Building a 2027 Telecom Budget That Survives Contact With Reality

For most CFOs, CIOs, CTOs, and IT Directors, telecom is not the most exciting line item in the annual budget.

Until something goes wrong.

A critical circuit goes down. A contract auto-renews at an above-market rate. A new location needs connectivity yesterday. AI adoption starts putting pressure on the network. Or finance discovers the company has been paying for services nobody has used in two years.

Suddenly, telecom gets everyone’s attention.

The problem is that many organizations still build their telecom budget the same way:

Take last year’s spend, add a few percent, and move on.

It’s simple. It’s also one of the easiest ways to carry old mistakes into a brand-new year.

If your current spend includes outdated pricing, billing errors, unused services, unnecessary circuits, annual escalators, or contracts approaching auto-renewal, increasing last year’s number doesn’t fix the problem.

It funds it for another twelve months.

Your 2027 telecom budget should do more than predict expenses. It should help your organization control costs, protect uptime, support growth, and create flexibility for whatever the business decides to do next.

Here are six areas I recommend every IT and finance leader pressure-test before locking in the 2027 budget.

1. Start With Clean Actuals — Not Last Year’s Budget

Before you forecast 2027, make sure you know what you’re actually spending today.

That sounds obvious, but telecom environments have a funny way of accumulating things.

• Old circuits.
• Unused phone lines.
• Former locations.
• Duplicate services.
• Equipment charges nobody recognizes.
• Billing increases that quietly appeared somewhere along the way.

I’ve seen organizations continue paying for services long after anyone remembered why they were originally ordered. That is why I recommend starting budget planning with an audit of your current environment.

Review:

• Current invoices
• Existing contracts
• Active services
• Locations
• Usage
• Billing errors
• Equipment charges
• Services that may no longer be needed

Every dollar of unnecessary spend left in your baseline becomes part of next year’s budget. A budget built from audited actuals starts with reality. The budget built from last year’s budget starts with assumptions. If you haven’t reviewed your environment recently, my mid-year telecom audit checklist is a good place to start.

2. Know What Is Already Locked In

Before deciding what you want to spend in 2027, determine what you’ve already committed to spending. Map every major telecom agreement and identify:

• Contract expiration dates
• Auto-renewal provisions
• Required cancellation windows
• Annual price escalators
• Minimum commitments
• Early termination fees
• Renewal opportunities

This is one of the most common budget surprises I see. Finance budgets a flat number. The contract says otherwise.

A 5% or 8% annual escalator may not seem dramatic when you sign an agreement, but across multiple locations and services, those increases add up quickly. And the bigger danger may be the renewal date itself.

Miss a cancellation window and an organization can find itself locked into another term before leadership ever had the opportunity to benchmark the market.

Your telecom contract calendar should be part of your budgeting process. It is not something IT scrambles to find three weeks before renewal.

3. Benchmark Before You Budget

This is where organizations can uncover significant opportunities.

If you’re paying $5,000 per month for a service today, that does not automatically mean $5,000 is the right number to budget next year. It simply means that’s what you’re paying now. Those are two very different things.

Telecom pricing changes constantly. New providers enter markets. Fiber availability expands. Technology improves. Competitive pressure changes rates. Yet many organizations renew the same provider simply because it’s easier.
Before committing major telecom expenses to your 2027 budget, benchmark them against the current marketplace.

Look at:

• Internet and dedicated fiber
• SD-WAN and network services
• UCaaS and CCaaS
• Mobile
• Cloud connectivity
• Cybersecurity
• POTS replacement
• Colocation
• Managed IT and support services

Sometimes the current provider is still the best choice. And they can be, but only after renegotiation.  And sometimes the marketplace has changed enough that another solution delivers significantly better economics, technology, or redundancy.

As a carrier-neutral advisor, I can compare hundreds of providers instead of trying to fit every organization into one carrier’s solution.

That independence matters. Your budget should reflect what the market can deliver. It is not simply what one provider happens to be charging you today. For a deeper dive, see my telecom bandwidth benchmarking guide.

4. Budget for Where the Business Is Going

A telecom budget should support the business plan. Not last year’s infrastructure. Talk with leadership before finalizing the number.

What’s happening in 2027? Are you:

• Opening locations?
• Closing or consolidating offices?
• Adding employees?
• Acquiring another company?
• Moving workloads to the cloud?
• Expanding remote work?
• Deploying AI?
• Upgrading cybersecurity?
• Replacing an aging phone system?
• Adding contact-center technology?
• Improving redundancy or disaster recovery?

Each one can affect your technology infrastructure. AI deserves special attention. Organizations are moving rapidly from experimenting with AI to embedding it across sales, customer service, operations, analytics, and internal workflows.

But AI does not operate in a vacuum. More cloud applications, automation, video, real-time analytics, and AI workloads can increase demands on connectivity, network architecture, security, and resiliency.

You don’t need a perfect prediction. You do need enough visibility to avoid designing a 2027 network around your 2025 business.

