Telco cloud activity in 2024 is showing signs of growing momentum with 72 deployments in the year to date, in contrast to 90 for the whole of 2023. Even though many of these deployments are announced but yet to complete in 2024, there are improving prospects for vRAN and open RAN, alongside a positive outlook for 5G standalone.
As connectivity becomes ever more integral to enterprises’ operations, network APIs have emerged as a highly anticipated means for telcos to monetise their 5G investments while meeting customer needs. How big is the opportunity, and what commercial models will work?
Co-operation with hyperscalers can reap rewards – but only if telcos complete the hard work of cloudification first.
5G SA is an exciting development for operators, and the choice between a multi-vendor or single-vendor approach has wide-ranging implications.
In this update, we present data and analysis on progress with deployments of vRAN and open RAN. It is fair to say that open RAN (virtualised AND disaggregated RAN) deployments have not happened at the pace that STL Partners and many others had forecast. In parallel, some very significant deployments and developments are occurring with vRAN (virtualised NOT disaggregated RAN). Is open RAN a networking ideal that is not yet, or never will be, deployed in its purest form?
Some leading telcos have slowed their roll-outs of 5G Standalone cores. Others have not. What is the delay? And why it is important to speed deployments now while minimising the risks.
We evaluate the role of disaggregation and cloud native infrastructure and key breakthrough opportunities for network operators.
In this update, we present granular data on the 5G core, tracking the progress of deployments of both Non-standalone (NSA) and Standalone (SA) network cores. We recorded 49 5G core deployments so far in 2022, 24 of which are SA launches.
We found subtle but significant shifts at the GSMA’s Mobile World Congress 2022 that show how the market’s need is changing to ‘connecting technologies’ rather than ‘connectivity’. This has deep implications for the industry and telcos in particular.
Why did AT&T buy, and then sell, DirecTV and Time Warner after only six years? This report looks at AT&T’s decisions, actions and their consequences, and the lessons for others attempting adjacent market moves and M&A.
As telecoms operations become increasingly softwarised, network functions are getting broken down into their individual parts, and reassembled as an essential part of the IT stack for industry-specific applications and services. In this disaggregated telco value chain, is there anything left that is distinctively ‘telco’?