- Calls company an MNO, scoffs at rivals’ cloud claims, insists he is ahead on AI and data
- The more you pressure me, the calmer I become, in fact, if there’s nothing to do, I get agitated
Gurtaj Singh Padda, Tune Talk Sdn Bhd founder-CEO knows how some of his peers see him. They find him maddening for calling Tune Talk an MNO (Mobile Network Operator) rather than an MVNO (Mobile Network Virtual Operator).
Their argument is simple: no spectrum, no owned network, no right to call yourself an MNO – a mobile network model that calls for owning spectrum (sometimes costing billions of Ringgit, and then investing billions more to build out the network over the entire country). In stark contrast, Tune Talk spends around RM200 million a year in leasing network capacity from CelcomDigi.
His retort is pure Gurtaj — part challenge, part provocation, and delivered with the confidence of a man who has already moved on to the next argument. “If U Mobile is the only telco with 5G spectrum,” he asks, “then by that logic are Maxis, CelcomDigi, YES and TM all MVNOs in 5G too?”
That is the Gurtaj style. Push the claim right to the edge, dare the industry to answer.
It is not just his telco peers who get a piece of his mind. This writer was on the receiving end of his sharp retorts, barely minutes into our hour-long conversation.
“You made them look like a hero. On LinkedIn, people were asking me. What critical workloads? I said, ‘I’ll ask Karamjit. He’s coming here tomorrow, he printed the article,” said the India-born Gurtaj, who is a Singaporean citizen.
What rubbed him the wrong way was a Maxis Bhd press release that Digital News Asia had run a few months back, where Maxis said it had become the first Malaysian telco to migrate mission-critical workloads to the AWS Malaysia Region, shifting out from Singapore. In the release Maxis said this covered 100% of its digital workloads, including the Maxis and Hotlink apps. Gurtaj was having none of it. Apps, in his view, are not the beating heart of a telco. “The real critical workloads, when you are a telco, are the core network, the BSS and the OSS. Not moving their app to the cloud. You tell them, Gurtaj says that is bull!”
Ouch. Yet speaking to Gurtaj is a dream assignment for any journalist eager to make a name for themselves with some spicy quotes on the market, the regulator and of course his competitors. He is not one to hold back.
Interestingly, his allegation that poor KYC practices inflate competitor subscriber counts, especially in the handling of foreign workers and telco family plans, and can be a national security issue has been taken up by regulator, MCMC (Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission).
It is notable that MCMC tightened prepaid SIM registration rules in February 2026, introducing a mandatory standard aimed at curbing identity misuse, fraudulent registrations and scams. That does not validate his criticism of any one operator. It does, however, suggest the regulator sees SIM registration abuse as a serious enough issue to warrant tougher intervention.
The Gurtaj bite, the Gurtaj inflation
He hammers his points with sarcasm and a fair bit of bite. Why, he asks, does the media so often give large incumbents the benefit of the doubt when they make grand technology claims? Why is the burden of proof so light when the brand is established, but so much heavier when the claimant is a noisy challenger? “I am not whacking anyone. I am just a truth seeker,” he says. And yes, there is a mischievous glint in his eyes when he says that.
His bite is fed by his elephant memory. In late 2024 he had a discussion with this writer where he made some bold claims about what he was going to do as CEO. “Everything I said I wanted to do, I did. But you did not believe me,” he reminded. That prod failed to trigger a recall in this writer who offered a meek excuse. And then he even remembered the first time he ever met this writer – 10 years ago – and what we talked about. I almost walked out of the interview.
And yet this is where the tables are turned on him.
Because Gurtaj, who has little patience for what he sees as inflated PR from the incumbents, is not exactly above inflation himself in his media interviews. With this writer, he describes Tune Talk as “the first cloud-native 5G telco in the world and that there is “no precedence anywhere in the world – we set the precedent.” It is a cracking line, one has to admit. It is also a stretch of the facts that the public record does not support.
