The latest news, updates and opinions from the telco industry
Earlier this week, Nokia’s share price was hit by 8% by a rumour that Samsung would edge it out of Verizon’s radio network. What’s behind it? Is it a puff of smoke from a magician’s trick or a warning shot from a volcano of seismic moves afoot? Nokia’s market valuation is circa 20 billion Euros so 1.6 billion Euros is a costly rumour for its shareholders. I talked to my colleagues …
It’s still all change in the telco cloud space. This month, the focus has shifted away from hyperscale computing players, back onto traditional network equipment players. Huawei continues to dominate industry news, and we’re hearing about challenger function vendors too. More below. And look out for our webinar on Open RAN, where we explain what will really happen over the …
In 2015, STL Partners made some predictions about where we thought European telecoms was heading in the next five years. Now that we’re in 2020, we look back to see what we got right, and where we were less accurate. Prediction 1: There will be a retrenchment among telcos to traditional infrastructure-led activities with a focus on the network and delivering …
Once again, it is the ongoing geopolitical clash between China and the US that takes centre stage this month, with the fallout of last month’s sanctions shaking up the industry and potentially redefining Huawei’s 5G position in multiple international markets. This month’s sustained intensity in the geopolitical arena are somewhat contrasted by the steady development in a number of key …
Are hyperscale cloud players attractive telco partners, or are they going after the connectivity business? The industry is awash with questions. We look at some of this below – as well companies to watch. Meanwhile, we’re seeing several networking technologies moving along the maturity curve. Our data shows that NFV is now mainstream. Technologies that were previously just hype (Open …
The month of May has seen a wide variety of developments in the world of 5G, from the fluctuating levels of spectrum availability to the introduction of AI-supported autonomous robots to help screen for the coronavirus. But no factor has been as prominent this month as that of the ongoing geopolitical battle between China and the USA, of which 5G …
With the “current situation” testing the resilience of networks the world over, the future of telecoms is front-of-mind for many. Are we moving to a new world of fixed network dominance? What will this mean for 5G investments? And what role will telco cloud play in enabling it? These questions are top of our agenda at the moment. We’ve also …
What’s coming on telco cloud from STL Partners in 2020? A few weeks back I wrote a piece about telco cloud, at topic we have covered at STL Partners since at least 2011. While specific definitions have shifted over time, we have always seen telco cloud as a core transformative philosophy for telecoms operators: build the right technology infrastructure, and …
This is illustrative and not an exhaustive or comprehensive list of how telcos are helping their customers deal with the Coronavirus pandemic in order that other telcos can review what they can copy or learn from these measures to support their customers. STL Partners is also conducting a rapid survey of telco responses which can be found here. We will be updating and freely sharing what operators tell us …
In the 5G-aliser, we assess the outlook for the 5G market based on 18 key factors that we believe will drive supply and demand, splitting them into primary drivers which have the greatest importance now, secondary drivers which could become more important over time, and wildcards which could have a large impact but are less predictable. The COVID-19 pandemic …
“Who cares about Telco Cloud?” I’ve been asked this twice in two weeks. It’s a valid question. After all, I lead our telco cloud practice – so I should be able to justify my existence! One of my interrogators was a business leader. “Isn’t “telco cloud” just a technical term which covers up a host of boring three-letter acronyms that …
The cancellation of this years MWC is obviously a great shame from the perspective of all the many who have put a lot of effort into its preparation, but also a sensible precaution given the uncertainty surrounding the emergence of the new Coronavirus. The question is: what are we all going to do to minimise the impact on our businesses …
Through our ongoing conversations with telecoms operators and the wider industry about their strategies and progress in implementing automation and AI, we see telcos pursuing a range of different partnerships, depending on their goals and level of ambition (i.e. size of budget) to transform their businesses. On one end of the spectrum, telcos are mainly users of automation and AI …
We’ve been helping telcos work out how best to play in edge computing for a while. Essentially telcos’ choices for network edge / MEC infrastructure are: Build their own edge (with partners and vendors) alongside the same edge site facilities as planned for new-virtualised network infrastructure , e.g. nextgen central offices and mini datacentres Partner with a public cloud provider such as AWS, Google …
STL Partners European Summit Overview On October 28th, STL Partners hosted the 2019 STL Partners European Summit, which included talks and discussions on innovation and growth strategies for the telecom industry. We were joined by 30+ senior telco executives from Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Orange, Telsta, Tata and Elisa. In the afternoon session, Dalia Adib (Principal Consultant) led an interactive session …
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 …