I’m sitting in the audience at Network Field Day watching Dennis Thankachan and Ryan Schrack from Lightyear demo what they call a “telecom operating system,” and my brain is doing that thing it does where it stops listening to the presenter and starts thinking about my customers. Lightyear is pitching to enterprises, Fortune 500s, big-name logos. And I get it, that’s where the big contracts are. But I can’t help myself, so I grab the mic and ask: Do you work with MSPs? Not MSPs as customers, but MSPs who are aggregating a bunch of smaller clients and managing telecom on their behalf?
Dennis says yes, a few do it today.
A few. That’s the interesting part. From where I sit in the MSP/MSSP world, dealing with midmarket customers every day, the gap between what we manage and what carriers manage (badly) is enormous. And almost nobody is filling it.
Telecom Jargon Decoder
MACD — Moves, Adds, Changes, Disconnects. The everyday maintenance tickets you file with a carrier when something about a circuit needs to change.
LOA/CFA — Letter of Authorization / Connecting Facility Assignment. The paperwork that authorizes a carrier to deliver a circuit to a specific location and demarc point.
Notice Period — The window (usually 30–90 days) before a contract end date during which you must notify the carrier if you don’t want to auto-renew. Miss it, and you’re locked in again.
Auto-Renew — The contract clause that automatically extends your service (often at a higher rate) if you don’t actively cancel or renegotiate before the notice period expires.
Demarc — Demarcation point. The physical boundary where the carrier’s responsibility ends and yours begins. Usually a jack or panel in a telco closet.
RFP — Request for Proposal. The formal process of soliciting competitive bids from multiple carriers for a circuit or set of services.
TEM — Telecom Expense Management. The practice (or platform) of auditing, tracking, and optimizing your telecom invoices and spend.
NNI — Network-to-Network Interface. The connection point between two different carrier networks. Relevant when your circuit traverses more than one provider’s infrastructure.
The Gap at the Demarc
Here’s the reality of most midmarket MSP engagements. We own everything inside the building. Switches, firewalls, Wi-Fi, SD-WAN overlays, endpoint security — that’s our world, and we’re good at it. But at the carrier demarc, we draw a hard line. Everything on the other side of that handoff is “the carrier’s problem.”
Except carriers are terrible at managing their own stuff proactively. Renewal dates slip by and auto-renew at inflated rates. Billing errors go unnoticed for months. That “diverse” pair of circuits you’re paying a premium for? Nobody’s validated that they aren’t sharing a conduit into the building or converging on the same upstream autonomous system two hops away. The carrier account rep who sold you the circuit three years ago has moved on, and the new one doesn’t know your name.
And the customer’s IT director? They’re managing telecom as a side quest, armed with a spreadsheet they inherited from someone who left the company in 2022. Half the rows are wrong. There are circuits on there that were disconnected a year ago, but are still being billed. There are circuits not on there that are definitely still active.
When a circuit goes down at 2 AM, guess who gets the call? We do. The MSP. And we pick up the phone with limited, if not no, carrier-side context.. We end up playing telephone between the customer and a carrier support queue, which is about as fun as it sounds.
That gap at the demarc is real, it’s expensive, and it’s an opportunity.
What Lightyear Actually Does (The 60-Second Version)
For those who didn’t watch the network field day session, here’s the practitioner-level summary. Lightyear is a platform that covers the telecom lifecycle end-to-end through three core products.
Their procurement engine lets you run a digital RFP across over a thousand carrier integrations, powered by proprietary pricing and network intelligence data. Instead of calling three reps, waiting two weeks for quotes that may or may not be competitive, and comparing them in yet another spreadsheet, you get an exhaustive, data-driven result set. They also project-manage the install, which anyone who’s ever waited 90 days for a “30-day install” can appreciate.
Their network inventory manager is a proper system of record for your circuits — contract details, SLAs, notice dates, static IPs, LAN/WAN config, vendor contacts — over 30 data points per service. It automates lifecycle workflows like MACD ticketing and pre-renewal reshopping. It also has an API, so it can feed data into systems you already use, like ServiceNow or Netbox.
Their expense management product handles telecom invoice auditing with AI, catches variances and billing errors automatically, and can consolidate payments into a single monthly bill so you never eat a late fee or lose a circuit to non-payment.
Here’s the part that matters for MSPs: procurement is free to use. Lightyear monetizes through carrier commissions that would otherwise go to a sales rep, so it doesn’t increase the cost of the service. Inventory and expense management are SaaS subscriptions. And the whole thing comes with white-glove support; real humans who help with onboarding, network engineering, and carrier escalation. It’s not a self-service portal you’re left to figure out.
