More than half the mobile subscribers in the world are covered by networks operated by a handful of companies that provide managed operations services for telecoms networks, datacentres, applications, services, and transformation projects.
The market intelligence company GlobalData produces a regular Competitive Landscape Analysis of this market for Managed Infrastructure Services for Telcos. Its most recent update, published in April 2024, outlines the major needs of the market as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each vendor that competes in it.
Telecoms analysis
The report identifies the following broad categories as essential to evaluating the vendor that is the best fit for a given operator:
Scale and Reach. Telco infrastructure blankets entire countries with complicated equipment supporting various technologies under demanding conditions. Scale and coverage criteria, therefore, indicate not only existing success, but also relevance to other telcos in each region. The leaders in this category – Huawei and Netcracker – have the most customers in the network and IT areas, respectively. They also have a full system of operations centers and field offices which support its local operations. R&D spending is also essential to good performance in this category, as is experience operating virtualized and cloudified networks.
Expertise evaluates all of the technical know-how that is required to run a modern telecoms environment, including resources that are operated by partners like hyperscalers. It also evaluates the ability to help CSPs with their digital transformation. On top of that, operations personnel must grapple with security and regulatory concerns as well as emerging technologies and methodologies. Because telcos have diverse needs in this category, any vendor in the class may have the best mix of capabilities for a given case.
Network Design and Optimisation. As networks virtualise and densify, and as 5G introduces network slicing, beamforming, and new frequency bands, network design and optimisation grow steadily more complex. This category looks at the vendor’s ability to plan networks for a particular set of geographic, service, technological, and other factors. Increasingly, customer experience is also a key factor in network design. Huawei, which leads this category, is strong in every type of network from fixed to 5G mobile, and also has extensive experience in activities like site acquisition and construction.
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By GlobalDataService Agility measures how the vendor helps the CSP bring more services to market. It covers joint innovation as well as B2B2X passthrough services. Increasingly, it also covers management of third-party partner ecosystems that can include public cloud partners, specialists in a given enterprise vertical, content providers, and other parties that provide service components to and through the operator. Leaders Netcracker and Nokia are especially good at helping customers bring services to market, whether by assisting the telco’s own DevOps efforts or by operating services that the telco can then sell on a passthrough basis. Many vendors also have extensive networks of joint development centers and capabilities.
Commercial Models. While many operations contracts adhere to the classic three to seven-year, SLA-based model, telcos and vendors are also experimenting with more flexible relationship structures. As-a-service delivery, reward sharing, and project-based engagements are starting to enable smaller-scale, more innovative operational relationships than the standard contract structure. This category also measures providers’ ability to retain customers. Three vendors – Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia – tied for the Leader ranking in this category, with different strengths in multi-country and multi-company services, innovation in delivery models, and contract structures.
5G, digital twins and AI
To capture a lead in the next update of the report, managed operations providers must add new capabilities. 5G standalone is finally enabling dynamic network slicing in production, while all types of networks are supporting a wide variety of mission-critical services. Telecoms networks must do a lot more with an operations budget that is flat at best. The two sets of tools that will aid the continuation the most are digital twins and AI.
Digital twins are increasingly essential to running modern telecoms infrastructure. They are useful for both network design and orchestration as well as operations. 5G networks in particular require fine tuning that sometimes varies by season, since some 5G spectrum propagation is affected by the leaves on the trees. Throughout the network, digital twins are useful for testing changes to the network before they reach production. Since networks are supporting increasing numbers of mission-critical services, maintenance windows are increasingly unacceptable, and of course network outages must be avoided at all costs. Digital twins of the CSP’s infrastructure help to flag any difficulties before they impact production.
AI continues to drive innovation throughout the telecoms industry. The predictive AI that has been used for several years to identify and address problems is increasingly working together with generative AI, which makes its abilities accessible to more people through its natural-language interface. It also does this with digital twins: operations personnel can increasingly query knowledge databases, perform what-if analyses, and explore performance problems, all by using natural language to interact with the digital twin along with system logs and any other sources of information in the network.
Using GenAI makes these information sources more accessible; moreover, it can make predictive AI results easier to consume, allowing drilldowns into the analysis as well as the data underlying it. Overall, the combination of predictive AI, generative AI, and digital twins can help the CSP cut opex, increase reliability and performance, and ease network optimisation. To score well in GlobalData’s 2025 report, all managed operations providers should continue to invest in R&D, especially regarding AI and digital twins, but also in intent-based operations which will become more important in telecoms networks over the next few years.
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