Research

Defining the future telco — and what it means for operators and their partners


how can telco brands be loved

How can telcos be loved?

Loved brands have a range of advantages over other businesses, which over time creates significant commercial benefits.

Simon Best, experienced telco marketing strategist, gives us his take on how telcos can achieve this goal — and which telcos are achieving it.

Why CFOs must drive telecoms business model change

Since we first published this report in 2019, telcos have made significant investments in 5G, but value continues to shift towards service differentiators. Transformation remains at the heart of most telecoms operators’ strategies but change has been painfully slow. This report explains why agility and innovation – the goals of transformation – will remain elusive until CFOs adopt new resource allocation models at their organisations.

The-future-physical-retail-compressed

The future of physical retail

Physical retail was under pressure which COVID-19 exacerbated. However, it is not just a matter of decline: telcos are finding new models of hybrid retail that create new solutions that their customers need and embody the Coordination Age.

Telco-Cloud-Deployment-Tracker-Open-RAN-deep-dive-STL-Partners-April-2022

Telco Cloud Deployment Tracker: Open RAN deep dive

In this update we present more granular data into the RAN to track the shift towards disaggregation across vendor ecosystems. It is still very early days with open RAN and vRAN, with 33 deployments in total, but we expect this to accelerate over the coming year.

VNFs on public cloud: Opportunity, not threat

More telcos are making deals to run their VNFs on the public cloud. Not much is live yet. But cloud hosting of network functions will support telcos in realising the benefits of cloud-native, and we believe telcos can safely go further and faster.

learning telco

Building the learning telco

The knowledge and skills required to succeed in the digital environment are ever evolving. Telcos must maintain knowledge flows around the organisation and enhance their capacity to learn in order to keep pace and compete.

Telco plays in live entertainment

Live entertainment is evolving fast, as greater connectivity and digitisation allows for new experiences for both the audience at the venue and the people watching online. How can telcos play a more valuable role?

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