Billing chaos still plagues the telecom industry. Now, Fortune 500 carriers are quietly using distributed ledger tech to eliminate disputes and recover hundreds of millions.
When John Nolan ran global connectivity for AT&T, he was responsible for a multi-billion-dollar annual budget. His job? Keep the infrastructure running and keep the costs down across fiber lines, wireless backhaul, and international voice routes.
Each year, his team was tasked with finding 10% in cost savings from their budget. And every year, despite sophisticated tools and elite auditors, the same problems kept surfacing: billing errors, mismatched contract terms, phantom infrastructure charges, and the like.
“Every year, roughly a fourth of the savings was billing related, although you would never get back every dollar you overpaid,” says Nolan.
This experience is not unique to telecom, but rather a corporate finance problem hiding in every industry that relies on infrastructure, from logistics and healthcare to cloud and financial services. What makes telecom unique is its size and the visibility it gives us into how deep the inefficiencies really run.
And now, in an unexpected twist, the fix is coming from the same underlying technology that powers cryptocurrencies — not for speculation, but for reconciliation.
From Crypto Hype to Real-World Utility
SAGE Management, an enterprise audit firm owned by cost-reduction giant SIB, is quietly deploying blockchain-powered distributed ledgers to tackle one of telecom’s most expensive and least visible challenges: intercarrier billing.
In simple terms, when two telecom companies exchange traffic, like when one carrier leases fiber from another to reach a cell tower, the resulting billing is governed by dense, often ambiguous contracts. Small discrepancies in mileage, terms, or rates can result in large-dollar disputes. Historically, these have been resolved manually, after the fact, with long trails of invoices, emails, and negotiation.
SAGE’s approach flips that model.
Instead of auditing after errors appear, the company is building permissioned, immutable ledgers where both parties agree on contract terms, rates, and service inventory before the first bill is generated. Once those records are written, they’re locked, and every subsequent invoice is validated against that shared source of truth.
“It’s blockchain in the truest sense, a tamper-proof record that eliminates disagreement, ” says Nolan. “The holy grail isn’t better audits. It’s no audits. No disputes. No overpayments. No partial recoveries.”
Phantom Infrastructure, Real Costs
Throughout his career, Nolan’s teams have uncovered hundreds of millions in overcharges, often buried in the fine print, or worse, hiding in plain sight. One audit revealed completely disconnected power feeds coiled in the ceiling of a data center, still charging $400 per month. Another found racks half-empty but billed as full. Yet another revealed cross-connects linked to long-gone customers continuing to generate fees.
“It’s like paying for a storage unit for years without checking what’s in it,” says Nolan. “We’re talking millions of dollars in infrastructure no one’s using, but still paying for.”
Most companies don’t have the visibility or tools to catch these errors. Even for those that do, they often lack the incentive or resources to keep fighting them year after year.
That’s where the blockchain model shines. By establishing a mutual, machine-readable contract record at the beginning of a transaction, disputes are not only resolved faster but also prevented altogether.
The Broader Business Case
While the crypto market continues to search for real-world use cases, enterprise blockchain deployments like this one are quietly gaining momentum, particularly in industries where infrastructure, intermediaries, and legacy billing systems collide.
The potential upside is enormous.
While working at his prior company, Nolan hired SAGE to help them uncover savings. “Within a short amount of time, they found tens of millions of dollars in savings that had been missed,”
Nolan shares.
For other large telecom players and potentially any infrastructure-heavy business, the model offers a rare benefit: guaranteed ROI.
“Where only a fraction of a new revenue dollar drops to the bottom line, every dollar of expense savings flows straight to the bottom line,” says Nolan. “In some cases that dollar of expense savings pulls through other savings as well. All of that makes you more profitable and as a result more competitive so you can sell more; it’s a virtuous cycle.”
From Pilot to Platform
SAGE isn’t the only company exploring enterprise blockchain, but it’s one of the few already operating at scale and generating measurable results.
The company is also expanding its footprint beyond billing disputes into physical infrastructure audits at carrier hotels and data centers. In partnership with Rackonomics, SAGE now offers datacenter expense services that help carriers gain real-time visibility into their equipment, power usage, and connectivity costs across facilities, transforming disorganized, manual systems into structured, monitorable operations.
Once that physical infrastructure is mapped and reconciled, it can also be tied into the ledger, closing the loop from physical asset to financial record.
The result is a new operating model for telecom: one that’s not just reactive, but preventative. One where disputes disappear, billing becomes bulletproof, and infrastructure is fully accountable.
Why It Matters Now
As crypto enters its utility era, stories like this mark an important turning point. Blockchain isn’t just for DeFi or NFTs — it’s becoming the invisible infrastructure that powers more accurate, efficient, and trusted systems behind the scenes.
For telecom, that shift can’t come soon enough.
“Infrastructure spend is one of the last great black boxes in corporate finance,” Nolan says. “We’re finally getting the tools to open it and make sure what you’re paying for is what you’re actually using.”
