The world\u2019s leading telcos are often branded as monopolies that lack innovation. Telcos have been great at operational efficiency, connectivity and living off of transmission services. But in a world beyond telephone poles and basic wireless services, how will telcos modernize, become more agile and monetize new opportunities brought about by 5G, private wireless and a spate of new innovations in infrastructure, cloud, data, AI and apps? It\u2019s become table stakes for carriers to evolve their hardened, proprietary infrastructure stacks to more open, flexible, cloud-like models. But doing so brings risks that telcos must carefully balance as they strive to deliver consistent quality of service while at the same time moving faster and avoiding disruption.\xa0
In this Breaking Analysis and ahead of MWC23, we explore the evolution of the telco business and how the industry is in many ways, mimicking a transformation that took place decades ago in enterprise IT. We\u2019ll model some of the traditional enterprise vendors using ETR data and investigate how they\u2019re faring in the telecomms vertical. And we\u2019ll pose some of the key issues facing the industry this decade.\xa0