The Glotel Awards were back as a live, physical, event this year and the winners represented a great cross section of an industry going from strength to strength.
For reasons that will be obvious, we weren’t able to get loads of telecoms professionals in a big room for the past two years. Now that, in the UK at least, that whole strange period is behind us, it was great to be able to get together just like we did in the good old days. Some things just aren’t the same over Zoom.
No single company dominated the awards this year, with a gratifyingly broad spread of winners in terms of company size and geography. Korea’s KT won the Best Operator award, and big kit vendors Huawei and Ericsson both did well too, but there are plenty of more niche players represented too. Cheesy though it is to say so, the big winner was the telecoms industry on the whole, which finally got the chance to celebrate its achievements in person at a great night out in central London.
Here’s the full list of winners and highly commended entries from this year’s awards. We congratulate them all for their considerable achievement.
Advancing Artificial Intelligence
Winner: Capgemini, Project Marconi
Advancing Standalone 5G
Winner: Ericsson & Singtel, Singtel 5G Standalone
Automation Initiative of the Year
Winner: Huawei & Zhejiang Mobile, Core Network Autonomous Driving Network Project
Best Digital Transformation Project
Winner: Netcracker Technology, Netcracker Digital BSS
Best Operator
Winner: KT, DIGICO
Highly Commended: BT, BT’s R&D
Best Vendor 5G Innovation
Winner: Ericsson and Digital Nasional Berhad Malaysia, Multi-Operator Core Network and Dynamic Resource Partitioning
BSS/OSS transformation excellence
Winner: Netcracker Technology, Netcracker Digital Platform
Highly Commended: Lifecycle Software, Converged Charging System
Climate Action Excellence
Winner: Batelco Bahrain, Energy reduction program towards a sustainable environment
Highly Commended: Vodafone, Device Circularity
Connecting the Unconnected
Winner: Kacific Broadband Satellites, Kacific Gigstarter
Digital infrastructure Innovation
Winner: Solutions by STC, KSMC – Smart Medical City
Highly Commended: FiberSense, DigitalAsset Marine
Driving Digital Transformation
Winner: ZTE, ZTE 5G IDEA
Fixed Network Evolution
Winner: Neos Networks, Major network expansion programme
Ground-breaking Virtualization Initiative
Winner: SK Telecom, World-First Baremetal-based Telco Cloud-native Core network commercialization
IoT Initiative of the Year
Winner: Tata Communications, Smart Street Lighting Solution
Managed Services Innovation of the Year
Winner: P.I. Works, Next-Gen Managed Service
Mobile Financial Services Mastery
Winner: Ericsson and MTN , MTN Mobile Money Open APIs
Most Innovative Cloud Offering
Winner: China Mobile International, mCloud
Highly Commended: Radcom, Radcom Ace
Outstanding Contribution to Open RAN
Winner: Rakuten Symphony, Open RAN solution
Highly Commended: NEC, NEC Open RAN
Private Networks Perfection
Winner: stc, Non-public Mobile Networks/Private Campus
Project Delivery Perfection
Winner: Huawei & Telefonica|Vivo, Best Network Optimization Project
Highly Commended: Türk Telekom & Red Hat, Türk Telekom’s cloud-native transformation with Red Hat
Security Solution of the Year
Winner: ZTE, Private 5G Network Security
Telecoms Marketing Team of the Year
Winner: Amdocs, “Make it Amazing” campaign
Telecoms Transformation
Winner: Huawei & Turkcell, Insights as a Service