In July of 1776, a group of men in Philadelphia signed a document that boiled down to one very simple, very stubborn idea: we’re done depending on someone else to keep the lights on.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing, stripped of the powdered wigs and the poetry. A colony deciding it would rather build its own systems, take its own risks, and answer to no one else’s failures, than keep relying on infrastructure it didn’t control.

250 years later, we’re still building on that same instinct. We just do it with fiber instead of muskets.

Every generation has its version of “infrastructure.” In 1776 it was roads, ports, and printing presses. In the 1860s it was the telegraph. In the 1950s it was the interstate highway system. Today, it’s the network: the invisible layer of fiber, switches, towers, and engineers that decides whether a hospital in Ohio can pull up a patient’s chart, whether a bank in Atlanta can process a transaction, whether a call to 911 actually connects.

Nobody thinks about it until it breaks. That’s kind of the point. Good infrastructure is supposed to disappear into the background. The founders wanted a country that could stand on its own without leaning on a crown 3,000 miles away. Today, telecom operators want networks that can stand on their own without leaning on a single point of failure.

Same instinct. Different century.

It’s tempting to treat “independence” as a nice word for the history books. But in our world, independence is a design principle, not a sentiment. It shows up in very specific, very unglamorous ways:

Redundant paths. No network worth trusting has just one way for data to get from A to B. If a backhoe cuts a fiber line in Ohio (and it will, backhoes are undefeated), traffic needs somewhere else to go. Independence means never having your entire operation hostage to one buried cable.

Multi-vendor resilience. Depending on a single supplier for everything is just a slower version of depending on a single king. When one vendor has a bad quarter, a bad update, or a bad day, the whole network shouldn’t feel it.

24/7 monitoring. Problems don’t wait for business hours, and neither did the men debating independence into the night by candlelight. A network that’s only watched from 9 to 5 isn’t really being watched at all.

Proactive maintenance. The difference between a minor fix and a 2am outage call is usually about three weeks of somebody paying attention before anyone else noticed there was a problem.

None of this is inspiring in the way fireworks are inspiring. But it’s the same underlying bet: build something that can take a hit and keep functioning, instead of something that collapses the moment it’s left alone.

Here’s the part that doesn’t make it onto the postcard.

Most networks aren’t actually independent. They look fine, right up until the moment they don’t. A single vendor goes down. A single path gets cut. A single engineer who understood the whole system quietly leaves the company (or gets let go to make room in the budget for an AI tool that can’t actually do their job), and takes the tribal knowledge with them. And suddenly the network that looked so solid turns out to have been leaning on one thing the whole time.

Independence isn’t a status you declare once and keep forever. It’s something you have to keep building, on purpose, on a Tuesday, long after the fireworks are over. The Declaration didn’t win the war. It just stated the intention. The next eight years were the actual work: unglamorous, expensive, and mostly invisible to the people it was protecting.

That’s network engineering too. Nobody throws a parade for a redundant fiber path that quietly did its job during a storm. Nobody writes a folk song about the engineer who caught a failing switch three weeks before it would’ve taken down a regional carrier. But that’s the work. That’s always been the work.

There’s a detail in this that’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it: a meaningful amount of the engineering keeping American Tier 1 networks independent right now isn’t happening in America at all. It’s happening in Prishtina, on teams built specifically to give US carriers the redundancy, the 24/7 coverage, and the bench depth they can’t always staff at home. We wrote a whole whitepaper on why that model works, if you want the longer version.

There’s something fitting about that. Kosovo is one of the most openly pro-American countries in the world, not as a talking point, but as lived history: the statues, the street names, the gratitude that’s older than most of the engineers now working night shifts to keep a Comcast VNOC running smoothly. It’s a country that understands, in its own bones, what it means to want to build something independent and have someone show up to help you do it.

250 years ago, America decided it didn’t want to depend on anyone else to keep its own lights on. Today, some of the people helping keep America’s lights on happen to be 5,000 miles away, in a country that’s never forgotten what that kind of help meant when it needed it too.

Here’s where this stops being a metaphor.

This week, the American Chamber of Commerce in Kosovo and the US Embassy in Kosovo recognized Mikkena Global J.S.C. as one of Kosovo’s two largest exporters to the United States.

Read that again. A network engineering company, built from Prishtina, keeping American telecom infrastructure independent, was just named one of the top two reasons goods and services flow from Kosovo to the US at all.

