rsstelecom

Market Analysis Perspective: EMEA Telecommunications, 2026

Ahmad Latif Ali, Tolga Yalcin — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Analysis Perspective analyzes the trends impacting Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) communications service providers in 2026, with a focus on generative AI, satellite, and future investment priorities. It includes an overview of the essential market guidance and outlines the competitive challenges that key suppliers within the EMEA telecommunications landscape should consider.

"AI has moved from the lab to the balance sheet for EMEA telcos — nearly half are already funding generative and agentic AI use cases in the network, and that share will only grow. The operators that win over the next three years will pair that AI investment with real interconnect and edge capacity, and will build data sovereignty into every proposal rather than treating it as a regional afterthought." — Ahmad Latif Ali, vice president, Telecommunications, IDC

How Agentic AI Is Transforming Cloud Communication Platforms — From Pilots to Production: Economics, Trust, and Execution

Masarra Mohamed — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation examines how agentic AI is reshaping cloud communications platforms as the market moves from experimentation toward production-scale deployment. It explores how AI agents are changing the role of communications platforms from systems focused primarily on message and interaction delivery toward intelligent execution environments capable of interpreting intent, coordinating workflows, accessing enterprise data, invoking business applications, and completing customer and operational tasks across channels.

The presentation also assesses the implications of this shift for enterprise architecture, commercial models, cost structures, governance, trust, observability, and platform economics, including the movement from message- and usage-based monetization toward models linked to successful actions, resolutions, and measurable business outcomes. It reviews emerging enterprise use cases, the operational challenges associated with scaling agentic AI, and the capabilities buyers should consider when evaluating platforms (including orchestration, data and memory, interoperability, security, governance, and commercial flexibility). Finally, the presentation outlines strategic priorities for communications platform providers, telecommunications operators, and hyperscalers as value increasingly moves toward orchestration, real-time voice AI, enterprise context, trust infrastructure, vertical solutions, and outcome-oriented services.

How Agentic AI Is Transforming Cloud Communications Platforms: Part 1

Masarra Mohamed — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC presentation examines how agentic AI is reshaping cloud communication platforms as value shifts beyond standalone communications APIs toward orchestration, persistent context, trusted automation, and measurable business outcomes. It traces the market’s evolution from programmable communications and omni-channel workflows to AI processing and agentic orchestration and shows how enterprise AI adoption is moving from experimentation into operational deployment. The presentation explores how agentic systems can move customer engagement from reactive interactions to proactive resolution, creating value through lower operating costs, higher first-contact resolution, proactive revenue opportunities, and continuous optimization. It also examines the conversation, trust, time, and coordination gaps that limit autonomy, as well as the capabilities required to close them, including orchestration, persistent memory, governance, observability, identity, and secure network intelligence. It concludes with strategic priorities for providers as competition shifts toward ownership of the orchestration layer and commercial models move from traffic toward outcomes.

Lumen Intelligent Internet Brings More Flexible Billing to Enterprise Internet

Harsheeta Arora — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Lumen Intelligent Internet applies customer-controlled, hourly billing to the same basic relationship between access capacity and committed bandwidth used in burstable internet. The model offers greater cost visibility for planned temporary increases, while burstable internet may remain a better fit for unpredictable traffic-driven spikes; both models depend on sufficient physical access capacity.

Enabling Telecom Omni-Service Monetization

Chris Silberberg, Peter Chahal — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective examines how telecom operators can monetize an expanding portfolio of consumer, enterprise, NaaS, and API-based services, and how BSS vendors are helping them do so. It sets out 6 structural challenges — business model diversity, catalog fragmentation, ecosystem and API commercialization, data fragmentation, regulatory divergence, and commercial agility — identifies the billing, charging, CPQ, catalog, marketplace, and settlement capabilities most relevant to each, and profiles 15 vendors serving this market.

