A Telecom Transformation is underway. With 5G, a whole new generation of networks is being built to connect 50+ Billion Devices, creating more than a $12 trillion-dollar market opportunity for Mobile Network Operators. The road to 5G, it turns out though, isn’t a straight line. This leads us to a discussion of non-standalone architectures (NSA) and standalone architectures (SA). Here

No matter how you slice it, your slice manager matters a lot If you were to ask mobile network operators what keeps them up at night, “5G slice management” probably wouldn’t be their first answer. Or their second, third, fourth… well, you get the point. The fact is that slicing is just a very small slice of 5G rollouts at

Digital transformation is central to everything you do. It’s what determines how you build your network. It’s what sparks innovation in your business. It’s what will drive the great customer experiences of tomorrow. But without a new approach to orchestration, automation, and management, telco operators will never realize the full benefits of digital-driven initiatives such as 5G, multi-access edge computing,

With the announcement of Azure for Operators, Microsoft has outlined a vision and strategy to unlock the power of 5G and bring cloud and edge closer than ever, opening new opportunities for service providers all over the world. Microsoft’s recent acquisitions of Affirmed Networks and Metaswitch, while a surprise to some in the telecommunications industry, signaled  Microsoft’s long-term commitment to

The journey to 5G has been like a summer road trip, with choruses of “Are we there yet?” mixed with exciting discussions about all the things we’ll do when we get there. It’s going to be a long haul, though, as 5G isn’t expected to officially “arrive” for several years. What we’ve seen so far is a smattering of 5G

The 5G World Summit 2020 event program may have been a virtual one but that didn’t take away from the event’s ability to highlight the criticality of the telecommunication industry during this unprecedented time. This was especially true in the awards program.  Consisting of 15 dedicated 5G categories, the 5G World Awards are focused on celebrating and recognizing achievement and

Every now and then, a technology comes along that changes the strides humanity takes. The introduction of the first-generation iPhone in 2007 changed the way we look at the phone and how we use it. Smartphones and social networking have changed the way we communicate and work, which has had an unprecedented impact on healthcare, travel, education, national security, and

The cloud isn’t an if. It’s a when. And it will probably start like this: a few forward-thinking carriers will begin moving large portions of their network functions into the cloud and realize that the savings are almost shocking. Not the 2X magnitude CapEx savings we’ve seen from replacing physical servers with cloud-based servers, but a 10X magnitude CapEx+OpEx savings

Everybody’s talking about 5G. But how close are we really to a 5G revolution? According to GlobalData’s Global Mobile Broadband Forecast, 5G subscribers currently account for less than one percent of the global market. Even with steady growth, 5G subscribers are still expected to represent less than 20 percent of the global market by 2023. In other words, don’t throw

If you look at most telecommunications networks today, they’re divided into a kind of vanilla/chocolate/strawberry mix of services where you may have an enterprise flavor, a standard consumer flavor, and a high-usage consumer flavor. When 5G arrives, however, those networks will need to look a lot more like Baskin-Robbins’ 1,300 flavors. What telcos will do to create those flavors is