By: Evan Kirchheimer

Infrastructure divestiture. Public cloud. Digital transformation. Changing regulation. 6G. Enterprise. The splinternet. Questions are swirling the minds of service provider industry leaders more than ever. What does the successful service provider of the future look like? Is it a national utility, an agile partner in B2B, an owner of a significant network infrastructure, or a brand delivering a distinct customer experience? Are your suppliers your future competitors?

With some service providers re-fashioning themselves as techcos, and others leaning further into their network heritage, what’s clear is that market and technology development across fixed, mobile and cloud are converging to enable several strategic options for the service providers of today. There will never be one right answer to the questions above—but answering them in a way that is relevant to your stakeholders and customers requires an unprecedented amount of emerging tech and service awareness.

Introducing Network X

As the industry undergoes a dramatic transformation, Informa’s Network X event will bring together the entire ecosystem of cloud providers, fixed and mobile network vendors, software players and integrators to enable telcos to make the most educated and informed choices. Taking place from October 18 to 20 in Amsterdam, the event’s agenda has been carefully curated by the industry, for the industry, to spark powerful debates and connections. Network X is the new home of the long-running 5G World and Broadband World Forum, which will be joined by the newly launched Telco Cloud, designed to cover the full spectrum of the telecom ecosystem.

The future network

Future networks won’t only be faster with better latency performance, but also promise to be cheaper to run, more intelligent, automated and offer new ways to deliver services out of the cloud. The future network will be:

Increasingly converged

The convergence and development of fixed line and mobile infrastructures is advancing, whether that’s from copper to fiber or from 4G to 5G.  Service providers need to understand how new open technologies and system architectures can help reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) and introduce new network features.

Light physical infrastructure, cloud-heavy software architecture 

Telcos have begun to move core network functions to cloud-first infrastructures, where operators can more simply operate their networks, therefore service providers are actively exploring more flexible virtual infrastructure, which can help them drive greater automation, enhance customer experience, and reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO).

New (extended) services

The creation of new software platforms will extend the telco service portfolio. Many telcos will work with the hyperscalers and system integrators to sell and manage new industrial applications that take advantage of ultra-low network latencies and the application of machine learning at the network edge.

Supported by leading telco brands including Light Reading and Telecoms.com, the agenda has also been shaped by the Network X Founding Partners and Omdia, the home of unparalleled, world-class telecoms research and consultancy. From research the analysts at Omdia have undertaken, telcos report that they are:

• Increasingly making shared infrastructure decisions across fixed and mobile domains
• Planning on migrating workload to the cloud in the next three years
• Seeing cloud as being the most important technology in improving agility, reducing cost and reducing TCO of the network (over a third of telcos surveyed)
• Evaluating open architectures in their vendor selection
• Seeing hyperscalers as the most important partners (52 percent of telcos surveyed)