Telco execs surveyed on behalf of disaggregated router software company RtBrick have said that top management decision making and lack of skills are holding up progress towards building networks that can meet customer expectations and are able to take advantage of advances in automation and AI.
Market research company Vanson Bourne interviewed 200 telco execs on RtBrick;s behalf: 100 in the USA, 50 in the UK and 50 in Australia. About a quarter of those were working at mobile operators. Half of respondents were active in design/R&D.
Half of those surveyed (49%) said they lack “complete confidence” in delivering services that will satisfy future customer performance and price demands. Eighty-four percent say customer expectations are already outpacing their networks, while 81% concede their current architectures are not well-suited to handling perceived future increases in bandwidth demand.
It’s the bosses what gets the blame
We all love a moan about the bosses, and so it seems do those taking part in this survey. While 91% said that their organisation was willing to invest in resources to deploy disaggregation, 93% of respondents also agreed with a prompt that their organisation “requires more support from leadership to deploy disaggregation”.
But there are other issues too. 43% said that they suffer from complexity around operational transformation, ranging from redesigning architectures and workflows, to retooling how networks are monitored, automated, and supported. 38% said they are facing a critical shortage of specialist skills/staff that are necessary to design, deploy, and operate next-generation networks.
Only 5% of those surveyed say that they already deploy disaggregated network systems. 47% say they are planning to do so within the next year, and a further 33% within the next 1-2 years. That means that about a third of respondents are planning deployments right now, with about half saying they are exploring or evaluating their options. Over half of those surveyed expect to increase operational automation and enhance supply chain resilience by moving to a disaggregated model. A similar number also expect to lower operational and energy costs, as well as as purchasing costs.
60-65% of all respondents say they already use AI for tasks such as network optimisation and fault resolution. However, these can be viewed as preliminary use cases, with work still to be done on unblocking the benefits of automation. 93% agreed with the statement, “Gaining access to a rich set of real-time network data will be essential for my organisation to unlock the full value of AI.”
Which vendors?
So if the demand is there, who is likely to benefit from an investment in disaggregated networks? Will it prompt a new wave of vendor presence? Well, according to this survey’s respondents – it’s a mixed bag.
Certainly, most expect the incumbent vendors to go with the disaggregated flow. 90% agreed with the statement, “Traditional network vendors currently provide or will provide open disaggregated options for my network within the next three years.”
So it’s perhaps not surprising that when they were asked, “Which vendors are most likely to deliver open disaggregated solutions for your network over the next three years?”45% of respondents named Cisco, with other incumbents Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia and Juniper scoring between 25-35%. But there was good news also for DriveNets and Edgecore, scoring 41% and 38% respectively. RtBrick found itself down on 15%, proving perhaps that this was indeed, as claimed, an independent survey.
“Which vendors are most likely to deliver open disaggregated solutions for your network over the next three years?” [Vanson Bourne for RtBrick]
