The world’s 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’s 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. 

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’ll model some of the traditional enterprise vendors using ETR data and investigate how they’re faring in the telecomms vertical. And we’ll pose some of the key issues facing the industry this decade.