In these challenging times, there’s never been a greater need to stay connected whilst apart and for the wheels of industry to keep on turning.
5G opens the floodgates to new waves of possibility and provides operators with increasing ways to add new value to their customers.
A focus on customer needs is driving forward operator strategy in the 5G arena and Ericsson understand how important a framework of support is to enable its full potential to flourish around the globe.
A new report published by MIT Tech Review in partnership with Ericsson titled ‘The 5G Operator’ brings to light the perspective of 10 senior operators executives on both the many challenges and opportunities facing operators as they seek to monetise 5G.
“We foresee operators playing three distinct roles: “Network Developer,” “Service Enabler,” and “Service Creator,” explains Mats Karlsson, Head of Business Support Systems at Ericsson.
“These allow operators to provide increasing value from 5G network infrastructure, providing tailored connectivity solutions through a 5G digital platform for business customers to build their own processes and offers including “massive IoT,” and providing new digital services to collaborate on use cases beyond just communications,” he adds.
Ericsson anticipate the combined opportunity for those roles to reach $700 billion annually by 2030 but “deciding on which role to take on over time will be challenging,” says Mats Karlsson, head of BSS at Ericsson.
"5G allows us to break through the barriers of distance through an always on, always secure ecosystem, but we can't do it alone"
The emergence of a plethora of new services enabled by 5G and including autonomous vehicle fleets, IoT, and management of fully-automated factories provide operators with a route to new revenue streams but there is a growing understanding that operators cannot do it alone, due in no small part to a current lack of knowledge coupled with a lack of application development experience.
“In the next two to three years, as we get into industrial-type scenarios, they will require partnerships across traditional hardware providers, other software providers, new emerging entrepreneurs, and the traditional telecom... It’s going to be the combination of those that, we think, deliver the new solutions to market.” Says Michael Sherman, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at BT.
The need for a business intelligence driven ecosystem of partnership to share vital knowledge and experience in developing new applications for 5G is crystal clear, as the report dramatically highlights.
Indeed, a huge shift in the closer integration of network, development teams, platforms and processes is already taking place within the industry and there is an emphasis on cloud-centric roadmaps, where 5G will play a major part in enabling greater connectivity around the globe.
It’s a brave new world for the operators but executives interviewed for the report state that getting the full value of 5G is not something they can do on their own.
The report states that: “As operators drive toward 5G, they will need to develop market-responsive BSS and customer experience capabilities to open up agile, cloud-based service delivery technology to a wide ecosystem of digital partners.
“This will create compelling new opportunities for carriers, breaking the cycle of commodification of network capacity and data speed that has plagued the industry for the past decade.”
And it’s breaking these historical challenges of capacity and speed that operators see as the greatest business and societal value offered by 5G.
In healthcare where virtual assistance can be offered smoothly in real-time moments of crisis and in manufacturing, where 5G is enhancing factory automation and quality assurance management solutions, virtual connectivity has become crucial for all industry arenas.
And in the home the demand for connectivity is similarly rising. Research company Strategy Analytics predicts that 38.6 billion devices will be connected by 2025, and 50 billion by 2030, with enterprise IoT accounting for more than half of the market.
Likewise, Juniper Research forecasts that by 2025, 5G commercial IoT connections in automotive, augmented and virtual reality, smart cities, smart homes, and digital health wearables will amount to more than $8 billion in billed operator revenue.
But operators simply can’t, and shouldn’t do it alone, echoes the report.
With our view of the world being reshaped by the dramatic global effects of the coronavirus, now more than ever we need to know that we have the support we need to feel connected in our isolation and to break through the barriers of distance through an always on, always secure ecosystem through partnership.
You can get the full MIT report on the 5G Operator here.
For further resources on Monetising 5G click here.
Click here to learn more from the people themselves.
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The above post is sponsored as part of Ericsson’s Ambassador program.