STL Partners’ Research team present their observations from and analysis of the biggest mobile industry event of the year. There was a lot of buzz around AI and API but behind the tech jargon, we saw evidence that our industry continues to morph to become more open and customer-focused.
Generative AI is expected to create significant value across the telecommunications industry. To capitalise on the opportunity, telcos must build new skills across their organisations. Getting this right is critical given the scale of implementation challenges and the significance of impact on how employees work.
Fixed operators see network disaggregation as a way to reduce deployment and operational costs, remove vendor lock-in, and combine residential, business and other types of access into a single infrastructure. This report examines progress and learnings from early movers.
The capabilities that underpin telcos’ managed services offer to enterprise customers have shifted to the cloud. If telcos are to stay relevant as providers of managed services, they must understand the changing needs of enterprise customers, including how to partner, go to market and design SLAs.
Based on its deep industry knowledge, STL Partners is sharing its vision on how telcos can reverse the trend of stagnating consumer revenues by focusing on innovation, new ventures and excellent customer experience.
Telcos are getting moving with cloud-native. We have asked executives at seven such telcos about the process and what it has meant for their organisations, skills requirements and ways of working.
As operators embark on their telco cloud journeys, what should they look out for and what lessons can they learn from others? This report analyses the strategies and progress of four operators leading the way in telco cloud transformation and sheds light on the lessons learned from their initial deployments.
There is much debate in the industry on the topic of edge computing, but little clarity for vendors and potential customers on how much capacity will be available. STL Partners’ Network Edge Data Centre Forecast estimates the number of network edge data centres and their capacity from 2021-2027. We also breakdown who will operate these sites: telcos, hyperscalers or other third parties.
Since 2015 STL Partners has helped telecoms operators to develop their edge computing strategies. We summarise our learnings from those engagements as a manifesto for how the industry can address the edge computing opportunity.
We examine four ecosystem business frameworks to see how they might look when applied to the emerging network API opportunity to assess whether these sorts of models can unlock commercialisation possibilities in uncertain markets.
In the rapidly evolving ecosystem of private networks, collaboration and partnerships are becoming critical for success. Our report examines the key elements shaping this dynamic market and how partnerships, verticalisation strategies, and wide-ranging channel approaches are reshaping the private networks landscape.
NaaS is a major new opportunity enabled by telco cloud. But what is it? How can it be delivered and monetised? And how might it drive transformation across the whole industry?
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?
We found subtle but significant shifts at the GSMA’s Mobile World Congress 2023 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.
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?