Fisnik Pula, our CEO, put it better than we could: when the question kept coming back to “why would a US operator trust a team from Kosovo with their network infrastructure,” the answer was never an argument. It was just work. Every single day, until the question stopped getting asked.

That’s the whole philosophy of this post, standing on a stage, holding a trophy with a “250” on it, on the week America turns the same number.

Nobody builds independence with a speech. You build it one uptime report, one caught failure, one unremarkable Tuesday at a time, for long enough that eventually someone hands you an award and says: this, actually, is one of the biggest things holding the relationship together.

Kosovo exports talent. It always has. This week, that got put on paper.

Here’s to uptime. Here’s to redundancy. Here’s to never finding out the hard way which parts of your network were quietly depending on just one thing all along.

And here’s to the people, wherever they’re sitting, who make sure you never have to find out.

By Fisnik Pula, CEO, Mikkena Global

Somewhere in 2023, a decision got made in a lot of boardrooms at the same time.

It was not announced. It did not come with a press release. It came with a slide deck, a vendor demo, and a number that looked very convincing on a spreadsheet. The number said: AI will cost less than your engineers. So companies started making the swap. Quietly at first. Then not so quietly.

The engineers noticed. Some of them saw it coming. Others found out the way people usually find out about these things: on a Tuesday, in a calendar invite with no context.

I am not writing this to relitigate whether AI is useful. It is. I use it. My team uses it. The engineers at Mikkena use it every day. I am writing this because the story that got sold in those boardrooms was not the whole story, and the missing part is now showing up on invoices.

Picture an engineer at Uber. December 2025. The company rolls out a new AI coding tool called Claude Code. She tries it. It is genuinely good. Her colleagues try it. Word spreads. By March, 84% of Uber’s 5,000 engineers are using it, which is remarkable adoption by any measure. Usually you fight to get 30% of a company using a new tool. This one spread because it worked.

Then the CTO got the bill.

The entire 2026 AI coding budget, gone. Not stretched. Not over. Gone. Four months into the year, with eight months still to go. Individual engineers had been spending between $500 and $2,000 a month just on tokens. Not salaries. Tokens. The cost of asking questions.

Around the same time, Microsoft sent a memo. Stop using the AI coding tool. Not because it was not working. Because the bills were too large. This is Microsoft. The company that put $13 billion into OpenAI. The company that writes nearly a third of its own code with generative AI. They looked at what their engineers were spending and said: we cannot sustain this.

And then came the line that should be printed on a wall somewhere. Bryan Catanzaro, VP of Applied Deep Learning at Nvidia, the company whose chips are running all of this, told Axios plainly: “For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees.”

The people selling the shovels are telling you the gold rush math does not work.

A 2024 MIT study put numbers to it: AI is economically cheaper than a human in about 23% of roles. In the other 77%, the human is still the better deal. Gartner now has generative AI in what they call the trough of disillusionment, and they project that a quarter of AI budgets planned for 2026 will quietly roll into 2027, unspent, as pilots die in committee.

None of this means AI is a fraud. It means the business case was built on assumptions that have not held up in production.

There is a version of this AI story where the math eventually works out. Token prices drop, models improve, the unit economics flip. For a lot of industries, that story is probably true. Give it a few years.

Telecom network engineering is not that story.

Think about what a network engineer actually does on a given Tuesday. She is not generating content or summarizing documents. She is managing a live migration of thousands of ports across a carrier network that is actively moving traffic for millions of people. She is writing method-of-procedure documents that she will be held personally accountable for. She is on a call with a vendor escalation team at 2am because something has gone sideways and someone needs to make a judgment call in the next four minutes.

You cannot submit that to a prompt.

Network World analysts will tell you that agentic AI is going to handle more of the routine stuff: incident monitoring, change management, standard configurations. That is true and it is useful. But the same analysis says senior engineers remain indispensable for anything that requires contextual judgment, architecture decisions, or high-stakes interventions.

Here is the paradox nobody talks about: AI-driven network automation actually increases the demand for skilled engineers. The more automated your network gets, the more critical the humans who govern, troubleshoot, and evolve it become. The technology that was supposed to reduce your engineering headcount is creating a more specialized, more expensive version of the same problem.

You do not fix that with a better AI subscription.

This is the part of the story that rarely makes it into the trade press.

