3.2 Some new revenue opportunities will emerge at this early stage

There are a few use cases that were only rarely supported on 4G, and which will therefore represent new revenue streams during the first phase of 5G deployment. The most heavily supported examples are fixed wireless access (FWA) and live events/broadcasting. The latter has been stimulated by the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to stream events such as sports games to homes, and has been deployed by operators such as the UK’s BT/EE.

About one third of the surveyed operators plan to support some FWA in their 5G networks, though often in fairly limited locations. Almost one quarter cite FWA as a top-three commercial opportunity for the first phase of 5G.

Supporting FWA can lead to the following outcomes.

• It can extend the reach of an FTTx network for a converged operator. The most radical example of this is Verizon Wireless, which has deployed an FWA network using its millimetre-wave spectrum.
• It can enable a mobile-only operator to compete in the fixed broadband market, particularly for home services such as high-speed access, TV and multi-play services, while reducing its reliance on the infrastructure of a wholesale fibre network operator. Three UK is an example of an operator that is following this strategy: it launched FWA services before supporting full mobility and so offers fixed broadband while bypassing national FTTx provider OpenReach.

3.3 An IT approach can help an operator to save costs, right from the start

Rolling out an NSA 5G RAN provides operators with a reasonably quick way to put a stake in the 5G ground in order to enhance their competitive position and upgrade selected services, while making heavy use of existing assets such as the 4G cores, sites and application partners.

However, it is essential that operators that want to move beyond their established user bases and use cases prepare for the next stages of the 5G journey as soon as possible. This means that they must lay the groundwork for a cloud-native, sliceable core and 5G SA network, well before they actually deploy these technologies commercially and at scale, or else they risk losing out on the full potential benefits. For example, cloud-native deployments will be more successful if an operator has already introduced IT best practices such as DevOps to its internal teams, and if it has identified trusted partners to help manage the transition of skills and applications to a cloud environment.

Analysys Mason believes that it is best practice for operators to transform their underlying platforms and skills in parallel with deploying 5G NSA, so that they optimise their ability to monetise 5G SA and the 5G core as soon as these elements are introduced. A framework (consisting of tools, data services, application programming interfaces (APIs) and cloud services) is established when following a platform approach, and this can be used to enable any application or service, as required. This evolution will allow an operator to become ‘agile’ in multiple dimensions, and so make the most of 5G’s capabilities. Rather than building a network for a specific use case, usually mobile broadband, the operator can identify a business requirement and immediately configure a network slice that is optimised for the needs of that application or industry.

Digitalisation will enable operators to bring new products and features to market in days or weeks instead of months or years, and to provision new services in minutes or hours, not weeks or months. Service agility is predicated on the ‘softwareisation’ of the network and the associated ability to automate operations.