The Telco Cloud Manifesto

STL Partners believes that telco cloud is a crucial enabler for operators’ success in the Coordination Age. In this manifesto we explain why.

You are viewing a page relating to our first Telco Cloud Manifesto. It was updated in January 2023. Click here to see the new Manifesto.

Telco cloud: A key enabler of the Coordination Age

The Coordination Age is coming

As we have set out in our company manifesto, STL Partners believes that we are entering a new ‘Coordination Age’ in which technological developments will enable governments, enterprises, and consumers to coordinate their activities more effectively than ever before. The results of better and faster coordination will be game-changing for society as resources are distributed and used more effectively than ever before leading to substantial social, economic, and health benefits.

A critical component of the Coordination Age is the universal availability of flexible, fast, reliable, low-latency networks that support a myriad of applications which, in turn, enable a complex array of communications, decisions, transactions, and processes to be completed quickly and, in many cases, automatically without human intervention.  The network remains key: without it being fit for purpose the ability to match demand and supply real-time is impossible.

How telecoms can define a new role

Historically, telecoms networks have been created using specialist dedicated (proprietary) hardware and software.  This has ensured networks are reliable and secure but has also stymied innovation – from operators and from third-parties – that have found leveraging network capabilities challenging.  In fact, innovation accelerated with the arrival of the Internet which enabled services to be decoupled from the network and run ‘over the top’.

But the Coordination Age requires more from the network than ever before – applications require the network to be flexible, accessible and support a range of technical and commercial options. Applications cannot run independently of the network but need to integrate with it. The network must be able to impart actionable insights and flex its speed, bandwidth, latency, security, business model and countless other variables quickly and autonomously to meet the needs of applications using it.

Telco cloud – the move to a network built on common off-the-shelf hardware and flexible interoperable software from best-of-breed suppliers that runs wherever it is needed – is the enabler of this future.

Existing subscribers can download the Manifesto at the top of this page. Everyone else, please go here.

Table of Contents

• Executive Summary
• Telco cloud: A key enabler of the Coordination Age
  • The Coordination Age is coming
  • How telecoms can define a new role
• Telco cloud: The growth enabler for the telecoms industry
  • Telecoms revenue growth has stalled, traffic has not
  • Telco cloud: A new approach to the network
  • …a fundamental shift in what it means to be an operator
  • …and the driver of future telecoms differentiation and growth
• Realising the telco cloud vision
  • Moving to telco cloud is challenging
  • Different operator segments will take different paths

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