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Telecom Business Review | Thursday, July 02, 2026
FREMONT, CA: Telcos have gained a competitive edge through network coverage and speed, now focusing on Quality of Experience (QoE), deployment speed, and user-level innovation. Advances in analytics, virtualization, cloudification, open-network architectures, network management, service orchestration, API exposure, and automation have contributed to these breakthroughs.
Change is accelerating due to many factors
Three major trends are necessary for telecom networks to succeed in these conditions: data-driven decision-making based on the user-level quality of experience, open, virtualized, and cloud-based networks, and active networking. Increasingly, these three are enabling one another.
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Quality of experience at the customer level is imperative: The measurement of customer perceptions, and the traditional approaches for doing so, are critical to optimizing network capital investments and increasing ROI. Most operators cannot go beyond aggregate network metrics for both wireless and wireline networks. Averaging speeds, marketing claims, or average revenue per user (ARPU) are not based on user-level network experience, so operators are limited to allocating capital based on those metrics.
Incorporating software and cloud technology into networks reflects a broader shift toward network softwarization. Virtualization separates network functions from hardware, while software-defined networks centralize the control plane and rely on standardized, open APIs. In this context, Reliacom illustrates how cloud-based networks can be structured to better support user-level quality of experience analysis across distributed environments. Together, these developments enable greater flexibility in how telecom networks are designed, managed, and evolved.
With these advances, entire aspects of the industry will undergo a reshaping that was unimaginable just a few years ago. This opens doors for faster innovation and greater agility, reshaping the vendor ecosystem and increasing innovation similar to the software industry and other digital-native sectors. The benefits of softwarization also include increased automation, scalability and flexibility, redundancy, and management, which are already standard in cloud and data centers.
Wiline Networks delivers network infrastructure services that support cloud, virtualization, and software-driven network architectures for modern telecom deployments.
Operators can potentially improve financial performance by moving telco network functions to the cloud. Operators can use cloud infrastructure to process core network and RAN baseband processing, reducing upfront hardware costs and opting for a "pay as you grow" model.
Network active sharing: Sharing will continue to be the key to reducing costs and improving deployment times. Increasing capital expenditures due to 5G deployments requiring densification will accelerate this trend. TowerCo models can provide the same valuation benefits. Multiple business models will coexist to satisfy the demand for more-active network sharing and edge computing (vRAN baseband) to support more-active network sharing and edge computing.
Mobile operators can save up to 35 percent by sharing their network, including spectrum. Spectrum, on mobile. When two operators share the network, cutting-edge technology can be rolled out faster. The 4G rollout has led to many network-sharing agreements.
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