At the start of 2023, we were hopeful that the year would be that of 5G SA. In the event, only seven deployments materialised in the first 6 months leaving a staggering 30 in our tracker as “in progress” and to be completed in the second half of 2023. In this report, we discuss how likely it is that these deployments will take place in 2023 or at all and if 5G SA still matters.
In this update, we present a review of telco cloud deployments for the whole of 2022 and discuss trends that will shape the year ahead. Fewer deployments than expected were completed in 2022. The main reason for this was a delay in previously announced 5G Standalone (SA) core roll-outs, for reasons we have analysed elsewhere. However, we expect these deployments to be largely completed in 2023.
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.
New growth from 5G standalone, RAN and SASE is getting underway, amidst maturity and decline in foundational deployments.
SDN and NFV deployment is growing deeper but not broader: the long tail lags behind the pioneers.
This update to our ‘NFV Deployment Tracker’ series focuses on Asia-Pacific, alongside European and North American data to March 2018. Telcos in developed Asian markets have made a great start, and the region has outstripped Europe and North America in live SDN / NFV deployments – but can NFV scale to Asia as a whole?
This update to our ‘NFV Deployment Tracker’ series focuses on North America, alongside additional European data. 2016/7 has seen the rise of SD-WAN, enabling smaller operators to compete in the WAN market with NFV leaders AT&T, Verizon, Masergy, CenturyLink, etc. By contrast, fewer consumer use cases for NFV have yet been established.
STL Partners has compiled a new quarterly-updated tracker service of commercial deployments of NFV and SDN by leading telcos worldwide, providing an Excel database accompanied by an analytical report. The first update, devoted to Europe, found operators and vendors focusing on core network virtualisation and SDN/SD-WAN have so far led the way, as timelines on more systematic transformation programmes have been extended.
VoLTE solves the complex problem of providing voice services over a 4G mobile data network. Although it may allow 2G and 3G networks to be turned off, and their spectrum re-farmed to other networks, declining call revenues (and in some cases declining volumes) are dampening appetite to invest in VoLTE. However, with voice beyond telephony on the rise, for example through AI-powered voice assistants and video calling, can telcos use VoLTE as an opportunity to develop new IP-based voice and messaging communications offerings?
A write up and analysis of new research plus participants’ and speakers’ views at the May 2009 Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm exploring the challenges of new technology. (May 2009)
The fiasco of LTE voice standardisation should be a warning to us all against trying to impose any specific business model through the standardisation process.