The winners of the telecoms industry’s most prestigious awards event have finally been revealed.

A healthy range of companies were represented this year, with the 20 awards spread among no less than 13 winners. The big kit vendors all did well, with Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia each winning more than once, while SK Telecom was again crowned operator of the year. The winning entries also represented the latest trends in telecoms, including 5G, OpenRAN and telco cloud.

“It was such a pleasure to so much evidence of the telecoms industry’s enduring strength and innovation,” said Telecoms.com Editor Scott Bicheno. “All the categories were incredibly competitive this year, so the winners really had to earn their place and all the shortlisted entries should feel proud of themselves.”

Due to the exceptional circumstances everyone is having to cope with we weren’t able to host a live in-person event this year. But we did record a special awards video featuring comedian Geoff Norcott, which you can watch here. So let’s cut to the chase, here are the winners and highly commended entries of the 2021 Global Telecoms Awards.

Advancing Artificial Intelligence 

Winner: Turkcell – My Gem Inside: AI-Based Emotion Recognition for Autistic Children

Automation Initiative of the Year

Winner: Ericsson – Empowering Airtel’s automation journey

Highly commended: P.I. Works – SmartPlan

Best Digital Transformation Project

Winner: Huawei – AI-powered Digital Transformation Project

Highly commended: Verizon and Accenture – A Digital-First Approach to Building 5G Right

Best Operator 

Winner: SK Telecom’s 5GX Hyper-connected Networks and Services

Highly commended: China Mobile International

Best Operator 5G Innovation

Winner: Altiostar – Rakuten Mobile 5G Open RAN Cloud-Native Network

Best Vendor 5G Innovation

Netcracker – Netcracker Non-Real-Time RAN Intelligent Controller

BSS/OSS Transformation Excellence

Winner: Netcracker – Netcracker Digital BSS/OSS

Highly commended: Huawei – 5G BSS Reconstruction Project for China Mobile Chongqing

Connecting the Unconnected

Winner: Federated Wireless – Bridging the Digital Divide with CBRS Shared Spectrum

Highly commended: Starlogik – StarZRO

Consumer IoT Initiative of the Year

Winner: Turkcell – Smart Micromobility with LTE-M

Highly commended: China Mobile Research Institute & Huawei C-V2X Network Test Solution

Digital Transformation Innovation

Winner: Nokia – Nokia Digital Assistant

Fixed Network Evolution

Winner: RtBrick – RtBrick’s Virtualized Broadband Routing Software

Highly commended: Positron – G.hn Gigabit Access Multiplexer

Ground-breaking Virtualization Initiative

Winner: Altiostar – Rakuten Mobile for 5G Open RAN on Kubernetes

Highly commended: VMware – Telco Cloud Platform

Industrial IoT Initiative of the Year

Winner: Ericsson – Ericsson IoT Accelerator platform enabling Axon’s connected cameras

Managed Services Innovation

Winner: Ericsson – Indosat Ooredoo & Ericsson AI/ML and Automation driven managed services transformation

Mobile Money Mastery

Winner: Comviva – MOVii

Most Innovative Cloud Service 

Winner: Colt Technology Services – Colt Cloud Services

Highly commended: Robin – The Robin Cloud Native Platform

Most Innovative Cloud Technology

Winner: Red Hat – Red Hat OpenShift

Project Delivery Perfection 

Winner: Huawei – Huawei Rock-Solid Solution

Highly commended: Solutions by STC – Dammam7 Supercomputer Project

Security Solution of the Year

Winner: Nokia – Nokia for NetGuard XDR Security Operations in 5G

Telecoms Transformation 

Winner: Liquid Intelligent Technologies & Project Taara at X – Alphabet’s moonshot factory; Connecting the capitals of DRC and Congo

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