Where MSPs Fit In
So here’s where my brain went during that session. If you’re an MSP serving midmarket customers, Lightyear could slot into your stack in a few practical ways.
The visibility play. You already track switches, firewalls, and endpoints in your documentation platform such as IT Glue, or Hudu. But your telecom documentation is probably a mess, if it exists at all. Lightyear’s inventory manager becomes the telecom layer in your documentation stack. Their API means you can pull circuit data into your existing CMDB or PSA so your NOC techs actually have carrier context when they’re troubleshooting at 2 AM. No more “let me find the spreadsheet.”
The procurement play. Next time a customer needs a new circuit or is coming up on a renewal, instead of handing them a carrier rep’s phone number and wishing them luck, you run the RFP through Lightyear. You stay in the loop, the customer gets competitive pricing backed by real market data, and you look like the person who just saved them 20% on their WAN spend. Since procurement is commission-funded and free to use, this doesn’t cost the MSP a dime to offer. That’s a hard ROI to argue with.
The expense management play. For customers with 20 or more circuits, billing errors and forgotten services are basically guaranteed. I’ve seen customers paying for circuits that were disconnected over a year ago. The disconnect order went through on the carrier side, but billing never caught up, and nobody was auditing the invoices. Wrapping Lightyear’s TEM offering into a managed service is a natural add-on that can pay for itself in recovered overcharges.
The stickiness play. This is the one that should get MSP owners’ attention. Every one of these touchpoints deepens your customer relationship. You go from “the firewall and Wi-Fi people” to “the people who run our entire network, carrier included.” You become the single point of contact for everything, not just the LAN side. That’s a relationship that’s significantly harder to replace than a firewall subscription. It’s also a differentiator in a market where every MSP in town is selling the same stack.
The Circuit Monitoring Question
During the Q&A, Ryan mentioned that Lightyear is building a circuit monitoring product for 2026. A new pillar that would give the platform visibility into what’s actually happening on your circuits. Uptime, downtime, capacity utilization, the works.
I pushed back, because that’s what I do. Carriers don’t know their own circuits are down half the time. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve called a carrier NOC to report an outage and been told: “We’re not seeing anything on our end.” So if Lightyear’s monitoring plan is to pull status from the providers, that’s worthless.
Ryan’s answer was encouraging; he acknowledged the problem and said it would likely involve some kind of software-based tie-in to circuit IPs, not just trusting the carrier’s word. The details aren’t finalized yet, and it’s not shipping today, so I’ll caveat it appropriately. But if they get this right, the MSP value proposition goes through the roof. You’d have end-to-end visibility from carrier SLA performance all the way to the LAN port, lifecycle, and monitoring in one platform. That’s the kind of thing that turns a telecom lifecycle add-on into a core managed service pillar.
This is the piece to watch. It’s why MSPs should be paying attention to Lightyear now rather than waiting until the feature is GA.
Where It’s Not a Fit (Yet)
I’m not writing a commercial here, so let me be honest about the edges.
If you’re a very small MSP with a handful of customers and a dozen total circuits across your whole book of business, you probably don’t need a platform for this. A good relationship with a solid telecom agent and a clean spreadsheet still works at that scale. The overhead of onboarding a new tool has to be justified by the volume.
Also, Dennis described the MSP use case as “a few” customers today — this isn’t a formal channel program with deal registration and partner tiers. MSPs exploring this are early adopters, with both the upside and the risk that implies. You might have to do some legwork to map the platform to your service delivery model.
And telecom is still a different skill set. Contract negotiation, carrier escalation paths, regulatory notice periods, and tariff structures are a world apart from patching endpoints and managing firewall rules. Lightyear’s white-glove support helps bridge that gap significantly, but you still need someone on your team who can speak carrier when it counts.
Final Thoughts
The gap at the demarc is real. Your customers feel it every time a renewal auto-renews at a 15% markup, or a billing error goes unnoticed for six months, or a “diverse” circuit pair turns out to share the same fiber path. They just don’t know what to do about it, and honestly, most MSPs don’t either.
The MSPs who figure out how to fill that gap are going to differentiate themselves hard in a market where everyone else is selling the same firewall, the same RMM, and the same endpoint stack. Lightyear isn’t the only way to do it, but it’s the most complete platform I’ve seen for it, and the free procurement model makes the barrier to entry about as low as it gets.
My suggestion: start small. Pick one customer with a renewal coming up in the next 60 days and run it through Lightyear’s procurement engine. If it saves time and gets a better price, you’ll know whether there’s a service offering in it. If not, you’ve lost nothing.
Disclaimer: This post is based on Lightyear’s presentation at Network Field Day 40. As a Network Field Day delegate, my travel and accommodations were covered, but nobody reviewed or approved this content. These opinions are my own.
