Telecommunication Vendors - Past and Present (2020)
If we could use HG Well's Time Machine or Dr. Who's Tardis (Time and Relative Dimension In Space) we could traverse time and look at the past, present and the future.
Lets assume we will use the Tardis and we go back from 2020 to 1976 - time span of over forty years in the past. Lets examine the key Telecommunication Vendors that were around that provided solutions to numerous Telecommunication Operators (Communication Service Providers).
Following vendors provided Telecommunication Solutions and Products (e.g. Telephone Exchanges, Transmission equipment, etc..):-
-Lucent (AT&T)
-Motorola
-Nortel
-Ericsson
-Nokia
-NEC
-Philips
-GEC (GEC Plessey Telecoms - GPT)
-Alcatel
-Siemens
-ITT
-STC
-ITALTEL
Early 2000 was characterised by the Y2K (Year 2000) debacle and dot com boom and bust (dot coma!) Financial losses were heavy, hence this saw a heavy round of vendor consolidation. If we now enter the Tardis and fast track to 2020 we now have:-
- Huawei
- ZTE
- Nokia (includes Alcatel, Lucent, Nuage and Comptel)
- Ericsson
- IBM
- Juniper
- Cisco
- F5
- Oracle
- FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) plus Microsoft
- Numerous IT / Cloud (SaaS/PaaS/IaaS/dBaaS/XaaS) players for SDN / NFV / MANO / AI / ML
Within a space of forty years the landscape has totally changed with new entrants (IT) and several former players becoming totally extinct. The Tardis has shown that the pace of change is fast and the players that remain are constantly updating their role with new and relevant solutions that align with a rapidly changing communication landscape. New IT entrants will be able to create and integrate different VNFs - Virtual Network Functions - to a Cloud Native environment.
It is all too easy to lose focus and to be removed from the Telecommunication landscape. The future will hold a lot more "kodak moments" where Vendors will be displaced, consolidated or finally removed. Lets see what the Tardis will reveal at a later stage.
Keep watching this space.
Reference:
AI - Artificial Intelligence
MANO - Management and Orchestration
ML - Machine Learning
NFV - Network Function Virtualisation
SDN - Software Defined Network
VNF - Virtual Network Function(s)
XaaS - Anything as a Service (e.g. Software, Platform, Infrastructure, Database, etc..). Hence SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc..
https://www.opendaylight.org/
https://www.openstack.org/
https://www.etsi.org/technologies/open-source-mano
https://www.onap.org/
https://telecominfraproject.com/
https://www.o-ran.org/
