Welcome to The Fast Mode's 2021 Trends and Outlook
COVID-19 hit everyone, and every sector. Telecommunications is no exception. Like most essential sectors, the industry found itself on the front-lines, using all of its capacity to deliver connectivity to homes, businesses and governments, to keep nations afloat as the pandemic raged on. It is during these times that all the past effort in building networks that can deliver, and that can deliver fast and reliably and resiliently, came to prove the kind of technologies that have been put in place through continuous innovations and improvements by the industry. IP networks in particular, have came to play a lifesaving role in this pandemic, enabling simple data communications to transfer critical information, provide media and entertainment content, connect remote endpoints, and enable financial transactions, enterprise operations, government administration and healthcare communications.
In our Trends and Outlook Series 2021, we saw what players in the telecoms sector feet about the effects of the pandemic, and what they think will unfold as nations slowly recover from its effects and forge ahead to rebuild their economies. From virtualization to programmable networks, from 5G to the Internet-of-Everything, from edge computing to cloud native networks, from network security to SASE, we heard from 50 leading vendors on their top telecom trends for 2021 and what they think will shape up the industry in 2021.
Check out our 2019 Trends and Outlook | 2020 Trends and Outlook
By Martin Morgan, VP of Marketing
5G Network Monetisation Reverses the Trend of Data Commoditisation
...the early days of 5G have been focused on delivering enhancements to consumer experience. All these improvements have been focused on improvements to network connectivity. 2021 will start to deliver the real excitement that 5G promises. We will start to see commercially live standalone 5G networks that will revolutionise enterprise 5G service delivery and enable lucrative new services and accelerate 5G network ROI for global service providers...
By Ben Cardwell, SVP & Segment Leader, Venue & Campus Networks
What Will the Future Hold for Building and Campus Networks?
...they say necessity is the mother of invention, and the strictures of Covid-19 forced IT and OT networks in venues and campuses to evolve rapidly and in ways we might not have expected a few years ago. The demand for sufficient bandwidth to support new technologies and the applications they enable is driving a wholesale evolution of the network. New edge devices will be catalysts for upgrading...
By Tomas Hedqvist, Director, Product Marketing
...here we are at the end of the year with a vaccine in sight and a pent-up need for enterprise networks to adapt to the hybrid workplace. Does that mean everyone will just jump on the first SD-WAN or SASE offer they come across? I do not think so. One thing enterprises and service providers have learnt is that the future is uncertain. They will think twice before they...
By Mike Murphy, CTO
...the original Perfect Storm was a weather event that happened between October 28th and November 4th, 1991. The book and movie traced the Andrea Gail fishing boat and its crew, from Gloucester, Massachusetts. Now, 30 years later, we are entering an equally turbulent time; a perfect storm of a different kind. 5G, on its own, represents a significant disruption for...
By Anatoli Levine, Director of Products and Standards
Dusting off the Telecoms Crystal Ball for 2021
...it’s a common fact that you can’t drive forward and look into the rearview mirror at the same time. But the rearview mirror is an important driving instrument…it lets you better understand where you are and what might be coming your way. So, let’s start by quickly reviewing our 2020 predictions for the telecoms industry and see how we fared....
By Marc Serra, CMO & Head of Strategy & Development
COVID-19 Pandemic Accelerating Operators' Move to Automation and the Cloud
...making predictions for 2021 in such a chaotic world might look bold, if not quite foolish. But there are some clues that allow us to foresee what the near future of the telco industry might look like when it comes to network evolution. Three key emerging realities will likely determine what we can expect in the coming months...
By Sameh Yamany, CTO
5G Trends to Watch For in 2021
...one hundred years after the 1918 flu pandemic, the world again faces the reality of a viral pandemic. Fortunately, today we have accumulated a century of health and technological advances - mature technologies to fight, in a smart way, the viral transmission and address the containment dilemma. These technologies are saving lives while enabling the gradual return to some social and economic normalcy...
