MWC 2024 – the largest telecom event of the year – just concluded and, as always, it was full of product announcements. Given the size and scope of MWC, we wanted to know what the largest service providers were reading in the weeks leading up to MWC. (For an account of the event itself, read executive editor Dan Meyer’s assessment of MWC.)

Methodology

To do this, I selected 20 global services providers and looked at what content they’ve engaged with on SDxCentral over the last 90 days.  I  included only engagement that came from registered members or confirmed internal networks of these companies (i.e., the analysis does not include all traffic from AT&T fixed and mobile networks). This allowed us to see what people working at these services providers are reading about.

The list of service providers I used for research are AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Comcast, Charter, Lumen, BT Group, Vodafone, Telefonica,  Orange, Swisscom, Deutsche Telekom, KPN, NTT, KDDI, China Telecom, SK Telecom, SoftBank, Bharti Airtel and Jio. It’s important to note that over 1,300 service providers globally have employees who are SDxCentral members – and this analysis is on 20 that set the tone for the rest of the industry.

Hot telecom topics

To get a sense of the most popular technology topics by these service providers, I identified the topics with the most pageviews coming from people working at the 20 companies.

  1. Networking
  2. Security
  3. Artificial intelligence (AI)
  4. Cloud
  5. Secure access service edge (SASE)
  6. Data center
  7. Threats
  8. Zero trust
  9. 5G
  10. SD-WAN

If I also added pageviews from content about other service providers or enterprises into the analysis – they would have landed in the middle of this list. Clearly, people at service providers want to know what their peers are doing and how they are doing it.  No surprise – we all want to know when others have successfully navigated a technology migration.

I was surprised at how much security content was consumed by this list of service providers. I would not have expected that our threat coverage – which is enterprise-centric – to be in the top 10 topics. It’s a little surprising to see that edge and private networks didn’t make the top 10 – however, for both topics the conversations feel much more vendor-weighted. RAN not making the top 10 is expected given how little news there’s been on RAN the last 6-12 months.

Most-researched telecom topics

To get a sense of what types of companies are being researched by telecoms, I pulled our directory pageview data and organized it by topic. This list of service providers most researched companies about the following topics in order:

  1. Networking
  2. Network-As-A-Service (NaaS)
  3. Security
  4. Data center
  5. Open source
  6. Zero trust
  7. 5G
  8. Radio access networks (RAN)
  9. Multicloud
  10. SASE

What’s interesting is that for the second analysis Edge (#12)  and Private Networks (#14) didn’t crack the top 10 and was tied with security service edge (SSE) and 6G. Given all of the hype and announcements this week on LinkedIn, I would have expected this to be higher. Equally interesting was just how much interest there was in NaaS.

Most-researched companies by telecoms

So what companies were the most research by this list of telecoms?

  1. Nile
  2. VMware
  3. Palo Alto Networks
  4. Dell Technologies
  5. Cisco
  6. AT&T
  7. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
  8. Broadcom
  9. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google (Tied)

A couple of items stand out from this list. First, Nile was by far the most-researched company on SDxCentral the last 90 days. Check out my previous insights piece to see why. Second, and we’ll see this in the next set of data, is that telecoms are very interested in VMware/Broadcom. This should not be a surprise given how dependent they are on VMware today – this also likely drove the interest in AWS and GCP.

Finally, interest in CISA is driven from our new SecOps topic hub where we publish CISA advisories and alerts for companies included in the SDxCentral directory. We soft-launched the SecOps hub in January to specifically address the needs of SecOps professionals. However, it was also visited by network, data center, cloud and telecom professionals. Check it out here: Security Operations (SecOps)

Most-read articles

What’s the most-read content by these companies?

  1. Security shakeup: Palo Alto Networks, Cato, Crowdstrike, Zscaler take the lead
  2. University of Denver ditches Cisco, HPE Aruba for Nile NaaS
  3. VMware layoffs (and other cuts) start as Broadcom takes over
  4. Zscaler finally launches SD-WAN, targets surging single-vendor SASE market
  5. T-Mobile name-drops UScellular as acquisition target
  6. Zscaler responds to skeptics of its new SD-WAN offering
  7. HPE, Juniper execs nearly commit to full continuity
  8. Why AT&T picked Ericsson for open RAN deployment
  9. Fortinet launches OT network security hardware: New switches, access points and gateways
  10. Cisco sees $1B potential in Silicon One networking architecture
  11. AT&T network outage burns customer loyalty, federal agencies investigating the cause
  12. Samsung stumped by AT&T’s 5G open RAN plan
  13. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile slashed tens-of-thousands of jobs in 2023
  14. Verizon slashes business unit valuation as struggles continue
  15. Nokia CEO: Losing the AT&T deal hurts‚ cost cutting commences
  16. 6 SASE and SD-WAN trends to watch
  17. Comparing HPE's and Juniper Networks' networking portfolios where’s the overlap?
  18. Microsoft stands by VMware post-Broadcom
  19. Fujitsu honored  by AT&T open RAN deal
  20. 10 networking technology predictions for 2024
Most-researched companies

Lastly, what were the most-read-about companies by our list of the Top 20 service providers?

  1. Broadcom
  2. Cisco
  3. AT&T
  4. Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  5. Dell Technologies
  6. Verizon
  7. Microsoft
  8. HPE
  9. Google
  10. T-Mobile
  11. Zscaler
  12. Cato Networks
  13. Ericsson
  14. Palo Alto Networks
  15. Juniper Networks
  16. Nokia Networks
  17. Crowdstrike
  18. Accenture
  19. IBM
  20. Fortinet
Takeaways

My top takeaway from this analysis and reading all of the MWC news is that the industry is not aligned with the priorities of leading telcos. With such a focus on edge and private networks, the industry may be missing out on much larger trends – the security hardening of the telecom industry. Topics such as threats have never resonated so high at SDxCentral with large telecom companies. Similarly, telcos spend vast sums on running their infrastructure, so it’s not surprising that they’ve prioritized how to leverage telco-clouds from AWS, GCP and Microsoft.

Obviously, this was a self-curated list and doesn’t represent all service providers. However, it is a good representative of priorities of the largest telecoms on SDxCentral.

What does this mean?

Our readership metrics show a sense of focus by these telecoms on the items that matter: Operating large-scale network infrastructure, securing that infrastructure and keeping up on major technologies they depend on, such as RAN, 5G, open source and networking. The lack of interest in edge and private networks reflects the business realities of these topics, which is they are not a single product or technology and these terms are too loosely defined to make them easy to act on. We’ll address how to gain traction in edge and private networks in a future article.