovations exactly?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's a great question. So the hindsight's always 2020. So starting fresh, you have the benefit of learning from the past. And I mean, we we we as a team had the benefit of that experience over the last few decades uh of telco. So certain things, you know, from a foundational piece was let's define everything that works well and everything that doesn't in telco. And it was literally, you know, a legal pad of paper that you rip it in half and you say, we're never gonna do this and we're gonna do this. So on the technical side, we went cloud native day one. So there's no legacy baggage built entirely on open standards, on open ran, uh AI ran, cloud infrastructure day one. And that allowed a much more modular and software-driven approach where we can iterate and deploy new network features in weeks, not years. And the challenge for most telcos is when they buy equipment from or or technology or stacks from the large Cisco's, Huawei's, Ericssons of the world, they're buying a black box that does one function or a limited set of functions. They don't have access into that system, they don't control the features of that set, they don't even have access to the databases of the of in most cases, it's a proprietary network management system. So you're limited at the speed at which your vendor is willing to deploy things on their roadmap, or you're waiting for um a decision internally to run an RFP, which is usually very costly in time, and rip all that hardware out and put someone else in. Whereas by going to open standards like open RAND, it becomes like Lego. And it becomes so if I don't like an algorithm from a vendor, I just go deploy my own or pick someone else's best. And then building that on cloud, we didn't go and build this. There's a lot of um fear in the telco world where they feel like they need to compete with the hyperscalers or that the hyperscalers and and and rightfully so, that in the past, OTT and technology companies ate their lunch because traditional telcos used to make money on everything in that pipe. And most telcos have now been relegated to be a dump pipe. And what I mean by that is most of the revenue that goes through that pipe, they don't get a piece of. They used to sell TV, now it's Netflix. They used to sell long distance, now it's WhatsApp or any of the other hundred OTT apps. They used to sell all these additional services, and now they're just just give me a pipe for the internet. Uh, and that's really 10% of the total revenue that's going through that pipe at best. And and part of it is it that lesson creates this fear of, well, I don't, I don't want anyone else to take any more of my lunch. But the reality is you're, as a telco, to build the width and breadth of the functionality of some of these hyperscalers to have all the functions that AWS or Google Cloud has. Uh no matter how big you are, you don't innovate at their speed, and they've had years of head start on you. So, really, it for us, it it the partnership mindset is what makes Paradise Mobile different. We co-create with innovators. We are we're literally building new products and services with some of these tech titans in Bermuda. We're not just trying to buy tech, we're building ecosystems.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, that's fantastic. Um, and as a cloud native, AI native uh operator, uh, can you share some real operational or customer opportunities that have been created uh by this new platform?

SPEAKER_01:

For sure. I mean, there's um there's a ton of stuff, and I'd invite anyone interested to just go to our website and check out our innovation page. We update uh regularly with case studies. But I mean, you know, two recent ones, um, we have, I believe at this point, we have the majority of the airlines that fly into Bermuda that are our customers. And it started, it actually started with um with Bermuda Air, which is a homegrown uh airline in Bermuda. They had a very unique challenge where they were using actually over-the-air connectivity to do all of their pre-flights checks, they're to do all of their regulatory finding. They were they needed to connect everything, not just the cockpit, the ground crews, everybody together. And the solution, the legacy solution that they had from the other um operator was not only costly, it wasn't meeting their requirements, up to and including um delaying flights, which, as many people would know, if you are um, you know, a small airline and and you miss your window, it's like a domino effect. Uh, you don't get to go again, you get to be maybe put to the back of the line and wait. Um, so there were all these additional operational challenges beyond the cost. We inc we increased on-time departures, we definitely lowered their cost by building a customized solution that met their needs, connecting literally the cockpit systems and all the people. These aren't just cell phones, um, use both here and everywhere Bermuda Air flights. So we built a global solution that met their needs based on those SLAs. Uh, another interesting one, um, for those that aren't familiar with with um Bermuda, there is um a big sailing culture here. And uh there actually America's cup in in 2018-2019 was sort of the the start of of international competitions here, and then out of that came a uh a global league that is called Sale GP, which is honestly incredible. It's it's Formula One on water. And that that racing league held uh just last September their first ever uh training camp because they've got some new international teams, including Brazil, now joining the league. And it was the first time the teams were actually going to test the new boats and the new tech. And a big reason of why it was hosted in Bermuda was because we could meet the technical requirements uh in the time that they needed. So we were connecting in that scenario, I mean, hundreds of different sensors. We're talking about, you know, the cameras, the comms, but also all these IoTs that are on these boats. And the the latency on this stuff was super important. We're measuring milliseconds because they were actually testing a new foil. And the materials engineering on this stuff is insane. But uh, it literally got to the point where they are creating so much friction in the ocean, it's boiling the water and it's losing, it's losing the friction, and the boat crashes back down. So milliseconds matter when you're measuring these things. Um, and and you have analysts, I mean, not just in Bermuda, but in the UK and elsewhere watching this stuff. And I mean, we we we we beat even the requirements in terms of what was actually required to connect all those things. So when you look at, you know, use cases like those, um, traditionally that would be a much larger project or program with many limitations because of vendors, versus when you own your stack and you're basically a software company, you just do it yourself.

