Snapshots from our analyst team's latest research
In April 2021, STL developed a new sizing model for 217 digital healthcare markets that reflects the recent impact of the COVID pandemic on the health sector, with the goal of identifying the new opportunities and risks presented to operators and others attempting or considering investment in the market. Our model focuses specifically on four application areas within the digital …
Monetising 5G goes beyond the service propositions that contribute to a telco’s bottom line. STL Partners considers the following four factors to be foundational to 5G monetisation: Value-adding service propositions, built on top of network connectivity (Services) A network architecture that can deliver the features and flexibility demanded by such propositions (Network/OSS) IT/BSS to facilitate provisioning of such services and …
5G is an opportunity for MNOs to refresh its consumer propositions, introduce new services, new pricing and tariff features while bringing older customers on legacy tariffs and handsets to an often new tariff paradigm (unlimited and or speed-based) as well as a new commitment period tied to the tariff and/or handset.
Telco data monetisation has been an area of activity for the last few years. However, telcos’ interest levels have varied over time due to the complexity of delivering and selling such a diverse range of products, as well as highly variable revenue opportunities depending on the vertical. Telcos’ appetite to pursue data monetisation has also been heavily impacted by the …
In 2015, STL Partners published a report on ‘The Agile Operator: 5 key ways to meet the agility challenge’, exploring the concept and characteristics of telco agility, including what it means to telcos, key areas of agility and the challenges in agile-focused transformation. Today, the definition of agility remains as broad as in 2015 but many concepts of agility …
Vodacom is working with Alipay to launch a lifestyle consumer application, merchant commerce and financial services platform that brings together to all ecosystem participants. What are the opportunities, and what will it take to succeed?
Prioritisation matrix for telco A3 capabilities STL recently explored potential enterprise solutions leveraging analytics, AI and automation (A3) capabilities that telcos can address across 200+ use cases across 14 industry verticals. We looked at vertical opportunities and sought to answer two questions: Which of the A3 technologies are most feasible for telcos to work with? and which verticals hold the …
STL Partners represents the private networking opportunity across two dimensions: level of stakeholder alignment vs. degree of cellularity. With the aim of helping others evaluate the extent to which they can take advantage of private cellular networks, we identified 4 archetype situations below for deploying private 4G or 5G. Segment 1: The sweet spot for private LTE and 5G networks …
Source: STL Partners Verizon was a pioneer, launching a 5G network based on millimetre wave (mmWave). The characteristics of this spectrum choice (i.e. limited reach and propagation) have challenged its ability to monetise the network with both consumers and business customers, despite the performance benefits that mmWave can deliver. It has since added low-band 5G (for extended 5G coverage) and, …
NFV and SDN deployments by primary category, North America, 2016 to 2021 The overall trends in North America are similar to those elsewhere: a strong rise in 5G core deployments (SA alongside NSA) together with a decline in other areas, particularly SD-WAN, which has in previous years been the leading category of NFV / SDN in the region. We observed seven deployments of NSA 5G cores in …
As one of the first in the world to launch 5G networks for both consumer and enterprise, SK Telecom (SKT) reported 5.48 million 5G subscribers at the end of 2020. The operator pursued a “5G Cluster” based approach to the development of its network and services. It created high density coverage in specific locations (e.g. stadiums, parks, business districts, factories) …
As edge computing technologies and definitions are still evolving, different terms are sometimes used interchangeably or have been associated with a certain type of stakeholder. For example, mobile edge computing is often used within the mobile network context and has evolved into multi-access edge computing (MEC) – adopted by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) – to include fixed and …
Our top 5 telco financial services is drawn from STL’s April 2021 report; Are telcos smart enough to make money work? which shows a growing number of telcos around the world are expanding into consumer financial services, offering loans, savings and insurance. Most telcos have the capabilities required to develop a compelling financial services proposition, except for three – …
Source: STL Partners telecoms survey, March 2021, 100 respondents According to our survey, automation is primarily driven by the need to reduce the operating costs of existing networks and services for operators in EMEA and North America. In APAC, on the other hand, automation adoption tends to be a necessary consequence of network development as they develop new network services …
At STL Partners, we see a clear rationale for telco cloud beyond more flexible, agile, cost-effective, OpEx-centric networks and operations. Telco cloud is also about enabling further telecoms differentiation and growth through application and use case-specific networking, and ultimately about creating technology, practices and organisations fit for the Coordination Age. We have been talking about this transformation since 2012. In …
STL Partners believes that healthcare is a vertical that is well suited to telecoms operators’ strategic scope: Healthcare is a consistently growing need in every country in the world It is a big sector that can truly move the needle on telcos’ revenues, accounting for nearly 10% of GDP globally in 2018, up from 8.6% of GDP in 2000 according …
In 2018 STL partners coined the term Coordination Age to describe how connectivity between people, computers, applications and ‘things’ is generating volumes of analysable data and how the use of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence would create the conditions enabling governments, enterprises, and consumers to understand the world in ways which would be game-changing for society. A world where resources …
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