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The definitive guide to the biggest shifts shaping mobile, AI and telecoms. How will AI reshape telecoms? What’s next for 5G, satellites and enterprise networks?

This report focuses on the increasing investment by mobile operators and service providers on super-apps, where legacy mobile banking, payments and messaging apps and more are subsumed into one all-inclusive app. With new technology, super-apps today can feature a core stack with 'mini-apps' that are layered on for quick development and rollout. This gives a lot of flexibility and speed for operators to build out ecosystem partnerships and bring new services to market fast, thereby increasing their revenue generation potential.

Bharti Airtel has trialled and subsequently deployed a new technology for wireless backhaul. The technology, free-space optical communications (FSOC), has been pioneered by Taara - a division of X, the Moonshot Factory of Alphabet. This case-study report explains FSOC, outlines Bharti Airtel's deployment of the technology, and assesses FSOC's viability as an alternative transport solution.

Private 5G is growing at an impressive rate as enterprises are increasingly engaging ecosystem players, including telcos and systems integrators, to set up private wireless networks. Industry attention is increasingly focused on filling the gaps in the private wireless proposition, and in this sense, this is also a maturing industry segment. In 2024, the private network opportunity will become increasingly attractive while momentum continues to build, with multiple vendors further increasing their investments. But the value points are shifting away from radios and mobile cores, which are now table stakes, towards the distributed edge and seamless orchestration of workloads across enterprise IT/OT environments.

For 5G monetisation, the primary challenge is to drive a higher price premium for tariffs linked to content or speed, with consumers being willing to pay and sustain this level of payment over time. This comes down to people feeling 5G delivers something new or better than what is possible using an existing 4G service. This analysis shows that FWA and speed-linked tariffs are the best means of doing that, with content-linked offers a more market-specific play.

An emerging area of focus for net zero is energy production and its supply to the power grid. Virtual power plants offer mobile operators opportunities for more stable power capacity, more efficient use of renewables, and a revenue stream from frequency balancing and power sales.

New chipset designs must be made with sustainability as a bedrock principle. This report examines the rationale and urgency behind the sustainability push, how compute efficiencies translate into energy reductions, and how competitive activity is set to accelerate among chipset designers and producers to improve power efficiency.

Edge computing plays a vital role in enabling digital transformation. Understanding its deployment status, benefits and challenges is key to unlocking new use cases and revenue opportunities across the value chain.

Technology-neutral spectrum licensing (also referred to as technology neutrality) is crucial to allow mobile operators to refarm spectrum used for legacy networks (2G and 3G) for 4G and 5G services, at a pace driven by market demand. This report takes a closer look at the benefits of technology-neutral licences.

In Africa, the 5G FWA opportunity is substantial, considering the addressable market for household broadband and the importance of the MSME sector to the region's GDP. Despite issues with device costs and technical hurdles, 5G FWA holds significant potential if the remaining challenges can be addressed collaboratively by stakeholders.