By Paolo Cuttorelli, VP & General Manager, APAC
Innovating for Customer Growth in a Post-Pandemic World
...in 2020, the stage was set for the arrival of 5G. If we revisited the tech predictions from futurists, experts, and analysts last year, I suspect that few correctly predicted how the arrival of a global pandemic would wipe out every major in-person event in the world. Our world has dramatically changed in the last twelve months....
By Rod Naphan, CTO, Fujitsu Network Communications
Driving Towards Disruption in 2021
...as demand for ubiquitous, high-speed wireless and wireline connectivity continues to escalate, communications service providers (CSPs) are turning to digital transformation and open, cloud-native technologies to help them optimize the customer experience. Looking ahead to 2021 and beyond, the pace of this transformation will continue to...
By Keith Brody, VP Marketing
...when we sat down twelve months ago – and for those of us in the UK, two lockdowns ago – to forecast the direction of the telecoms market in 2020, my guess is that none of us saw what was about to happen next; the Coronavirus pandemic. While there may be a little more certainty about what lies ahead next year, the likelihood is that...
By Tony Thakur, CTO
Forecast 2021: The Network is the Bridge to the Hybrid Workplace
...last year, our forecast for the 2020 telecoms industry predicted we would be generating larger amounts of data, which would call for more bandwidth, along with a scalable, redundant network to accommodate the increases. What an understatement that turned out to be! Like everyone else...
By Zahid Ghadialy, Senior Director, Technology & Innovation Strategy
21 Predictions for Mobile and Wireless in 2021
...despite the pandemic, the cancellation of the MWC and everything going topsy-turvy, 2020 has also been significant as the year of many firsts. The chief amongst them being Apple finally launching their first 5G iPhones. On a much smaller scale, Google also launched their own first 5G Pixel phones. With so many networks launching 5G networks, it’s just a matter of time before you see a...
By Anis Chemli, Vice President
Top 3 Trends to Beat Customer Churn in 2021
...I think we’ll see CSPs take a much more holistic view of customer experience and the impact of customer experience to their network and third parties, such as Netflix and the like. To do this, they need to deeply understand individual subscriber experience and behavior - to take an ‘outside-in’ approach, using analytics to bring the outside perspective of network and service performance from...
By Richard Piasentin, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer
The Race to the Edge: How CSPs Can Carve Out an Advantage
...telecoms companies were famously beaten to the cloud computing punch by smarter, nimbler rivals. By the time they realized what was happening, the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft had built up an unassailable advantage. Telcos were relegated to a supporting role, and have been condemned ever since to carry the OTT services built on these cheap elastic clouds - services that have commoditized networks and...
By Richard Piasentin, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer
5G Needs to Grow Up: Five Trends to Look For
...how many of us spent this past year connecting to the world behind a screen? Working from home, keeping up to date on current events, streaming sporting events or learning online? The pandemic was a catalyst that highlighted the importance of networking in our society. While always important, it drove to the top of the agenda the mission critical need for us to stay connected....
By Brian Klaff, Marketing Director
2021 Trend to Watch: FPGAs Become the Silicon of Choice to Enable OpenRAN
...NFV has gained a lot of traction over the last few years. Virtualization allows the network to be much more agile, which can lead to real cost savings over a rigid, hardware-based network. NFV also makes the network scalable and flexible in the face of changing requirements, without becoming locked-in with a given vendor. 5G in particular...
By Bernd Pruessing, Director, Business Line Networks
2021: 5G, IoT and Virtualization to Drive Demand for More Bandwidth and Digital Twins
...COVID-19 has heightened the need for digital transformation and is accelerating its mainstream adoption to support IoT, virtualization, campus networks and the rollout of 5G. To ensure success in the aftermath of the global pandemic and remain competitive in a digital world, telecoms must increase bandwidth to support large-scale remote workforces, implement...
By John D’Ambrosia and Dorothy Stanley
The Now, Next, and New in Networking
...with so much more work, education, commerce, healthcare, entertainment, and social interaction taking place online (and very often only online) in 2020, the growing global importance of connectivity and bandwidth has been one of the last year’s defining stories. Connectivity and bandwidth stand to take another giant leap...
