Here is one I have already made

Sometime in February 2026, Odido (the erstwhile T-Mobile NL, now owned by Apax and Warburg Pincus) found itself in trouble. No, not the failed IPO situation. They had exposed the data of 6.2 million customers in what the newspapers called "the biggest data leak in Dutch history".

The data included all personal details including bank account numbers, ID card details and even customer service notes. The hackers had basically downloaded the whole Salesforce database by querying records one at a time (bypassing MFA with the simple tactic of pretending to be Odido IT and calling the customer service agent), threatened Odido with exposure for a ransom and then dumped all of the data on the dark web. The records included, contrary to what GDPR allowed, data stretching back ten years, including of people who were no longer customers.

And how Odido responded became a PR masterclass. No, I mean the opposite. They sent a "general email" to all subscribers, promised to follow up with a specific one (they did not), offered no compensation but suggested "better tips to manage your identity online" and a 2 year subscription to F-secure, an antivirus software. Upon being asked if the CEO would address the press, they said he was "far too busy to do that."

Reddit and community forums were enraged. One poster summed it up succinctly - "it is unfortunate that they did not want to spend 12.5 cents per customer to protect privacy and data". It did not help matters when subsequent press reports emerged that they were tracking modem data and passing it on to data brokers.

There is a certain agreement that is made between companies and customers in the current era - we pretend that privacy and social contracts are intact unless there is an egregious violation of both. And somehow, Odido had stumbled their way into the worst example of that.

I had been a customer of T-Mobile since 2017. Their prices were fair and they had excellent worldwide roaming agreements with solid unlimited plans. The data horse had just bolted, but I wasn't happy about continuing to pay money to them. I had just moved to their fibre connection in January 2025 but didn't have a fixed contract any way, though my mobile contract was only up in September.

The die was cast. I was going to churn.

When I checked online for replacement ISPs, it seemed like only Odido was offering fibre. They had laid cable in my street in 2024 with the homeowner's association granting access to buildings some time in the last quarter. Having only one ISP on fibre with everyone else on ADSL/cable was confusing to me, but I suspected it probably was an outcome of exclusivity for 1-2 years. Surely the incumbent, KPN, will have fibre access on the line at some point and so if I moved to them, I would have fibre internet at the same time.

So, I walked into the KPN experience store, waited behind a lot of people with the same idea as I did and moved to KPN broadband (at a 90% speed drop). In my chat with the salesperson, I asked when KPN would move into the 21st century in my street and he told me to check for myself, but who needed gigabit speeds anyway?

"Strange," I thought to myself but thought this would be resolved over the course of the year. And yes, I would have ADSL from April 5th because there was no way I was staying on fibre with the only ISP (Odido) available on my street.

The Sunday dawned for my fibre to ADSL switch. I swapped my Odido modem in my electrical cabinet for the KPN modem in my living room, but faced some issues. I set up an appointment with the customer service for the Tuesday. Meanwhile, I was dropping my internet connection in the home office and could hardly use Google Meet.

So I decided to actually understand what my options really were for getting a better internet connection in my neighbourhood. When the KPN customer service agent called, I asked her when the fibre would be available on my street and she professed she did not know. I pointed out to her that Odido and ODF (Open Dutch Fibre) had already laid the cables down and surely it was just a matter of switching providers over the fibre infrastructure. She was very helpful but couldn't give me any further information.

I kept the phone down and decided to email my VvE (Vereniging van Eigenaars - the Home Owners Association), which in my neighbourhood's case was around 150 apartments, to ask whether they had gotten a request from KPN for fibre access. The very nice man, Jasper sent me this note:

To our knowledge there is no KPN connection yet and we have not received a proposal from KPN to install the necessary kabels. So all we can do is wait for them to send a proposal for this.

I remained confused. I did some more digging online to finally find out three pieces of information:

a) Odido (via a one year exclusivity with ODF) and KPN maintained two separate fibre networks that sometimes overlapped or crossed paths and had their own independent deployment schedules. This meant that my neighbourhood had ODF fibre and would not have KPN unless they reopened the streets and laid their own fibre in their own ducts OR made a wholesale agreement with ODF which the KPN CEO had publicly disavowed

b) Odido's exclusivity with ODF had expired late 2025 for my neighbourhood and there was a secret second fibre ISP that simply wasn't showing up in the provider checks

c) and finally, I was within the 14 day bedenktijd clause with KPN. I could cancel with no reasoning and move to another internet provider. I would probably have no internet for a few days to weeks but I could hotspot.

So, that made sense. I applied for Freedom Internet (they have a fascinating set of corporate rules centred around open access and privacy), called the customer service and got a date of April 15th for service delivery.

But the fibre rollout story was still bugging me.

From a Capex allocation and project management standpoint, having two very expensive fibre roll outs in the same neighbourhood, especially in the urban density of the Randstad, its old buildings and swampy foundations did not make financial or bureaucratic sense.

I finally decided to leave my Googling skills honed over many years behind and typed directly into Claude:

Can you give me an indication of how the KPN fibre network is progressing in Amsterdam, specifically the De Pijp area?

It wasn't very helpful for the first ten minutes, just restating a bunch of news articles I had already seen. So, I asked it to build a map of Amsterdam with the different fibre players mapped on the neighbourhoods.

So, the fibre rollout story in Amsterdam specifically, but also urban Netherlands generally, boiled down to this: slow and difficult because of the urban density and stakeholders including the gemeentes, but also inefficient because of risk of fibre overbuild by the operators. Almost 90% households have FTTH access in the country but while the regulator was driving customer choice via open access, the returns were suffering because of lower than expected fibre take-up and the aforementioned overbuild risks (currently approx. 550k households).

And all of this while all the MNOs and infrastructure operators (the cable player ZiggoVodafone/Liberty Global, Odido/Apax and Warburg Pincus, ODF/KKR and DTCP, and Delta/EQT and Stonepeak) except KPN were owned by Private Equity with an exit expectation in the next five years.

So I pulled on the thread I saw dangling. Hard.

...Please forget about the consumer - what are the moves available for each player in the market - the top 3 telcos/infra players and the Dutch regulator? How will the moves go?

I spent the next day with Claude coaxing it to write me increasingly complex scenarios for base, bear and bull market cases with different permutations of exits, buyers and timing and drawing analogues with other markets.

It kept making mistakes that needed corrections (imputing a 10% drop in subs to a 40% decline in revenue, for instance) and confidently asserting hallucinations or implications as fact. As a friend had told me before: "Claude's like a really smart first year BA. Very enthusiastic but you need to check the maths."

And I got a pretty good V3 strategy deck for the Dutch telecom market, which is probably 80% right in the essentials of how the market will move. The time compression of being able to get to an output of this sort is immense - though as many people have said before me, you need to be able to see through the logic fallacies and ask the right questions.

But the real lesson for me was not the ease or the 1st year BA that is Claude; it was a personal reflection. I spent two days on building a deck about the Dutch telecom market because I wanted to pick a different ISP. I am not entirely sure what it says about me and that is a thread I will disentangle at some point.

The universe was always me trying to understand the Dutch telecom market.