A read of Tune Talk’s own Nokia-linked announcements from March 2025 and March 2026 paints a different picture. In March 2025, Tune Talk said it was “the first telco in ASEAN to implement a fully containerised core network on public cloud.” In March 2026, it followed this up and said it had “completed Phase 1 of its cloud core modernisation with Nokia, becoming the first ASEAN telco to deploy this cloud-native core technology at scale.”
Cross-checking this with Nokia’s own release sees the Finish telco vendor describing Tune Talk as “the first live service in Malaysia for a 5G Standalone Core in a public cloud.”
That is still significant though. Malaysia-first and ASEAN-first are not small claims. But they are not the same thing as world-first. In fact, Nokia’s own multi-cloud page also points to Boost Mobile in the US as the world’s first telecommunications provider to launch live service of a 5G Standalone Core on a public cloud.
So yes, Gurtaj has a serious cloud-native story. But no, the evidence available publicly does not support his claim that it is the first cloud-native 5G telco in the world.
Those who follow the telco industry will not bat an eye at Gurtaj’s stretching the truth. Exaggeration is hardly unique to Tune Talk. Telcos have long had a habit of treating press releases as a branch of speculative fiction. They are forever “transforming”, “redefining”, “pioneering” and “leading”.
What makes Gurtaj’s Tune Talk journey so interesting is that, after launching the company in Aug 2007 as its founder and first CEO and stepping down at the end of 2008 with services going live in Aug 2009, he had to fight in court against AirAsia linked parties from 2020-2023 before coming back as CEO in Nov 2024.
The court battles from 2020 to 2023
The dispute was over a 2019 agreement under which Tune Group and three other parties were going to sell 850,934 Tune Talk shares to Gurtaj at RM3 per share. Media reporting indicated that, under the deal, he was supposed to pay for the shares within 30 days. However, Celcom, which owned a 35% stake, objected to the RM3 price with Gurtaj suing to enforce the original sale deal. The defendants argued the deal had lapsed because payment had not been made within the stipulated 30 days.
The matter went to arbitration. The arbitrator ruled in Gurtaj’s favour. The High Court upheld that award in Aug 2022. Then, in August 2023, the Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal by Tune Group and three others and upheld the enforcement of the arbitration award.
All this was going on with the pandemic raging. It was a tough and stressful period all around. For most people, perhaps but not the inimitable Gurtaj.
Asked what gave him the confidence to take on AirAsia-linked parties in court over the shareholding dispute, Gurtaj said, “When you are right, you should not ever give up, no matter the pressure. But a lot of people, maybe even 99% give up not because they are wrong, but due to the pressure. And the other side knows that and that is their MO (modus operandi.”
Sharing his belief that one’s backbone is defined by how much pressure a person can take, he reveals, “My strength comes from the fact that the more you pressure me, the calmer I become. In fact, if there’s nothing to do, I get agitated. I don’t know what to do in life. So, I need pressure, and I love this, right?”
He also loved the outcome that saw his shareholding rise to 37.7% then. A Tune Talk press release from Nov 2024 was headlined, “The Chief Talker is back.” (no prize for guessing who came up with the headline)
The hustle of a founder who’s in at 7am, and an ownership experiment
For the workaholic executive, who, by the way, eschews the negative connotation to the term – “We are an essential service to the market. Everyday I am thinking of how to solve problems for our customers. Why is that a negative thing?” – Tune Talk was in the perfect condition for him to take over. “The office was a mess.”
Gurtaj who says he is in the office before 7am, and is up at 5am, downs seven to eight coffees a day and expects the team to move with the same urgency as him. He says he has “killed” the teh-tarik culture. “100%, I did it!” How did I drive staff motivation? In Feb he announced that 4.15% of the company has been donated to an employee trust from his personal stake. Has anybody in Malaysia done it? Has anyone in the world?”
There is a proper mechanism for dividends to be paid – by tenure, by productivity, by performance.
“We do things which are totally unheard of, which makes people uncomfortable,” he declared.