By Eugina Jordan, VP of Marketing
12 Open RAN Predictions for 2021
...2021 will be a year of “disillusionment” as there will be more trials, more deployments, and more findings of challenges and opportunities that are faced with deploying Open RAN. Open RAN will be deployed more widely for new use cases like very dense urban. The vendors and operators that will be doing the learning through tests and deployments will...
By Karl Bream, Vice President and Head of Strategy, Portfolio, and Alliances for Nokia Enterprise
...predictions for 2021? First and foremost, we will harness one of the greatest technological achievements of our time with vaccine roll-outs to help quell the societal and economic threat of the COVID-19 pandemic. Developed in months, rather than years, the vaccine is truly the standout innovation that will most impact 2021. Turning our...
By Jurie Roux, Product Marketing Manager at TEOCO
2021: The Race to 5G Network Slicing
...the regular joke is that blockchain is a solution in search of a problem. With telecoms, it’s found it. Infrastructure and hardware is often a mess of complex relationships and agreements, and smart contracts that run on blockchain can manage these relationships effectively. The rollout of 5G also means also rolling out hundreds of thousands of small cells across cities and towns over the...
By Lindsay Newell, Head of Marketing, Nuage Networks
SD-WAN: The Key to Working Securely in 2021
...as we entered 2020, it was easy to foresee that SD-WAN would continue to be a crucial component in enterprise digital transformation across many verticals. The driving forces were clear and included aspects such as corporate applications shifting from private to hybrid or public cloud, the move from branch- to cloud-centric networking, the demand to support ‘any-to-any’ traffic...
By Heather Stewart, Marketing Manager
Where Will Carrier Billing Take Us in 2021?
...casual gaming is reaching new audiences, making on-the-go gaming easily accessible on mobile devices. Hyper-casual is mobile’s latest disruption in the industry and its mass appeal with snackable and visually stimulating content means it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon...
By Rob Shore, SVP
What Does 2021 Have in Store for Optical Networking?
...2020 was certainly an eventful year. At the outset, it would have been difficult to predict the emergence of a global pandemic, and equally difficult to have predicted the impact COVD-19 would have on our lives. From lockdowns to quarantines, COVID-19 impacted virtually everyone. 2020 saw significant changes in the way we work, interact, and live. And if we learned one thing from 2020...
By Andrew Drozd, CEO
Nine Predictions about Spectrum Sharing and Spectrum Utilization
...carriers and providers continue to focus on network utilization and optimization to better monetize services, but remain limited in their ability to optimize spectrum utilization for the same purpose. Creatively monetizing network and spectrum utilization continues to be a vexing industry challenge...
By Ofir Zemer, CEO
2021: The Year of 5G - and Automated Intelligent Management Systems
...5G has been the Next Big Thing in telecom for some years now, but 2020 - the year in which just about everything went sideways, and virtual - provided a major impetus for the development and rollout of 5G networks. Operators have accelerated building out their 5G infrastructures, seeking to increase growth in demand - and need - for fast data communications engendered by the world's experiences with COVID-19. As a result, 2021 is set to be...
By Ian Fogg, VP Analysis
Mobile Experience Predictions for a More Resilient World
...mobile telecom networks and service provider businesses have proved extremely resilient over the last twelve months despite the increased reliance placed upon them by everyone. Alongside the operational challenges of meeting the new demands on their networks, operators have continued to pursue new 5G launches and expand 5G deployments — to build the foundations for the world beyond...
By Kent Lusted, David Tremblay and Bob Voss
Ethernet Continues to Thrive in All-Remote Model
...prior to 2020, I had my reservations that any modern society could function without going to a physical office, store, school or establishment on a regular basis. Yes, there was a communications framework in place for people, but it was patchy and mostly used in the off hours when the primary modes to businesses and schools were not in use. The global COVID-19 pandemic was a tipping point in the...