SPEAKER_00:

Amazing. Um, and you have so many different projects and programs and partners uh underway. Uh, can you give us a peek into the future and what you're testing and scaling in terms of innovation over the next few months or year, maybe a sneak peek?

SPEAKER_01:

For sure. I mean, for Bermuda, um, first of all, Bermuda is our first market, uh, but uh we do have multiple markets now. And the uh we do expect to announce at least half a dozen more markets in the next few months. Um, every one of those markets will have unique problems and unique challenges. And a product that's built in Bermuda may be fit for purpose for a specific demographic or for specific use case, whereas something that's built and maybe in a lower ARPU market uh would be fit for purpose, not to be sold necessarily into North America, but into the global south. But the the key point here is we're solving real problems where it's not a it's not a technical proof of concept. You're actually proving market traction because in the 400 different products and services that we intend to test in Bermuda over the next few years, as an example, um when we when we prove them out, we've proven them out with a demographic that models, as we mentioned before, something as simplistic as phones, for example. It's 65% Apple, 30% Samsung, 5% everything else. It models almost perfectly any North American suburb or city for that matter. So what you've done is you haven't actually proven out a technical proof of concept, you've proven out market traction with a base that models the personas that you would want to send. And because you're building it cloud native, this is literally a lift and shift of code into public cloud.

SPEAKER_00:

That's amazing. Um well done. And and just a thought on the uh personal side for business travelers, tourists like myself who love Bermuda and want to come with your iPhone, my my Apple Watch, maybe swim or sail with my Apple Watch, or use my um mobile device as a fixed, you know, fixed hotspot to get around bad hotel Wi-Fi, Airbnb Wi-Fi. Um, what's in store? What can I expect as a visitor, as a traveler uh coming into Bermuda for the first time? How do I engage with Paradise Mobile?

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, it's a very uh good question. We have the simplest and fastest digital onboarding of any mobile network operator in the world. Depending on how savvy you are, within 30 seconds, you've got an e-sim on your phone. The average time is a few minutes to be to underpromise and over-deliver. Uh, but if you have you know auto-fill on your forums and you and you're you're quick on your phone, we have clocked under 30 seconds. Um, the the idea here is we're we're a SaaS model. So everything, um we don't do legacy billing the same way that traditional telco does, where it's per gigabyte, per megabyte, per minute, per where were you and what were you doing? Think of it like the next flick Netflix model. You have a small, medium, large, everything's unlimited. It's just on the Netflix model, the large may give you four TVs at eight with HD and the other one would give you one TV, but it doesn't matter how many shows you watch. Same concept here for us. So everything has data, everything has calling. If you want to be able to, you know, just use it locally, there's a small package. And if you want to be able to literally call 190 countries without paying per minute charges, there's the big package for you.

SPEAKER_00:

That's fantastic. It's been a uh a few years since I've been to Bermuda, but that was definitely one of the downsides. The only downside was the high cost of roaming, the high cost of calling and the hotel Wi-Fi, which was not great. So uh more reasons to come to Bermuda like you needed any. But congratulations on all the success, Sam, onwards and upwards.

SPEAKER_01:

I appreciate that, Evan. Yes, and uh, you're more than welcome. Please uh please ping me when you're here.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, thanks so much, Devin. Thanks everyone for listening and watching. And be sure to check out our TV show, Tech Impact TV, now in Bloomberg and Fox Business. Thanks, everyone.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you, Evan.