Orchestration: Where can telcos build new IP?
Orchestration is rapidly becoming a critical asset and skill set for operators looking to optimise the value of existing assets, and create new services and marketable IP.
Orchestration is rapidly becoming a critical asset and skill set for operators looking to optimise the value of existing assets, and create new services and marketable IP.
Orange Business is entering a more mature phase of its transformation. This report explores why its pragmatic approach to partnerships, trust and platform orchestration may prove to be a more significant differentiator than any individual product announcement.

As telcos move beyond connectivity, platform strategies are becoming a key route to growth. This report looks at how operators are approaching the shift, and the underlying capabilities and organisational traits that are shaping success across the industry.
AI will create large potential opportunities for telcos in connectivity and use case enablement. But telcos must manage expectations and prioritise their investments carefully.
Enterprises want on-demand, highly performant connectivity services – and service providers are embracing NaaS delivery and commercial models to meet these expectations. This report provides a case study of disruption in the Indian market by NaaS provider Lightstorm.
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.
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.
The industry is still on track to deliver 5G Standalone and various types of virtualised RAN – but progress is a lot slower than originally expected. In this update of the Telco Cloud Deployment Tracker, we look beneath the hood of the numbers to assess what if anything will accelerate growth in 2024.
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.
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?
In this update, we look at the new deployments completed by 31 March 2023 or confirmed for completion by the end of 2023 or during 2024, and provide the usual update of telco cloud deployments including new data for 2023 and 2024. Our deep dive this quarter is on SD-WAN and SASE services.
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.
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 granular data on the 5G core, tracking the progress of deployments of both Non-standalone (NSA) and Standalone (SA) network cores. We recorded 49 5G core deployments so far in 2022, 24 of which are SA launches.
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.
Telecoms is too important to leave up to traditional fixed and mobile operators. Thanks to the “democratisation” of shared spectrum, virtualised networks, fibre and cloud – plus the demands of industry, government and local communities – a plethora of new service providers are emerging to fill the gaps. This report is intended as a “spotter’s guide” to the categories of network owners and operators.