By Alan Bentley, President of Global Sales
Sales of 5G Smartphones and Wearables Devices Will Fuel Mobile Market Growth in 2021
...with a difficult 2020 nearly over and the very first COVID-19 vaccines being delivered across the globe, 2021 can’t come soon enough. This is great news for humanity as well as businesses and the world economy. The news is positive for mobile operators as well. After a drop in smartphone sales in the first half of 2020 due to a pandemic-related decrease...
By Danielle Royston, CEO & Founder
2021: The Year of the Public Cloud in Telco
...think of pretty much any other industry sector, and odds are it will be ahead of the telcos in its utilization of the public cloud. Even the finance industry, with similar legacy application baggage and regulatory issues, is moving critical workloads to the public cloud to benefit from the myriad advantages - massive cost savings being just one....
By Marc Price, CTO
The Future of 5G: Seven Predictions for 2021
...if 2020 taught us anything, it is to expect the unexpected. Yet despite the impact of an unforeseen pandemic, we saw great progress in the telecom industry, especially as operators all over the world began to rollout 5G. The lockdowns associated with COVID-19 also ushered in new trends in connectivity, as we moved into distributed networks at home and moved away from....
By Seri Yoon, Marketing Director
Telecom Trends in 2021: Bringing 5G Indoors, Wireless Public Safety Changes, and New Carrier Moves
...while many industries hit a wall last year, telecom was defined by its growing importance to our economy and lives. In 2020, 5G continued its nationwide rollout, and bandwidth usage substantially increased due to stay-at-home orders and the global quarantines. At the beginning of the pandemic, mobile bandwidth usage increased between 50 and 70% as people increasingly relied on digital communication for both work and personal usage. This is expected to continue in the...
By Bill Versen, Chief Product Officer & President of Communications Market
New Year, New Robocall Problems; What to Expect in 2021
...twenty-twenty was certainly filled with the unexpected, but what did it hold for robocalling? You might be surprised to learn that amid all of the chaos resulting from COVID-19, the volume of unwanted robocalls actually dropped significantly for the first time in years. The primary reason? The pandemic not only kept consumers at home, but the shutdown of...
By Nikhil Vyakaranam, Product Line Manager
The Rise of Cloudified Network Automation
...last year started off on an optimistic note. In January, Gartner predicted that global IT spending would increase by 3.4% compared to 2019. Many organizations were expected to upgrade outdated legacy hardware. However, the pandemic forced organizations to rethink long term strategies...
By Darach Beirne, VP, Customer Success
What’s in Store for Cloud-based Telecoms in 2021?
...in 2020, many companies were forced to rethink their current processes. Numerous businesses have had to move away from regular operations and expand their library of cloud-based tools. Despite 2020 coming to a close, in 2021, many organizations will be managing some of the same issues that they were facing, such as balancing the...
By Brett Lindsey, President and CEO
Fiber the Key to Service Provider, Enterprise Success in 2021
...bandwidth demands for both service providers and enterprises will push the telecom infrastructure market to unprecedented levels in 2021 and beyond. While enterprises seek additional bandwidth to meet the demand for next-generation applications, service providers are striving to densify their networks and acquire new spectrum for the ongoing needs of 5G...
By Mark Dzuban, President & CEO
2021: A Year for Cable and Healthcare Collaboration
...while 2020 forced many industries to focus on survival, for cable the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the essential and sometimes lifesaving nature of our work. It also drove the industry forward toward new innovations. As we move into the new year, we can expect to see more industries shift perspective - from survival to recovery...
By Staffan Göjeryd, CEO
“Are We Still on Mute?” - Five Predictions in 2021
...2020 forced us to rethink how we build our networks and question the fundamental structure of the network to make it more modular in a vastly different way. This was an extraordinary learning period for us - from a bandwidth demand side in a three-week span we saw a full year’s growth. From a professional side, myself and most of our staff went from one day...