5. Decide How You Want Technology Spend Structured

Budgeting isn’t only about how much you’re spending.

It’s also about how you’re spending it.

Technology continues moving toward subscription-based and consumption-based models. That gives leadership more choices around:

• CapEx versus OpEx
• Owned versus managed equipment
• Fixed versus scalable services
• Long-term commitments versus flexibility
• Internal support versus managed services

Those decisions have operational consequences as well as financial ones. A lower monthly price is not always the better business decision if the solution creates more internal management, less flexibility, poorer support, or greater risk.
Likewise, paying more for redundancy or managed support can sometimes save exponentially more when an outage occurs.

The right question isn’t: “What’s cheapest?”

It’s: “What structure gives us the best combination of cost, performance, flexibility, and risk?”

I dive deeper into this in my CapEx vs. OpEx telecom guide.

6. Build in Room to Make Smart Decisions

There is a difference between padding a budget and building flexibility into it. I recommend the latter.

• Technology changes.
• Businesses change.
• Providers change.

And opportunities appear throughout the year. Maybe 

• a fiber provider completes construction near one of your locations.
• a contract renewal gives you leverage to renegotiate.
• an acquisition suddenly requires ten new sites.
• Maybe you discover you’re paying 30% more than market rates.

A budget that gives leadership zero flexibility can actually prevent the company from making decisions that save money long term. You want enough room to act when the business case makes sense. Because sometimes spending a little today prevents you from spending a lot tomorrow.

The 2027 Telecom Budget Pressure Test

Before your CFO, CIO, or executive team signs off on the number, ask these eight questions:

1. Is our baseline audited?
Or are we simply carrying last year’s expenses forward?

2. Have we eliminated known waste?
Unused services, ghost lines, billing errors, outdated equipment, or duplicate services?

3. Do we know every contractual increase coming in 2027?
Including annual escalators and other automatic increases?

4. Do we know which contracts expire or auto-renew?
And have we started planning far enough in advance to create negotiating leverage?

5. Have we benchmarked our largest expenses?
Or are we assuming today’s pricing is competitive?

6. Have we budgeted for business change?
Growth, acquisitions, new sites, cloud migration, AI, security, or network upgrades?

7. Have we intentionally decided the CapEx/OpEx mix?
Or simply inherited last year’s structure?

8. Do we have enough flexibility to act on a good opportunity?
Without creating an unexpected budget battle?

If you can confidently answer all eight, you are probably building your budget from a strong foundation.If you can’t, that’s not necessarily bad news.
Those unanswered questions may be exactly where your biggest opportunities are hiding.

One More Thing: Don’t Budget Telecom in a Silo

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is treating internet, voice, cloud, cybersecurity, mobile, and managed services as unrelated expenses. They aren’t. They increasingly depend on each other.

• Your cloud strategy affects your network.
• Your AI strategy affects your network and security.
• Your UCaaS or CCaaS platform depends on connectivity.
• Your redundancy strategy affects business continuity.
• Your cybersecurity architecture may change how users access applications everywhere.

When these decisions are evaluated independently, organizations often end up with overlapping vendors, unnecessary complexity, poor contract alignment, and missed savings opportunities.
The better approach is to look at the entire technology environment as a portfolio.

• What are we spending?
• What are we using?
• What is changing?
• What is at risk?
• What could we negotiate?
• And does our current infrastructure actually support where the company is headed?

Those are much better questions than simply asking: “What did we spend last year?”

About Michelle Burgad

I’m Michelle Burgad, Regional Vice President with Sandler Partners and a carrier-neutral technology and telecom advisor.

I help CFOs, CIOs, CTOs, IT Directors, and business leaders simplify complex decisions across connectivity, UCaaS, CCaaS, cloud, cybersecurity, AI, mobility, and managed services.

My role isn’t to sell you one carrier. It’s to understand what your organization is trying to accomplish, evaluate options across the marketplace, negotiate aggressively on your behalf, and help you implement a solution that makes sense operationally and financially.

Because sometimes the right answer is a new provider. Sometimes it’s renegotiating the one you already have.

And sometimes it’s discovering you shouldn’t be paying for something at all. That’s the advantage of having someone sitting on your side of the table.

Before You Lock Your 2027 Budget…

If you’re building your 2027 telecom and technology budget, this is an ideal time to take a second look at your current environment.

I’ll help you pressure-test:

• Your existing spend
• Contract expiration and auto-renewal dates
• Annual escalators
• Current market pricing
• Redundancy and business-continuity gaps
• Upcoming technology initiatives
• Opportunities to consolidate vendors
• Areas where you may be overpaying

Organizations are often surprised by what we uncover. And there is no cost to have me take a look,

Schedule a strategy review before your 2027 numbers are locked.

Because once an unnecessary expense makes it into an approved budget, it has a funny way of becoming “normal.”

Let’s make sure you’re budgeting for where your business is going — not paying for where it has been.

Related reading: How to Benchmark Your Bandwidth Rates before those numbers make it into your 2027 plan.