The latest news, updates and opinions from the telco industry
STL Partners has been writing on the topics of blockchain and edge computing, both broadly speaking and from a telecoms industry perspective for a number of years. For more information on our research services, check out our research services or send an email directly to contact@stlpartners.com. Blockchain and edge computing have an interesting interdependent relationship. Edge computing/a distributed compute architecture …
STL Partners’ edge computing practice has been engaging the develop community on edge computing for a number of years. Our recent research paper summarises the key lessons from these discussions. 1.Edge computing does provide an opportunity to solve the key pain points of some developers through improving user experience and increasing their addressable market. Application developers, particularly in key domains …
The 5G path is not straightforward. It’s not just a case of more Gs are better, though some of the hype is based on this idea. There are some intriguing possibilities. The upsides are not yet all clear, but neither are they all garbage. The way forward is nuanced, and we see our job at STL Partners to make it comprehensible and better still, actionable. …
Our recent two part research programme identified thirty six potential blockchain use cases for the telecommunications industry, deep diving on eight of the use cases we felt had the most promise. Despite the breadth of the blockchain opportunity, people are still looking for the killer use case that will either significantly save costs or increase revenue. Part of the challenge …
The introduction of 5G networks will act on global carbon emissions in 4 domains: Energy consumption of telco networks Energy consumption of devices “De-carbonisation” of energy supply Reducing energy demand from enterprises and consumers On the face of it, 5G promises to be a key enabler in our quest for a carbon-neutral future. In simple terms, due to much lower kWh/TB transmitted, 5G should outperform 4G …
Four years ago, we wrote a report on CSPs’ opportunity in sovereign cloud. Essentially, this argues that local operators are well-placed to offer global firms sovereign cloud services. Global concerns should be less exposed to often vaguely defined, discretionary powers of national authorities looking to act against them on the grounds of national security, data sovereignty and privacy. Not only …
This overview explains the essentials about virtualisation, NFV and SDN. Read more specialist research and articles on virtualisation and get in touch with our virtualisation specialists on our virtualisation hub. Network function virtualisation (NFV) is about taking the hardware-based network functions of the past and running them as software. Telecoms operators can replace expensive dedicated networking equipment with common off-the-shelf …
Edge compute is proving attractive to investors. Our chart of the week looks at recent VC investment, highlighting four edge companies that have achieved increased backing. Investment houses want to tap into revenue growth and/or sustained income and believe edge could offer this. Packet alone has more than doubled capital injection in 2 yrs ($9.4m in August 2016 & $25m …
Our research shows operators in the US, China, Korea and Japan chase 5G most enthusiastically and back that enthusiasm with real investment. This is characterised by T-Mobile’s CTO Neville Ray: “We are all in on 5G. Every dollar we spend is a 5G dollar, and our agreement with Nokia underscores the kind of investment we’re making to bring customers a …
STL Partners’ research into 5G shows that operators in the US, China, Korea and Japan are the most enthusiastic in pursuing 5G and backing that enthusiasm with investment. This is characterised by T-Mobile’s CTO Neville Ray “We are all in on 5G, Every dollar we spend is a 5G dollar, and our agreement with Nokia underscores the kind of investment we’re making to bring customers a mobile, nationwide 5G network.” Operators …
Is the industry on track to deliver NFV’s promise of truly open hardware and software platforms? Our chart of the week suggests not when based on recent performance. Telcos were supposed to deploy virtual network functions from multiple vendors on the same hardware. In reality, most deployments have been from single vendors supplying virtualised 4G mobile cores, primarily EPC and …
Edge compute holds opportunities for telecoms so why don’t telcos chase it more? Our chart of the week looks at the sector’s edge readiness. The chart data comes from our recent edge compute webinar (December 2018). Surprisingly, 32% of respondents claim they’ve a commercial strategy. We think this is a generous reading of ‘commercial strategy’ or skewed by vendor answers. We …
At AWS re:Invent, its annual jamboree, the cloud titan made over 60 announcements (I lost count). You could therefore be forgiven for overlooking a pre-view announcement for a service that isn’t due to ship until the H2-2019: AWS Outposts. You will be hearing lots more about it in the coming months. The information on the service is limited. Basically, customers will be …
To make the case for telco edge compute, we tend to focus on applications that require very low latency. This focuses on 5G and edge compute’s ability to deliver millisecond round trip times that enable futuristic, headline-grabbing examples such as self-flying drones or AR-assisted repairs. However, there is another group of more mundane requirements that edge compute supports: high-throughput data …
There is much interest across the telecoms industry in edge computing. The key rationale behind this is that telcos – through their increasingly virtualised distributed network assets – are in a unique position to push workloads closer to devices, reducing latency and/or data volumes to centralised clouds, and thereby enabling new experiences and use cases, while enhancing existing ones. It is …
1) Telco edge compute can be broader than multi-access edge compute (MEC) or network edge compute Edge computing is a technology that brings the capabilities of hyperscale compute close to the end-user or end-device. For telecoms operators, edge compute is often treated as synonymous with mobile edge computing or multi-access edge computing: compute based on the edge of the network. …
Telcos planning to offer edge compute services should draw wider lessons from public cloud computing. For that, we need to go back to 2006 when Amazon launched S3 and EC2. At the time, Amazon’s cloud services were seen more a curiosity than a serious alternative for enterprises to entrust their mainstream compute workloads and data. Indeed many viewed it as …