to jointly solve specific issues of interest to the industry. Trends and reports were hot news in the final weeks of 2020 and early days of 2021. Consumers expect connected technology to become more flexible and interactive going forward and see devices enabling more proactive (and even creative) choices in a wide range of everyday life situations by 2030.These findings and predictions were released in Ericsson’s 10^th annual ConsumerLab Hot Consumer Trends Report. Another top technology trends report from Matrix Integration pinpointed cybersecurity, unified collaboration, edge-to-cloud, virtual IT departments, and enterprise-level telephony for businesses of any size as top trends for 2021. 

A new study from  Juniper Research has found that RCS (Rich Communication Services) business messaging traffic will reach 415 billion messages by 2025; rising from 160 million messages in 2020. This represents a growth of 2,500 percent. It predicts that this substantial growth will be driven by the increasing popularity of CPaaS (Communications-as-a-Platform) services amongst brands and enterprises. Another report from Juniper Research has found that network operator spend on MEC (multi-access edge computing) will grow from $2.7 billion in 2020, to $8.3 billion in 2025, as operators invest heavily in upgrading network capacities and infrastructure to support the increasing data generated by 5G networks.

Market forecasts also made headlines. The global Satellite Communication Market size is expected to reach USD 122.98 billion by 2027, registering a CAGR of 9.2 percent from 2020 to 2027, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. The worldwide sales of SD-WAN technologies are forecasted to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 24 percent over the next five years, and the market is expected to surpass $4 billion in 2025, according to a new report from Dell’Oro Group.

In partnership news, AST SpaceMobile and Vodafone have unveiled plans to launch the first phase of a space-based commercial mobile communications service in 2023. The network will serve 1.6 billion people initially. Deutsche Telekom and Microsoft announced an expansion of their partnership that will help customers of all sizes accelerate their cloud transformation initiatives. ADVA and Advantech announced a joint test-drive portal initiative for remote evaluation of SD-WAN and security solutions on universal CPE (uCPE). FNT Software has expanded its existing partnership with Belize Telemedia Limited (BTL), the leading telecommunications provider in Belize, on digital transformation initiatives.

Security News

In security news, Positive Technologies published a new report on vulnerabilities and threats for subscribers and mobile network operators, which stem from the use of new standalone 5G network cores. The vulnerabilities in protocols HTTP/2 and PFCP, used by standalone 5G networks, include the theft of subscriber profile data, impersonation attacks and faking subscriber authentication. The company also announced that several Positive Technologies products can now discover the use of FireEye pentesting tools stolen by hackers. The company’s Expert Security Center experts analyzed the data published by FireEye to detect the use of their tools by attackers, which is automatically detected by PT Network Attack Discovery.

Neural Technologies has been awarded a deal by Orange Morocco to deliver its Revenue Assurance and Fraud Management solution. The new partnership will help Orange Morocco to detect and prevent fraud in the Africa and Middle Eastern markets to its 22 million customers.

Subex entered into a partnership with Telefónica to provide the latest version of ROC Fraud Management. As part of the engagement, the operator will be deploying Subex's ROC Fraud Management to opcos in Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Colombia.

In the US, the Federal Communications Commission has adopted rules to implement the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act of 2019, further protecting the security of the United States and the safety of U.S. communications networks.

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