The Top Three Telecom Sector Trends in 2021 and Beyond

With the advent of mobile technology about three decades back, the telecom sector experienced a revolutionary boom. Given the current pandemic situation, which forces most of the world’s operations to be conducted remotely, the telecom industry plays a pivotal role. The robust and seamless connectivity provided by telecom network providers throughout these trying times has facilitated effortless remote working for global operations. Otherwise, we would have faced significant economic consequences that would significantly impact our lives. Quality assurance in telecom plays a crucial role in ensuring proper network integration among your devices and uninterrupted mobile network experience. The remote working scenario has slowly seeped into our lifestyle and has proved to be the new normal now. Therefore, the Telco sector needs to up its game and work out ways to ensure they provide smarter services, which are safe, robust and reliable at the same time. Here is a list of upcoming trends set to transform the telecom sector in 2021 and beyond. We shall also discuss in brief how quality assurance will play a major role in this transformation.  

1. Innovations in Remote Connectivity

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, telecom industries have played a huge role in helping us adhere to the protocols of social distancing and making the remote operations lifestyle successful. From the rise of telemedicine and virtual doctor consultations to schools and colleges taking the entire education infrastructure online to the shift of the worldwide workforce providing services through online platforms, digitization has seen an insurgency in the past year, like never. The global telco sector has manifested its power through the pace and scale at which the transformation to this virtual way of life occurred. Therefore, in the telecommunications sector, we will witness technological advancements in the sphere of remote working to enable the glitch-free continuation of day-to-day processes for every other industry.

2. 5^th Generation Networking (5G)

With every leading telecom organization embracing the shift to 5G networks, 5G is expected to become the standard convention by the end of 2021. The hype surrounding reduction in latency, reduced connectivity costs and accelerated speed with a 5G network, has proven to be influential enough. 5G has established an enhanced customer experience compared to 4G networks and with more operations moving to the remote working process, everyone expects to leverage the benefits of a 5G network worldwide. Since virtualization is an area that most telecom organizations are exploring, an accelerated 5G deployment is possible through the enhanced interoperability and open architecture allowed by O-RAN (Open Radio Access Network). 2021 is expected to see a widespread launch and use of the 5G network throughout the entire telco sector. Some organizations in this industry are also looking forward to exploring 6G capabilities to support the new “remote working” global infrastructure in operations and services. With 5G making its way into our lives, we can anticipate a global transformation at scale along with accelerated innovation. However, that also brings forth new risks related to security and the telecom industry would need to address these challenges using advanced strategies and technologies.

3. Network Function Virtualization (NFV)

Network virtualization is an area in telecom that projects excellent potential. Therefore, this is a technological trend in telecom, which is here to stay and has already started transforming the entire telco landscape. Virtualization in telecommunications refers to building network services that are software driven.  The process involves replacing hardware devices and elements related to the telecom network with software to facilitate its virtual mechanism. To make this procedure a success, quality assurance practices are essential. For telco organizations to ensure seamless virtualization, Network Functions Virtualization testing is extremely crucial. Software quality engineers use comprehensive methodologies to validate NFV for telco companies and make sure quality is not compromised during the transformation from physical to virtual networks. Virtualization involves the extensive use of cloud technologies, which helps telecom service providers boost their business agility while dramatically reducing expenses. Many telco companies are already leveraging the benefits provided by NFV, and soon the entire telecom sector is expected to follow. Other Upcoming Transformations in Telecom. Apart from the trends mentioned above, certain other advanced and emerging technologies have already started impacting the telecommunications industry and will continue bringing on innovations in the future. These include the power of AI (Artificial Intelligence), ML (Machine Learning), IoT (Internet of Things), the DevOps methodologies, Edge computing and more. Given the constant evolution in technology, Telecom organizations must always be ready to embrace innovative tech. Telco service providers must always be open to upscaling and developing their capabilities to provide a better customer experience and survive the tough competition posed by game-changers in this sector.