This matters because it suggests his management style is not merely about pressure. It is also about ownership, leverage and reward. He says Tune Talk will keep headcount lean, in the 200 to 250 range even as subscriber numbers grow – even if it grows from 2 million to five million. One reason he believes it can do this is because the entire team are much better at their jobs due to investments in training and development.
Last year the company used 80% of its HRD fund after barely using tapping 20% of it in 2024. “My entire marketing team is AI-trained.”
Whether one finds that inspiring or exhausting probably depends on one’s tolerance for founder intensity. But there is a coherent logic to it: stay lean, train hard, automate aggressively, and make people feel they have skin in the game.
He also talks about the physical office as a marker of change. When he came back as CEO in January 2025, he says, it was “like a cow shed”, cramped and chaotic. Today, he says, it is in a new location, spacious and modern. The image is rude but it tells you how he sees the business: before, cramped and drifting; now, sharper and moving.
In terms of subscribers, he had 950,000 in 2024, hit 1.8 million last year, though the target was 2 million and Gurtaj expects to grow the number to 3.5 million this year. It is an aggressive target but Gurtaj is confident that his technology edge over the market gives him an edge.
Cloud-native, data lakes and AI: where Tune Talk is ahead of competitors
For Gurtaj, the real case for Tune Talk’s technological edge is not about labels. It is about architecture.
His view is that most incumbents are trapped in a patchwork world of on-prem systems, too many vendors, too many buckets of data, and no clean single source of truth. Tune Talk, by contrast, moved its systems to the cloud, then made them cloud-native with Nokia and Mavenir, then layered governance on top. That, he argues, gives the company a real-time data foundation it can apply AI to much faster than rivals can. The phrase “data lake” comes up as shorthand for this advantage: a central pool of operational, network and customer data that can be analysed without endless manual stitching.
When I reveal my ignorance by asking about how he cleaned his data, he got impatient. “Getting clean data when you are a telco with millions of customers who use your service heavily on a daily basis is practically impossible.”
Telcos generate data by the terabytes, he said. Your cleaning process is not going to keep up. Why? “It’s coming from 10 different places. But when we put everything on the cloud and make it cloud native, that’s where our advantage is. We came in late to the game. But when we came in, we came in with new technology.”
The public record backs his narrative. Tune Talk says it migrated its operational systems from on-prem infrastructure to AWS in 2024, then moved on to deploying a 5G-enabled cloud-native core network with Nokia and next-generation OSS/BSS with Mavenir. It also says this gives it the ability to deploy new services in days rather than months and supports a longer-term move toward AI-enabled and eventually autonomous workflows.
That does not prove all rivals are technologically asleep. But it does show Tune Talk is not merely waving around the phrase “cloud-native” for PR purposes.
This is where he also makes his most forward-looking promises. “Tune Talk will introduce two major new products in 2026, something which has never been done before – globally.” One example he gives is a network-layer ability to block Facebook for subscribers, pitched as a parental-control feature that can be switched off without a child knowing it. That sounds both inventive and slightly menacing, which may be exactly why he likes it.
The two products landing should offer proof that Tune Talk’s cloud-native pitch as a means to faster product invention is not mere exaggeration.
2026 challenge: Proving this is more than a great performance
So what is the real challenge for Gurtaj in 2026, besides hitting the 3 million subscriber target?
He has to prove that AI ambition and cloud-native infrastructure translate into durable commercial gains, not just attention-grabbing claims.
Competition is also heating up. Regulation is tightening. Larger rivals, however slowly, are modernising as well. The danger for every insurgent is that what looks like vision in year one becomes expectation in year two.
Once you have loudly declared yourself ahead of the market, the heat is on. “I don’t back off, I welcome the competition,” he stresses.
There is evidence that Tune Talk is genuinely moving faster than many expected, both technically and organisationally. That combination — part operator, part provocateur — is what makes him hard to ignore.
And in case there was any doubt about how he sees himself in the fight, he quips, “My name is Gurtaj. When the truth is on your side, you have no fear.”
AI was used in generating an initial draft with the writer and editor involved in the published version.
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