AI-RAN is emerging as a critical area of innovation for telcos. While early pilots confirm technical feasibility, the path to commercialisation remains less clear. We explore the practical pathways for telcos to capture near-term value and prepare for long-term opportunities.
At MWC 2025, we held the Digital Health Summit in collaboration with the GSMA. At the event, we explored the opportunities and the challenges in smart hospitals, IoT, direct-to-consumer services and AI in healthcare. This report outlines the key takeaways and insights from the summit.
The range of optional additional features in 5G has expanded massively since previous generations. This report covers the technology, use cases and timelines for six of the less-discussed domains of 5G evolution – RedCap, sidelink, URLLC and time-sensitive networking, drone connectivity, precise positioning and real-time communication.
The development of agents underpinned by data and knowledge assets looks set to be a major challenge for telcos. It may take up to ten years for telcos to truly master agents, but they will be key to the realisation of fully autonomous networks.
Ten years of private network deployments tracked in our global insights tool.
The manufacturing vertical is expected to be the largest customer group for real-time automation solutions. This report outlines how ecosystem players, such as systems integrators and independent software vendors, can work together to leverage their strengths and better serve the sector.
This report looks at the AI, automation and analytics a telco needs to effectively deploy, manage and operate private networks and slicing at scale for enterprise customers.
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.
Operators are transforming their networks to provide advanced services and tackle network complexity. However, progress is uneven as operators develop various capabilities at different stages. We outline four common pathways and provide recommendations for operator peer groups.
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.
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.
The big prize in enterprise managed services today is supporting industries’ digital transformation. With the growing ‘softwarisation’ of networking, this creates more impetus for vendors to compete with telcos as part of a shifting ecosystem. But does vendor software risk cannibalising the telco network?