CIO Review APAC

Developments including telco and hyper-scale convergence, the 5G standalone introduction, wider adoption of open RAN, and new applications and services will cause huge amounts of innovation in the telecom industry.

The 5G standalone introduction, the wider adoption of open RAN, and new applications and services designed for the network edge will drive a significant amount of innovation in the telecom industry. Although 5G has long been anticipated, it has not significantly upgraded telecommunication (LTE) or led to the creation of any new killer applications.

However, this will change in the coming years as 5G emerges with more deployments of standalone (SA) networks. 5G SA enables many of the advanced performance benefits that it was developed for, such as low latency, slicing, and edge computing. These features will help the development of new 5G-native business and consumer applications.

One gigabyte of broadband is now the standard, and fibre-based access transforms lives in homes, businesses, factories, and schools. As next-generation fibre access technologies proliferate and create additional opportunities for education, remote health and work, entertainment, manufacturing, and commerce, society will advance more quickly. Passive optical network (PON) technology responds to industry and consumers’ demands for energy efficiency, and the PON equipment market is likely to grow exponentially.

PON will continue to be the dominant fibre-access technology deployed around the world. This growth offers significant opportunities to existing PON OLT vendors, and PON equipment vendors will have access to previously untapped opportunities. This will extend across all regions as various types of operators build, extend, and upgrade their respective fibre-access networks.

Furthermore, telcos will move up the digital value chain by pursuing network edges, which depict the symbiosis between applications and connectivity. It is one of the primary paths of evolution for communication service providers (CSPs) wishing to make the transition from a connectivity provider to a digital technology company. Pursuing network edge holds significant new revenue opportunities for CSPs by leveraging their growing cloud-based 5G networks and carries considerable potential by enabling telecom firms to assert relevance in the larger digital value chain.

In the coming years, the telco industry expects the network edge ecosystem to expand as CSPs and technology companies forge deeper relationships. This will be seen in different ways, like viewing CSPs climb up the edge stack, getting closer to the application, and taking an active part in orchestration, which already exists in many organisations. They will experience CSP edge platforms and public cloud companies operating closer together. Therefore, interoperability and optionality will become key competitive differentiators for CSPs as they work to engage customers with complex cloud requirements and deployments.