A year of telco transformation: reflections on 2024 and looking ahead to 2025

As 2024 winds down, it's a perfect time to reflect on the transformations we’ve witnessed in the telecommunications industry and how they’re shaping what’s to come in 2025. This year has been one of collaboration, innovation and navigating new challenges together—qualities that define telco’s ongoing evolution.

At Red Hat, we’re fortunate to be part of an ecosystem that thrives on change. Whether it’s advancing the open telco approach or tackling the complexities of artificial intelligence (AI), our industry has never been more dynamic. Let’s explore some of the pivotal themes that have shaped 2024 and will guide us as we move forward.

Virtualization and cloud-native evolution

Virtualization has reemerged as a major focus, but with a fresh perspective. Many service providers are exploring alternatives to legacy solutions—not solely for cost reasons, but for the broader opportunities these changes bring.

This isn’t just about saving money. Organizations are increasingly realizing that modernizing cloud-native virtualization infrastructures can extend the life of their virtual machines (VMs) while opening doors to new, unified approaches for managing workloads.

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization exemplifies this evolution. It enables a consistent, single, unified platform for both VM and container workloads, powered by RHEL KVM and Kubernetes. As telcos embrace this flexibility, they’re better positioned to balance operational costs with performance and agility—key drivers in today’s economic landscape.

Open RAN, disaggregation and realizing 5G ROI

In 2024, open RAN moved from the lab to reality. Service providers are taking tangible steps to deploy oRAN solutions, leveraging disaggregation to foster competition across the stack and drive down costs.

Open RAN isn’t just about economics—it’s about enabling next-generation edge services for industries and enterprises. The telco industry is evolving from virtualization to cloud-native, with oRAN playing a crucial role in delivering the agility, innovation and revenue opportunities telcos need.

As service providers look ahead, they’re also adopting hybrid and multi-cloud models to build flexibility into their networks. At Red Hat, we’ve been rallying the industry around the horizontal telco cloud platform, from the core to RAN and edge, to deliver these outcomes.

AI in the network

The AI era is here, and its impact on telecommunications is profound. Telco networks—distributed by nature—are perfectly suited for AI integration. AI has  helped to automate network lifecycles, streamline operations and provide intelligent insights across IT, digital and enterprise environments, driving down operational costs. Automating the infrastructure results in better observability of your hardware and software estate, enabling service providers to apply analytics to this observability and better utilize AI.

For instance, service providers are deploying AI in RAN to dynamically manage frequencies, sectors and base stations, improving efficiency and performance beyond traditional presets. Similarly, generative AI (gen AI) and AIOps are enabling predictive maintenance, root-cause analysis and smarter decision-making with guardrails for privacy and compliance.

At Red Hat, we’ve been delivering solutions like RHEL AI to help telcos harness the power of AI while addressing the complexities of data gravity, sovereignty and sustainability. These efforts are just the beginning of what’s possible as AI continues to reshape the industry.

The road to 2025: sustainability and 6G 

While we’re building smarter networks, we can’t ignore the sustainability challenges AI brings. Telcos account for 2-3% of global energy consumption—a figure expected to rise as AI adoption grows. Red Hat is committed to helping service providers optimize their investments, using tools like Kepler, Climatik and Red Hat OpenShift AI to maximize the value of existing infrastructure while minimizing environmental impact.

Looking even further ahead, the road to 6G will focus on leveraging AI to unlock new data-driven services and meet ambitious sustainability goals. This journey will require pragmatic, evolutionary approaches, ensuring business value is delivered across industries and geographies.

The opportunity ahead

The telecommunications industry is at a pivotal moment. From virtualization to oRAN to AI, we’re not just responding to change—we’re driving it. At Red Hat, we’re proud to partner with telcos, enterprises and communities to bring open, cloud-native innovations to life.

As we look ahead to 2025, let’s continue building on this momentum. By embracing open collaboration, leveraging shared technologies and solving challenges together, we can unlock the full potential of future networks.

Here’s to the new possibilities on the horizon. Want to learn more? Explore session recordings from Open Telco 2024 here.