Spotlight on Tech

Ten telecom realities to guide 2025 planning

By
Geoff Hollingworth
Chief Marketing Officer
Rakuten Symphony
January 16, 2025
6
minute read

The new year tends to bring predictions of what will come. While guessing about the future is always fun, we want to speak to what we believe is most important for the industry to actually focus on and do.

Rakuten brings a unique perspective to this analysis given its experience as both the world’s first cloud-native full automated Open RAN mobile operator and as a global technology provider to other telecom operators and other verticals that are becoming real-time service providers.

Rakuten chose to become a telecom ecosystem participant for three reasons:

  1. To gain access to the most important first party data it could not access as an MVNO.
  2. To deliver the highest quality connectivity at completely different cost structures.
  3. To make connectivity radically more affordable.

After five years Rakuten is achieving its goals, becoming profitable in Q4 of last year. Rakuten brought down mobile phones bills by an average of 2,000 JPY monthly and we saved Japanese households a combined four trillion JPY annually. The network delivers quality and performance at parity or better than traditional network approaches.

With the above in mind, here are the top 10 realities we are strategizing around for 2025. We hope this insight can shed light on activities and initiatives the broader industry may be planning.

  1. Industry growth: New services and improved value are a must. People want and need to use telecom services every day—but we must continually evaluate the value of connectivity we deliver, and change or expand offerings to match the opportunity. MNOs that are not growing are dying. This is the most important focus of all telecom ecosystem participants. The future will run on AI and data. Rakuten makes an additional 50% ARPU from non-direct connectivity revenue through the bigger digital ecosystem. As operators we all need to design our own growth. This starts with business models and experience above the network. We openly share our learnings, but if you want to learn more please reach out.  
  2. Horizontal cloud: Running one infrastructure is better than running twenty. The trend towards horizontal telco cloud platforms is accelerating, enabling service providers to leverage uniform infrastructure across core and edge telecom and IT. This is leading to more efficient resource management, reduced operational costs and faster service deployment. Flattening infrastructure and operations is a must to achieve the needed future operational efficiency, data accessibility and subsequent automation and AI it will deliver.
  3. Private data centers: Because sometimes you need to own your destiny. Private cloud data center deployments are becoming more commonplace as companies and countries prioritize cost, control and country compliance. Previously companies were having to explain why they had not completely moved to public cloud. Now companies are having to explain how they are getting the workloads back. This is not a black and white scenario and depends on the workload, the traffic patterns and the rate of innovation.  
  4. Distributed edge cloud: From "edge washing" to edge computing. Compute is moving to where the data is rather than the data moving to centralized compute. This means there is a need for sophisticated state management and resilience at the edge, with the least overhead, highest efficiency and best automated operations over a distributed footprint. Getting this right in telecom leads to the opportunity to get this right in other industries. Rakuten Cloud has been deployed in retail, sports and entertainment, and fast-food franchise operations for this reason.
  5. Planning and building: Where data starts. The telecom vendor community was always excited about running networks, but less so about planning and building them. This led to every operator on the planet designing their own tooling, processes and management systems for the highly complex work of planning and building the networks. Today we call this legacy IT. There are literally hundreds of spreadsheets, web apps and databases that every operator uses to traditionally construct a network. And there is zero data consolidation, data management, or possibility to run awareness and analytics. The key word for 2025 is simplification. The planning and building data is the most important data there is in an operation, since it is where the network inventory starts, and in modern networks that continuously reconfigure you need continuous awareness of where everything is hardware, software, and containers and virtual machines.  
  6. Service operations: Lean network engineering teams aren't just possible, they're inevitable. Automation and AI are transforming telecom operations, with AI and machine learning taking over network management, diagnostics and optimization. Zero-touch needs to become the standard to significantly reduce human error and operational costs. It is time to tailor services to specific customer needs in real-time, at scale, with known performance, enhancing user experience and operational efficiency.
  7. Supplier diversity: Breaking the RAN software vendor lock-in prison. MNOs want commercial-grade radio software to add to their existing and new product lines, but making truly commercial-grade radio software for product inclusion is not for the faint of heart. There is a need to diversify the availability of commercial-grade RAN software faster as more people will share software that accelerates product development and value creation. Let me say that another way: more people MUST share software that accelerates product development and value creation.
  8. Sovereign networks: Becoming anti-fragile. Governments want to be able to sleep at night knowing potential threats are not in their country networks, in their supply chains, or in their dependencies. The telecom industry is tremendously fragile and countries want sovereign networks so that fragility doesn’t become the future fragility of their entire existence. See #7.
  9. Situational coverage: Solving coverage with seamless accessibility. In-door coverage is an increasing problem with higher radio frequencies, more energy-saving reflective glass and increasing user needs and usage indoors. Rural coverage is not meeting the needs of countries and people. Even where telecom and mobile is mature, the economics do not compute. How do we get better access? By recognizing other technologies such as Wi-Fi and satellite need to be embraced as alternative technologies to be used as first-class citizens in network design and operations. Roaming needs a 2020’s refresh.
  10. Beyond telecom: All businesses are network businesses. Telecom is the first industry in which the customer experience was dependent on a network. Now all businesses are doing the same. Their experience is no longer being primarily delivered by people but rather technology. And that means all businesses need the same capabilities that telecom needs, highly reliable management of complicated real-time operations. Real-time support of real-time business is now a core strategy of all industries, from mining to retail to sports and entertainment to fast food franchises. If the technology is not working, the service is not working, and the business is not working.  

2025 is when telecom stops trying to be everything to everyone, stops focusing on science fiction future use cases, and starts being really good at what matters today. The technology is ready—are we?

Let me know if you want me to go deeper on any of these. Each one has a story worth telling.

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