10 telecom trends for 2024: Juniper Research

Telco market is primed for disruption, analyst firm finds, due to impacts of GenAI and more

What telecom trends can the industry expect to shape 2024? Juniper Research has put forward a list of 10 that it sees as being paramount for telcos in the coming year, which includes everything from an increased focus on sustainability in telecom supply chains, to 5G Advanced network developments and the use of generative artificial intelligence in marketing campaigns.

Overall, Juniper notes in a related white paper that while its list contains 10 trends, those are being shaped by four themes: Continued advancement of 5G technology, disruption fueled by AI, “innovative sustainability” that will increasing be top of mind as part of decision-making, and an evolution in messaging that includes Apple’s embrace of Rich Communications Services (RCS).

“The telecommunications industry has seen rapid digital innovation over the last decade, driven by advances that greatly improve the efficiency with which new telecommunications services can be launched,” said Juniper Research’s VP of Telecoms Market Research Sam Barker. “Over the coming year, we expect operators to capitalize on this efficiency and make bold moves to better position themselves amidst the major technological and business shakeups on the horizon.”

Juniper ranked the trends from most (1) to least impactful (10). “We consider the top 5 trends to be the most significant over the next year, but all 10 will have major repercussions across the ecosystem,” the firm concluded in the white paper.

Juniper laid out those 10 trends as:

1. Acceleration of satellite launches during the course of 2024, bringing the further integration of terrestrial and cellular non-terrestrial networks (NTN). “Satellites will play a critical role in the development of 5G networks in 2024,” the firm concluded, helping 5G networks to achieve coverage in underserved areas and improving performance and capacity, as well as enhanced backhaul support and better network resilience. Juniper Research anticipates that there will be more than 300,000 connections accessing 5G satellite networks in 2024.
2. Greater use of open APIs in telecom, which Juniper Research said is being driven by rising fraud and rising SMS pricing.
3. The use of GenAI to “revolutionize conversational AI” and automate personalized marketing, enabling telcos to identify and segment audiences based on demographics and behavior.
4. Juniper also expects that integrated-SIM, or iSIM, devices will proliferate during the course of 2024, particularly driven by low-power wide-area (LPWA) network technologies where reducing size is a priority.
5. The coming into force of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act regulation, which Juniper says is forcing big tech “gatekeepers” to develop cross-platform interoperability and is a driver behind recent developments such as Apple supporting RCS.
6. The analyst firm also expects that increasing 5G data roaming traffic will drive the adoption of GSMA’s Billing and Charging Evolution (BCE) 2.0 protocol, due to revenue losses associated with continued use of Transferred Account Procedure (TAP). “Specifically, BCE will enable operators to apply differential pricing for roaming access to different network slices on 5G standalone networks,” Juniper said.
7. Sustainable initiatives by telcos are expected to be prioritized, with a particular focus on applying AI and machine learning, seeking sustainable supply chains and more energy-efficient equipment and batteries.
8. Large Language Models (LLM) will lower the barriers of entry for voicebot implementations by enterprises. “Voice services must continue to evolve; improving not only the quality of services, but also the flexibility afforded to enterprises,” Juniper explained. LLM-driven voicebots are expected to be increasingly leveraged across verticals, as businesses seek to lower costs and improve response times.
9. 5G Advanced networks will support new mobility and extended reality markets, Juniper said. The next iteration of 5G “will have significant benefit to the entertainment and education sectors, by providing support for more interactive application use cases. Operators must capitalize on this rise of new use cases by supporting business models that leverage APIs for service access,” the firm added.
10. More holistic, network-wide AI implementation that will drive increased function efficiency. “We expect network-wide AI implementation to come to the fore in 2024. This will include AI services that can access data from the entirety of the network, from the core to edge nodes, rather than in isolation,” Juniper said.

More insights in the full white paper, available here.