Telcos must adapt to virtualisation and changing customer needs in the Coordination Age. Our three new telecoms business models offer a realistic agenda for telcos to build up the stack into the IT layer – either by themselves or through partnerships.
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.
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.
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.
Our research focuses on how telcos and their partners can embrace industry disruption.
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