Operators are starting to switch on to Stand Alone (SA) 5G networks. In fact, as recently as July, Korea Telecom commercially launched their own SA 5G network, while Singapore operator, M1 launched a market trial of its own SA 5G.
Furthermore, three Chinese operators (China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom) have also launched SA 5G too. Outside of APAC, it’s fair to say that SA 5G is also gathering pace with the likes of T-Mobile in the US launching SA 5G back in August 2020, Vodafone Germany doing the same back in April, and South American operator DIRECTV now also offering SA 5G FWA (fixed wireless access) services.
Customers can now receive minimal latency of between 10-15 milliseconds. As well as this, operators are also now looking to deploy network slicing on the SA 5G network. This will enable dedicated slices for particular services to have predefined quality of service and latency.
We will continue to see more of this kind of operator activity. The accelerated move to a digital economy, the ubiquity of streaming services, and the ability to control the delivery channel for many services (in this case the SA 5G network), opens up many new opportunities and places the operator centre stage in the 5G value chain.
All the 5G promises that the industry has been talking about for the last 3 years are starting to become a reality. While systems in the 5G core such as policy (PCF) and those adjacent to it, such as charging (CHF) all have 3GPP standards, many of the supporting systems that operators need to run their business on don’t have such well-defined standards.
As such, there is a danger of vendors sticking a ‘5G compliant’ label on newly designed systems when voice was the main revenue earner for operators and texting was seen as the next big thing. BSS is one such example.
There is the TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture guidelines (cloud-native, built using microservices, uses containerisation and open APIs). These type of guidelines should be the building blocks of all BSS. However, for BSS that supports 5G we need to look at how 5G will impact the day-to-day running of an operator’s business.
5G will expectedly deliver new business models. It will also deliver new and more fluid channels. As such, operators will need to be much more agile than before in defining, testing, and implementing new business offers and new processes. The ‘fail fast and learn fast’ operating model needs to become reality, as 5G offers opportunities yet comes with its own uncertainty.
It could also be argued that 5G needs new offers and processes to be developed and produced in 24 hours as opposed to 24 weeks - but there are no standards to define this, only best-in-class business processes.
Therefore, for 5G BSS it would seem that the no-code approach is the only way to go. No-code BSS enables a level of hyper-agility that operators will need as SA 5G gets rolled out. It enables business users in an operator to make changes to BSS via visual tools.
As such they don’t need any form of IT expertise to design and build new services offerings, or develop new up-sell processes, as there is no form of coding involved. This democratises BSS and enables changes to be administered faster and with greater frequency than ever before.
Operators won’t need to go through the lengthy and expensive change request process. They can make changes themselves - quickly and cost-effectively. SA 5G is the next evolution in telecoms - as such, it needs to be supported by the next evolution of BSS.