"The rationale for telco BSS investment is shifting from a focus solely on TCO, or monetizing a specific product such as 5G FWA, toward investing in systems with the flexibility to sell anything. This is to unlock revenue growth and commercial agility by monetizing a wider range of services. Technical capability is just one part of the solution; telcos must also reconsider their processes and organizational setup if they are to overcome common challenges," said Chris Silberberg, research manager, Global Telecom Operations and Monetization at IDC.

Ericsson 2026 Analyst Event: The Network as a Participant in AI Use Cases

Ahmad Latif Ali, Denise Lund, Paul Hughes, Brandon Butler — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Ericsson's 2026 Analyst Event made it clear that the network is no longer just infrastructure for AI — it's becoming a co-participant in it. Ericsson is repositioning the network from infrastructure to a trust layer for AI, monetizing identity, location, and quality signals that pure-play CPaaS rivals can't replicate. The risk: Value scales only as fast as operators expose these APIs, and developers still expect open flexibility over network lock-in.

Telecom Infrastructure Modernization in Sub-Saharan Africa

Tolga Yalcin — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation examines the state of telecom network infrastructure modernization across Sub-Saharan Africa, covering 5G rollout, fiber and FTTx backhaul expansion, RAN and core virtualization, tower and infrastructure sharing, and the energy and currency constraints shaping network economics. The presentation profiles infrastructure investment patterns in Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, and Côte d'Ivoire, and identifies three models through which operators are modernizing at scale: shared and coinvested build-out, regulatory-enabled competitive scale up, and network virtualization.

Equinix Inference Exchange and Metro Edge: Colocation Becomes AI Production's Middle Tier

Olga Yashkova — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note examines Equinix Fabric One and Equinix Inference Exchange, announced at the company's inaugural Horizon conference, and their implications for enterprise AI infrastructure strategy. Built with NVIDIA and Together AI and slated for 1Q27 availability, Inference Exchange positions metro colocation as a production-grade middle tier for AI inference, sitting between centralized cloud training and device-level far edge, and raises the competitive bar for neutral edge and colocation providers, hyperscaler edge programs, and network operators alike.

"Equinix is making a clear bet: The next battleground in enterprise AI isn't just which model you choose but where inference actually runs. By turning metro colocation into a pre-integrated production tier, Inference Exchange forces every neutral edge and cloud provider to answer the same question: proximity or scale, but not both," said Olga Yashkova, research manager, Worldwide Telecommunications Services at IDC.

IDC Survey Spotlight: How Much Traffic Is AI Use Adding to European Enterprises’ Networks, How Are They Responding, and What Will Drive Further Growth?

James Eibisch — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight shows how AI use is increasing traffic on European enterprise networks, where the greatest increases are occurring, how enterprises are responding, and where they believe further AI-related traffic growth will come from. The report is based on the European results from IDC’s Future Enterprise Connectivity Infrastructure and Services Survey, conducted in August 2026.

LEAP 2026: AI Infrastructure Reshapes Saudi Telecom Strategy and Regulations

Ahmad Latif Ali, Tolga Yalcin — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note examines the AI, cloud, and infrastructure announcements from LEAP 2026, held August 31–September 3 in Riyadh, which drew more than 200,000 visitors and produced nearly $15 billion in disclosed investments and agreements. It covers new hyperscaler cloud regions from Microsoft and AWS, HUMAIN’s expanding sovereign AI compute pipeline, and a fresh wave of Saudi datacenter investment, alongside the different strategic paths Saudi telecom operators, including stc, Mobily, Zain KSA, Salam, and Tawal, are taking into AI infrastructure. It also covers CST’s move to extend infrastructure-based competition to a second utility, the National Water Company, following its earlier licensing of SEC-owned Dawiyat.

“LEAP 2026 made clear that Saudi Arabia’s AI buildout is being layered onto its telecom operators’ infrastructure, and that a widening set of players, including utilities, are now being brought into that infrastructure layer alongside them,” says Tolga Yalcin, research director, IDC.