Predictions for 2020: Open Ecosystems and Disaggregation Are the Key Tenets for Telecom Innovation
In my post last year, I predicted that 2019 would be The Year of Network Transformation, and the telecom industry as a whole would make tremendous strides as it seeked to keep up with bandwidth demands driven by billions of connected devices and with subscriber expectations for digital experiences. In order to enable this network transformation while reducing costs and accelerating service introduction, communications service providers (CSPs) turned to open components from a multi-vendor ecosystem. This work will continue at an accelerated pace in 2020 as open ecosystems such as the O-RAN Alliance, the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) - driven by CSPs in collaboration with the vendor community - deliver open reference architectures, specifications and interfaces.