It was no surprise that AI dominated MWC this year. But there were lots of other notable trends on the rise – including cybersecurity and data centres – and some that were disappointingly overlooked. Find out what the STL Partners team saw and missed at MWC 2025.
Ten years of private network deployments tracked in our global insights tool.
Innovation best practice becomes table stakes when developing telco propositions that go beyond core connectivity.
Telecom operators want to become techcos, but they need to keep being telcos too. Telecom techcos will be best positioned to find growth in the Coordination Age, but the path is not easy…
New technologies have made innovation in the network imperative for telcos’ survival. But the focus and scope of innovation varies by the type of company telcos aim to become.
Implementing autonomous networks offers an average CSP cost savings and annual revenue uplift of around US$794 million. However, challenges impede progress to realise this financial potential. This report addresses five of the main obstacles faced by CSPs and provides recommendations to help overcome them.
Case studies of telcos adopting infraco, servco, or telecom techco models, how they achieved this, and what lessons can be learnt.
Partnering offers telcos a way to unlock innovation and uncover monetisation opportunities to help fuel business growth. However, this requires telcos to embrace a different approach to partnering strategy and a more open, trusting mindset.
DTW24 showed a telecoms industry ready to face reality and making quiet progress. This progress may not go far or fast enough to change the future of the industry, but either way AI will play a big role.
To avoid becoming pure utilities, telcos must evolve their core businesses into more efficient and flexible infracos. But if they also want to accelerate growth and capture the full value of their network investments, they should strive towards building services businesses and becoming telecom techcos. We explore different pathways leading operators are taking to get there.
Telcos need new skills to change their organisations to compete like technology companies. Insights from our Future skills tracker tool show that telcos are behind techcos in the penetration of key skillsets and provides direction on the capabilities required to become more innovative, agile and software-driven overall.
Our analysis of five telco case studies highlights the challenge for telcos looking to introduce cross-silo working and how approaches are being adapted to fit the organisation and access business benefits.
How telecoms can adapt and offer customers and other stakeholders an attractive way forward in markets facing inflation, and geopolitical and environmental challenges.
As telcos attempt to capture the B2B revenue opportunity, marketplace is rapidly becoming an industry buzzword. We explore the characteristics of a marketplace and the industries in which telcos have a genuine right-to-play
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.
This research defines and considers the topic “Future of work” – exploring the impact of emerging technologies and economic and social changes on telcos, and identifying how A3 (analytics, AI and automation) can help solve new challenges.
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.