By Larry Lunetta, VP, Portfolio Solutions Marketing
2021: The Year 5G and Wi-Fi 6 Get Friendly
...2021 marks the beginning of a new kind of relationship between private enterprises who manage open or guest network access and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). What were once considered competing technologies have now become complimentary, and both are crucial to ..
By Michael Clegg, VP & GM, 5G, Embedded/IoT
The Drive for Digital Transformation Will Accelerate 5G Deployments in 2021
...we’re coming up on a year since most Americans started quarantining and social distancing to stay safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the global workforce now incredibly dependent on new digital services and collaboration tools, this has had a major effect on the ...
By Joe Rash, Industry VP, Semiconductor & Electronics
4 Semiconductor Trends to Watch in 2021
...how will the semiconductor industry emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and perform in 2021? The extent to which people’s daily lives now depend on chip technology makes this a critical question. From AI-reliant smartphones to automobiles to online shopping, nothing has been left untouched by...
By Sunny Rao SVP, API Global Sales
Key Trends Shaping the Future of Business-Customer Communications
...covid-19 has forced a seismic shift in business-customer communications. Customers are now communicating from the comfort of their homes, preferring online and social channels rather than visits to malls, restaurants, or the doctor. This has resulted in customer channel fragmentation, as ...
By Steven Van Zanen, Head of Product Management & Marketing
Standalone Doesn’t Mean Isolated
...in August 2020 T-Mobile US announced they had launched world’s first nationwide Standalone 5G network (5G SA). Radio and Core Network are now both 5G based. In contrast to the literal meaning of the word ‘standalone’, 5G SA certainly doesn’t mean that in 2021 we will see..
By Chris Wade, Co-Founder & CTO
The Network of the New Year: Three Trends to Watch
...coming off a year plagued with uncertainty, frenzy, and the need to adapt and keep businesses moving forward in a virtual environment, we enter 2021 with new priorities for network operations. Distributed work has created a host of new opportunities that will need to be addressed as...
By Biju Nair, EVP & President, Global Trade-in & Upgrades
2021: Why 5G and Trade-Ins Will Be the Catalysts for the Upgrade Supercycle
...2021 will be the second year in the Coronavirus pandemic, and operators have spent a lot of time over the past 12 months adjusting their strategies in line with the new normal. 2020 required a steep learning curve, and while it was hailed as the year of 5G, it will be in 2021 we finally see 5G take center stage. In fact, we are in the midst of an...
By John Giere, President & CEO
BSS Trends: New Normal, New Approaches
...the pandemic created dramatic changes to how we live, consume services and work. It also brought the increased need to innovate. As our new normal takes shape, CSPs will become more nimble, focused and broadened in their service offerings to increase value and accommodate the changing needs of.
By Natasha Tamaskar, Head, Global Marketing & Sales Strategy
The Telecom Future is Wide Open
...if there is one thing 2020 has shown us it is that life is truly unpredictable. While many of us are eager to put the challenges of 2020 behind us as we begin the new year, many of those challenges have become the driving forces behind what will become some of the biggest successes and..
By V.V.R. Kishore, Chief of Roaming Business Unit
Why 2021 Must Be the Year for VoLTE Roaming
...if we have learnt anything throughout 2020, it was that voice remains a staple of communication for mobile users across the globe. A fact highlighted by a 20 to70 percent spike in usage worldwide in 2020, sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, despite the positive signal, a voice-related business continuity crisis is...
By Vikram Takru, CEO
What to Expect in the Year Ahead for Field Service Management and Asset Management
...new apps will schedule both field crews and drones. Delivery of AI and ML-based asset management, service, and optimization will be led by innovative, mobile and cloud-first-based applications. Some SaaS providers will be able to enable enterprises to eliminate silos and unify Field Service Management (FSM) and...
By Inna Ott, Director of Marketing
Automating for the Cloud, the End of the NOC and More
...2020 was a year of unprecedented change. Of course, much of this change was forced upon the industry, as we adjusted to an entirely new set of circumstances. The impact of this will be felt for years to come and will accelerate several shifts that were already underway - but it will also ease the transition to a new level of...