This report analyses the positioning of four hyperscalers – Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Huawei Cloud – in the telco vertical. We evaluate how successful they have been at convincing telcos to migrate their workloads (from IT to the network) to the hyperscalers’ respective cloud platforms and we ultimately consider what the future role of hyperscalers in telecom will look like.
This report analyses the positioning of each of the three hyperscalers – AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure – in the telco vertical (outside of China). We assess how successful they have been at convincing telcos to migrate their business to the public cloud.
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.
In this report we update our model of the financial value of adding AI, analytics and automation (A3) into a telco’s processes. The focus of this update is the network and OSS. In these domains, our bottom-up assessment shows that telcos can achieve financial benefits amounting to 5% of annual revenues.
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 maturity of telco automations in the network OSS and BSS varies significantly. Some telcos are reporting significant headcount reductions from mature automations while others are still in the early stages of simple automation deployments. There are important steps telcos must consider if they are to reach maximum automation.
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.
There is a proliferation of reports on the potential technologies and use cases that will be part of the 6G roll-out, but little distinction between what’s real and what’s hype. We identify what 6G is most likely to emerge by 2030, and what telcos and vendors should prioritise now.
We evaluate how the concept of agility has changed, its relevance to telecoms and what telco operators are doing to transition to more agile operating models to capture new monetisation opportunities.
Changing telcos’ systems from a legacy to a virtualised model is a bit like building an autonomous car from a moving steam locomotive. In this report, we look at the relationship between NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) and OSS (Operations Support Systems), and the difficulties that operators and the developer community are facing in migrating from legacy OSS to NFV-based methods for delivering and managing communications services.
The early high hopes for SDN and NFV have given way to the realization that the road to cloud-telco ‘heaven’ is strewn with ‘infernal’ rocks and pitfalls. We present the “devil’s advocate’s” (i.e. an extremely sceptical) view of NFV set out in eight indictments. We then examine the argument for the defence.
A major emerging market operator, Zain, has entered the mobile banking game with a radically different business model.