As COVID-19 continues its firm hold worldwide, 5G investment has persisted. According to GSMA Intelligence, 5G will account for 21% of mobile internet connections by 2025, up from less than 10% in 2020. This rise in adoption will be driven by mobile operators, who are expected to dedicate more than 80% of their capital expenditure to build 5G infrastructure between now and 2025. However, as the post-COVID-19 era approaches, operators must address these key priorities to ensure that the hype of 5G is realized, says Ron Haberman, Chief Product Officer at Mobileum.
#1: As the Sun Sets on 2G and 3G Networks, Roaming Headaches will Rise
As we near the end of 2G and 3G networks, there are significant changes for operators, particularly for roaming. For example, 2G and 3G networks have typically been used for extended coverage where the 4G (and now 5G) network has a gap. However, with 2G/3G networks shutdown and frequencies reallocated, a coverage gap will impact the user experience when customers roam. That will require steering to different partners. Steering of roaming will need to become more precise in a 5G era whereby CSPs will need to monitor partner network health and measure an individual roamer’s experience so that they can intelligently steer their roaming customers to what best fits their needs. Steering based on quality will become increasingly important with the growth of critical OTT services that demand ubiquitous high-quality coverage but also has several associated benefits, such as increasing customer loyalty and reducing customer churn. This intelligence will also be required as new 5G use cases and IoT adoption rises. For example, in the case of IoT, it may seem logical for a carrier to steer the SIMs/devices based on cost to achieve better margins, but this may impact QoS. Or, if a partner cannot support power-saving mode, this may impact device battery life and IoT business models. Therefore, operators need to implement a context-aware and segment-based steering approach to steer customers and IoT use cases to the optimum network, ensuring the best QoE and seamless connectivity in the most cost-efficient manner.
The biggest upcoming challenge is the shift to VoLTE. While VoLTE brings benefits such as HD quality voice roaming, significant organizational and technical barriers have slowed adoption. And as the 2G and 3G network sunsets accelerate, the industry is already lagging on VoLTE implementation and readiness. According to Rocco Research, VoLTE subscriptions are expected to jump 746% by 2023. However, in the interim 12 months, CSPs have user experience challenges – such as complications around call completion, short-code use, and emergency and toll-free numbers – to resolve, as well as potential revenue leakage risks as home networks will now be responsible for termination costs. Therefore, addressing VoLTE must be on the January 2022 to-do list for all operators!
#2: Automation Becomes Paramount in 5G
5G brings new use cases requiring more than just a best-effort service. For carriers to meet and monetize on the potential of 5G they must prioritize quality of experience (QoE). This requires a next-generation approach to testing and monitoring that combines established testing methodologies for 5G smartphones, radio access, and core network, with the new automation processes emerging across 5G network design, launch, and operation.
Proactive 5G testing and monitoring become increasingly important as CSPs need to monitor and manage QoE across user devices, radio access, and core network, over multiple network slices and across various applications running nationally on public, private, or hybrid networks and internationally. Creating a holistic view of network performance is the only way to fully understand the context of the device and services provided to ensure that SLAs are met, and services are delivered as intended. Without end-to-end automated testing and monitoring, it would be impossible to answer questions that common 5G use cases will ask, such as:
- Is the 5G device in the right slice and with an agreed SLA?
- Does the radio access deliver the required service performance?
- Are the core network functions and slices dimensioned and designed correctly?
- Do the new software updates deliver the correct performance?
- Is my subscriber at risk of churning?
In addition to holistic network testing and monitoring, CSPs will also need to have end-to-end visibility of every individual subscriber’s service experience as their 5G network expansion accelerates.
With a context-aware approach, leveraging insights from a comprehensive 360-degree customer view, Customer Care Agents (CCAs) can respond effectively and timely to each subscriber’s unique situation and need. CCAs should be empowered with detailed user plane and control plane insights, visualizing them in real-time. When service degradation events impact subscribers, CCAs can quickly escalate these network performance issues to engineering teams, who should be able to retrieve real-time and historical insights about a subscriber’s location, devices, applications usage, and network experience. Enabled by precise and granular information about each customer’s digital behaviour, CCAs and engineering teams can promptly investigate and resolve network issues, ensuring a positive customer experience and satisfaction.
With their Customer Care equipped with deeper intelligence, CSPs can stand out from the competition, making customer experience and engagement their competitive advantage.
#3: Assuring customer experience on day 1 of 5G launch with 360° view will be required across business and service layers
To convert the hype of 5G into a successful business model, operators are enabling various use cases. Enhanced mobile broadband, massive IoT, and private networks are top-tier use cases that demand assurance strategy to be live from Day 1 of 5G launch. These use cases cater to the enterprise market, which has seen strong demand to grow during the pandemic. The operators who are early to adopting digital operations have been able to pivot their operations based on customer experience during the pandemic. The pandemic provided an excellent opportunity to run new experiments to optimize network changes on run time and validate the enhanced experience. As the pandemic turns to endemic, the operational optimization model created by some of the leading operators will cater as success stories for future operations management teams. The distributed cloud, disaggregated radio access network (RAN) along with the cloudified BSS functions enable ultra-low latency, multi-gigabit bandwidth. Demand for intent-based networking will skyrocket, especially as customers adopt network slicing in 5G. Network slicing allows QoS per customer, requiring continuous monitoring of end-user experience and proactive optimization of network policies to ensure the best operators never miss their true intent to deliver the best experience.
- Does the 5G assurance strategy cover enterprise use cases?
- Does my OSS toolset enable closed-loop automation of customer experience driving the network change?
#4: 5G Complexity Provides an Open Door for Fraudsters and Hackers to Exploit
The pandemic gave fraudsters another window of opportunity to exploit weaknesses and vulnerabilities across mobile networks. According to a Mobileum operator survey, in the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic, 75% of survey respondents experienced new or emerging incidences of fraud, and 61% said network security threats increased or significantly increased. While hackers and fraudsters have stepped up their game, network operators have lacked signaling firewall effectiveness. Attackers exploit the change in typology using the growing number of signaling protocols. MobileSquared’s research found that of the MNOs that have deployed a signalling firewall, less than one-third (31%) said that it could perform cross-protocol correlations, such as correlating information and identifying abnormal patterns across different signalling protocols. This situation has left nearly 25% of MNOs believing that 75% of security attacks go undetected even if they have a firewall.
In order to protect your network and achieve 100% detection in 2022, signalling firewalls must provide cross-protocol correlation to protect across SS7, Diameter, GTP, MAP, SIP, CAMEL, and HTTP/2 and be underpinned by machine learning to efficiently examine the 100+ million event details records that are generated each day. Firewalls do not just protect networks from security breaches; they also play a role in preventing fraud via SMSishing and reducing revenue leakage by preventing carriers from grey routing their SMS traffic. The complexity of 5G networks will become a treasure trove for hackers and fraudsters, making firewalls a critical defense for network operators in 2022.
