Last year, I refrained from making any telecom predictions.   And no one complained.  And this year I was content to continue down that path.  However, I got an offer I couldn’t refuse regarding making 2018 predictions for the Fast Mode 2018 Trends and Outlook, so I did.  The full content is here.

Obviously, no one really knows what is going to happen in the future.  However, a few things are certain:

1.     The Gartner Hype Cycle is so true especially when it comes to 5G.  The peak of inflated expectations is off the charts with 5G.  There is not much good news going with respect to telecom infrastructure spending, so everyone talks about this, all the time.  And it makes it worse and worse.  I suspect that means the trough of disillusionment will be especially deep.

2. The Long Tail for telecom is long.  Longer than anyone expected.   TDM still exists, much to the chagrin of those Gartner Hype Cycle folks above.  We have customers still implementing SIP Trunking.  Gateways are still being sold for this purpose.  Customers are still buying BRI, Analog and SS7.  Once a technology is out there, it takes longer to change out than anyone imagined.

Now, to the 2018 predictions.  The full story is my Fast Mode article, but in a nutshell I see the following:

1. WiFi continuing to grow, at the expense of 5G deployments

2. NFV, as per the GSMA definition, is essentially being relegated to the large SPs.   But software-based cloud based infrastructure will grow.

3. We are going to see some important use cases where IoT converges with real time communications.

The full article is here.