Telco Cloud Deployment Tracker

The following dashboards showcase the most up-to-date insights from STL Partners’ Telco Cloud Deployment Tracker. Our tool is interactive and contains different high-level analysis and underlying data of what operators have done (and plan to do) globally in telco cloud. In-depth analysis can be found in our accompanying reports.

Any deployments with ‘Null’ as the deployment year below are ‘In progress’ or ‘Pending’ deployments. See explanatory notes and definitions at the bottom of the page.

Definitions and explanatory notes

Deployments and deployment numbers

• We count as deployments live, fully commercial implementations; this excludes PoCs, pilots and ‘commercial trials’, where the solution is powering services that customers are actually paying for, but only on a trial basis.​ A deployment includes all the elements that we know about, e.g. the VNFs or CNFs involved (such as a mobile packet core) and / or other components of the stack, such as the hardware, virtualisation platform, orchestration, etc​.
• If the same solution is being deployed across multiple national subsidiaries of an international operator, as part of a single project, we do not count it as multiple deployments, but as a single deployment.​ However, if the same or similar solutions are commissioned by an operator at different times and implemented as separate projects, we count those as multiple deployments.​
• In the Tracker Excel spreadsheet, we show both the deployments and all of the components involved, including information on the vendor and vendor solutions where known. In the ‘Detailed dataset’ worksheet, each deployment is given a unique number that applies to each of the components involved, to make this distinction between deployments and deployed components clearer. The numbering is determined by alphabetical order of region where the operator is based, and then by operator names and chronological order of deployments.

Dates

• Dates are presented in the form ‘Jan-20, ‘Feb-20’, etc. Dates showing the month of December (e.g. Dec-19) mean ‘by the end of 2019’, unless we have added a comment stating explicitly that the month of December of that year was the deployment / go-live date. In all other cases, where we have shown a December date, this means that the precise date / month of the deployment is not known, but we have information or are confident that the deployment went or will go live by the end of that year.

Operator names

• The names of operators – shown in column C of the ‘Detailed dataset’ worksheet – are those of the operator group parent company, where applicable. If the local operating subsidiary carrying out the deployment has a different name from the parent company, this is shown in column H.

Country where operator based vs country where deployment is carried out

• In column D of the ‘Detailed dataset’ worksheet, we show the country where the operator or operator group is based. If the country where the deployment has taken place differs from the location of the company’s head office or domestic market, we show the country where the deployment was carried out in column F. For example, deployments by Asia-Pacific (APAC) subsidiaries of a Europe-based group (e.g. Telenor) will be assigned to the country where deployed and to the APAC region. In the Tableau reporting tool, a deployment is assigned to a given region (e.g. Europe) if it occurred in that region or if it was carried out on a global basis by a telco based in that region. E.g. global deployments by an operator such as Telefonica will be assigned to the Europe region, where Telefonica is based.

Non-complete deployments

• Deployments that have not yet been completed, or not been announced as completed, we categorise as either ‘in progress’ or ‘retired’ (in column N). ‘In progress’ means that the deployment is ongoing; and ‘retired’ means that the deployment was completed and went live but the solution has now been taken out of commercial operation. We continue to show retired deployments for the purposes of historical trends analysis.

Our regional key:

AF: Africa
APAC: Asia Pacific (including Central and Southern Asia)
EUR: Europe
LAM: Latin America (including Central America)
ME: Middle East
NAM: North America (including the Caribbean)