If you’ve been following the telecom tech press, and were asked to name one benefit that service providers should expect from 5G Standalone (SA) Core, you’d probably cite new use cases. For years, vendors and analysts have emphasized the game-changing customer experiences that the next evolution of telecom makes possible. By introducing network slicing, ultra-low latencies, open architectures, and more, 5G Core brings new capabilities to customize services, especially for enterprise customers. Service providers can unleash amazing new service experiences in areas like industrial automation, augmented reality, telehealth, and more, and tap into lucrative new revenue streams that redefine their role in the digital ecosystem.
It's an impressive list of benefits. But there’s another outcome of 5G Core adoption that gets far less attention: cost savings. Indeed, the buzz around this industry transition seems so focused on new use cases and revenues, you might think there’s just not much to talk about on the other side of the ledger. Ask those actually deploying 5G Core, however, and they tell a different story. In a recent survey of more than 70 service providers launching 5G Core, those making the most progress list cost savings as a key benefit of their rollouts - and often, a major driver for undertaking them.
What kinds of efficiencies are service providers seeing from early 5G Core deployments? And what should this mean for operators who’ve been hesitating to make the switch? Let’s take a closer look.
Inside 5G core savings
As of June 2023, more than 40 service providers had commercially launched 5G Core, with 115 more planning to upgrade within the next two years. This is excellent news, not least because it means we finally can move away from talking about 5G SA in purely theoretical terms, and start looking at the real-world experiences of those deploying it.
The operators we spoke with were still excited about the new use cases they’ll be able to support, and the agility 5G Core provides to differentiate services and quickly pivot to new opportunities. But while those benefits are still largely in the future, early adopters are seeing significant wins right now in cost savings and operational efficiencies. Deployment leaders point to:
- Simplified network operations: It might sound counter-intuitive that cloud-native, service-based architectures, with many more moving parts than traditional telco environments, could actually make operations simpler. Yet that’s exactly what early adopters have found. By decoupling network functions from their underlying hardware, service providers gain a foundation for extreme automation and AI-assisted deployment, optimization, and assurance. The shift to cloud-native telco architectures is certainly significant, but once operators get there, they find that managing the lifecycle of the network becomes easier, less error-prone, and less expensive.
- Dynamic scalability: With cloud-native 5G Cores, service providers can now take full advantage of cloud auto-scaling. As a result, they no longer need to massively overprovision their networks, or take on the significant capital and operational costs of scaling up traditional hardware-based network functions. Instead, they can pay for the resources their customers actually consume and scale capacity with demand.
- Energy efficiency: 5G Core allows service providers to more easily implement cloud-based power management strategies like resource pooling and consolidation for many workloads, while employing specialized hardware for more energy-intensive tasks. As a result, they’re finding that 5G Core uses power much more efficiently than previous networks.
- Spectral efficiency: The lower latency that 5G Core enables will play a critical role in many next-generation services. But low latencies also increase end-to-end network throughput and enable more intelligent radio resource utilization, helping operators accomplish more with existing spectrum investments.
- Reduced network overheads: The nature of current 5G non-Standalone networks, which fuse 5G radios with 4G cores, inherently increases signaling loads and latency. Now, that overhead disappears, along with the added complexity of having to manage two different technology generations in the same network.
Key lessons learned
If you’re part of a service provider organization that has not yet started rolling out 5G Core, what should you take from the experiences of early adopters? Above all, our survey suggests that it may be worth moving forward with 5G Core - even if you still have unanswered questions about which new use cases look most profitable or where exactly you should start. Why not start benefiting from 5G Core cost savings and efficiencies now, even as you wait for more clarity on the revenue side of the equation?
The other big lesson from initial 5G Core rollouts comes from what the early adopters have in common. They all recognize the central role of testing in navigating a transition of this magnitude, and they’ve all made significant efforts to ensure they have the right strategy in place.
Service providers seeing the most success in early 5G Core rollouts are focusing on three areas:
- Validation testing, including standards compliance, interoperability, performance, resiliency, and security, among other factors, to ensure that 5G Cores and network functions are ready for real-world deployment.
- Comprehensive test environments that allow for exhaustive, centralized testing, and that embed automated Continuous Testing (CT) into Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) frameworks.
- Managed solutions that allow service providers to get up to speed quickly in this rapidly evolving space, while investing in new capabilities on a “pay-as-you-grow” basis.
By focusing on these areas, early leaders have been able to minimize the complexity and uncertainty around moving to 5G SA - and to cloud-native architectures in general - while accelerating the benefits. Many say they can now validate new vendor releases 3x faster, automate thousands of validation tests, and reduce overall time to market by more than 60 percent.
Efficiency improvements on this scale should, on their own, motivate more telcos to start moving on 5G Core - even without considering new use cases and revenues. But of course, service providers don’t have to choose. When the market does finally settle on the most profitable new 5G use cases, those with a head start in this process - who’ve been realizing cost savings and efficiencies all along - will also gain first-mover advantages. They’ll find that the steps they’ve taken to streamline their operations puts them in even better position to differentiate their services and accelerate new 5G revenues.
