As a conglomerate with growing investments across the Internet of Things and AI value chains, SoftBank is a unique and intriguing player in the telecoms industry. What exactly is SoftBank’s strategy, and does it give its telecoms businesses a competitive advantage?
An introduction to digital twins, an approach to managing assets that is gaining increasing traction across many business sectors, and that will ultimately disrupt many industry business models.
Successful innovation for telcos is important but has proved elusive. We look at some successes and more failures to draw out the common factors required for innovation to succeed.
In our first report, we covered eight of the most exciting blockchain applications for telcos. In this report, we look at what else can it be used for. It explores 36 potential blockchain use cases for telecoms, identifying the current pain point, how blockchain could help, the business driver for telcos, and real world examples.
Our latest research shows that only one in five telco AI projects has made the leap from proof of concept (PoC) to live deployment. How can telcos improve the hit rate and achieve real performance improvements?
It’s hard to make things work in the IoT – it’s anything but plug and play. This report outlines why, what is needed, and current leading-edge efforts to achieve it. To deliver the benefits of the Coordination Age, all manner of “things” will need to be able to discover each other and communicate more autonomously. For this to happen easily and securely a new enabler is needed: the Internet for Things (I4T).
What other telcos can learn from AT&T’s and Verizon’s rapidly diverging strategies in the digital advertising market.
Over-focus on 5G was a distraction from fundamental changes in the world economy that telcos should prioritise in their strategies, investments and actions. What are the opportunities, and what should telcos, vendors and the GSMA do about it?
Transformation lies at the heart of most telecoms operators’ strategies but change at companies is 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.
Strategy is shaped and constrained by company culture, and a company’s culture will negate a strategy if they are not complementary. We examine how TELUS Health has created and maintained an effective culture that has helped to deliver employee and customer engagement, and business results. How does it do it, and what should others learn?
Telcos are well-placed to take advantage of the edge computing opportunity. In this report, we dive into the questions and challenges they face and how they can overcome these to succeed.
All telcos know they need to change. We believe the defining characteristic of those that will grow most is a clear focus on where and how they can create value beyond connectivity. This report lays out the two viable paths forward, and six steps all telcos must take in this new version of the Telco 2.0 vision.
Multinational operators have not been effectively harnessing their size and cross-country footprint. To create attractive economies of scale, they need to adopt a Telco Cloud model. Through a more common infrastructure and an innovation model which is sensibly calibrated across OpCos, large telcos will become more efficient and innovative.
Telcos can draw ten lessons around organisational structure, strategy and staying relevant with customers from AccorHotels’ rapid digital transformation. This is the second in our series of transformation case studies from outside the telecoms sector.
Veon (rebranded VimpelCom) has embarked upon a bold strategy, shedding its network to move from being a traditional telco business to an agile consumer IP communications platform. We analyse its new strategy, its risks, and what it will need to do to succeed.
Building a telco based on ‘free’ open source software is theoretically highly attractive to telcos, particularly those looking to increase their control over innovation and differentiation, and/or where cost reduction is critical. This report looks at how to address the challenges, identifies practical options and choices, and how, when and why to go about open source transformation in the real world.
Some telcos are hoping that mobile data growth will resurge and transform their fortunes, though STL Partners has previously argued that data growth will not be enough. In this report we re-examine this argument looking at global trends and present the insights and lessons from six operator case-studies including DNA Finland, T-Mobile US and Reliance Jio.
Our research focuses on how telcos and their partners can embrace industry disruption.
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