When companies cut engineering teams to fund AI investments, those engineers did not disappear. They went to companies that still valued them, or they went independent, or they moved on to work that paid better. The ones who stayed in network engineering are now in a tighter market than before. The Robert Half 2026 Salary Guide puts a senior network engineer in the US at $110,000 to $202,000 a year in base compensation alone, before you add benefits, employer contributions, and the overhead of keeping someone on your payroll. That number is going up, not down.

So the companies that made the swap are now sitting with two problems. The AI tools cost more than projected. And rehiring the engineers they let go would cost more than it did before.

There is a third option. It does not require choosing between them.

The telecom operators getting this right are not the ones who picked a side. They are the ones who asked a different question: what if you started with a lower-cost engineering baseline, and then added AI on top of it?

A Mikkena engineer costs 50 to 70% less than a comparable US hire, according to benchmarks from Statista/DevsData, Playroll, and Robert Half. That engineer also uses AI tools every day. Automation scripting, AI-assisted diagnostics, coding tools when they are useful. The AI spend is a manageable line on a budget that is already optimized, not a runaway cost eating into headcount savings that never materialized.

You get the productivity of AI-augmented engineering. You do not get the invoice that ended Uber’s year in April.

For a team of 10 to 100 engineers, the annual savings versus US-based hiring range from $450K to over $14.6M depending on role mix. That is money that does not vanish in a token pricing adjustment. It is structural. It compounds.

Mikkena has migrated over 75,000 ports for a Tier 1 carrier across all 50 states, completing the program six months ahead of schedule with zero customer-impacting outages. That work was done by engineers. Supported by tooling. Owned by people whose names were on the documents. The full delivery model is here if you want to read it.

I want to tell you something about where Mikkena’s engineers come from, because I think it matters more than the cost numbers.

Kosovo is a young country. Median age of 32, the youngest population in Europe. More than half the country is under 35. It is a place where people grew up watching the world through a window, then decided to build something worth looking at. The tech sector did not emerge from policy papers or investment theses. It emerged from a generation of engineers who saw what was possible and chose to work for it.

Gallup has ranked Kosovo as the most pro-American country in the world, with US approval ratings above 85%, higher than any other nation they survey. Pristina’s main boulevard is named after Bill Clinton. This is not political. It is cultural. It means that when a Kosovo engineer gets on a call with a network operations team in Atlanta or Dallas or Seattle, they are not navigating a cultural gap. They are on the same page before the meeting starts.

This is not the offshoring model most executives have in their heads. That model is built for volume: large teams, well-defined tasks, minimal judgment required, minimal interaction with the client. It works for certain things. Network engineering at Tier 1 carrier level is not one of them.

Kosovo engineers are trained to own outcomes. They ask questions. They push back when something does not make sense. They build relationships with the people on the other end of the line. When something goes wrong at 2am, they call you. That is a different kind of professional than someone whose job is to close tickets.

Ericsson understood this when they chose Kosovo for their first R&D center outside Croatia. The engineers there develop Radio Access processing software for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Vodafone. Ericsson did not go there because it was the cheapest option in Europe. They went there because they found the level of capability they needed.

The AI vs. engineers debate was never really about technology. It was about a deeper question that did not get asked out loud in those 2023 boardrooms.

The question was: do we still believe that the people doing this work are worth what we are paying them?

The answer that got written into a lot of strategy decks was: not if we can find a cheaper substitute. And the substitute looked very convincing until it started sending monthly invoices that made the original headcount look like a bargain.

The engineers who lost their jobs in that moment were real people. Some of them had spent years building institutional knowledge that walked out the door with them. Some of them were the ones who knew why the workaround on line 47 of the config existed, and what would happen if someone changed it. That knowledge does not live in a model. It lives in a person, built over time, through experience.

What we have learned in 2026 is that the cost of replacing human judgment with compute is higher than the spreadsheet said. Not because the technology is bad. Because judgment is genuinely expensive to replicate, and the people who have it have other options.

The operators who are going to lead this next phase are the ones who never stopped investing in engineers. Who found smarter ways to structure that investment, not cheaper ways to avoid it. Who understood that the question was never AI or humans. It was always: how do you build a team of humans who can use every tool available to deliver outcomes that a machine alone cannot?

That is the conversation worth having. The other one already had its moment, and the bill is in.

Mikkena Global J.S.C. provides outcome-priced network engineering teams for Tier 1 carriers, ISPs, and global enterprises. 75,000+ ports migrated. Zero customer-impacting outages. mikkena.com