4.4 The greatest revenue and TCO benefits will come from taking a platform approach that can support an extreme diversity of use cases
It is very early days for 5G within the telecoms sector, so there is an even less-mature understanding of exactly how 5G will impact transformation and which use cases will deliver the greatest returns in other industries. This is why advanced operators are looking to adopt a digital platform approach that can quickly and flexibly accommodate any number of new applications, connectivity variations, partners and users. Our operator survey demonstrates that there is a high level of awareness among Tier-1 and 2 operators of how the 5G monetisation opportunities are expanded by a programmable core and the flexible service delivery platform that it supports.
Figure 10 outlines the key elements of a cloud-native platform approach. In such an approach, the network is recast as a set of components that can be variously combined and recombined according to the requirements of a particular service. Network functions and applications run on common cloud infrastructure and support open APIs, development frameworks and interfaces so that new services can be created on the fly. This results in what Analysys Mason labels the “five ‘S’s”: standardise, speed up, simplify, scale and shrink.
Figure 10: The five ‘S’s from recasting the network as a composable set of cloud-native components. Source: Analysys Mason, 2020
Operators are also increasingly interested in incorporating edge computing into their 5G models. This can enhance the enterprise 5G proposition by supporting some customer organisations’ requirements for key applications to be run locally, on a public or on-premises edge cloud node, rather than in the central public cloud. Enterprises’ reasons to adopt edge-centric services include a requirement for the local management of their traffic, full control of data security and privacy and a low-latency response for certain use cases such as robotics or rapid big data analysis.
In our survey, operators were asked to list all the use case categories in which they considered there to be a commercial opportunity for 5G during the 2020s. A list of the 10 most-cited categories was then compiled, and operators were asked whether they aimed to support these use cases, and if so, which elements of 5G technology would be the minimum essential to enable a profitable business case (NSA RAN only, a virtualised 5G core or a full cloud-native core with slicing). They were additionally asked whether edge computing, though separate from the 5G network, would be a significant enhancement to the business case when integrated with 5G.
