The term "disruption" has been thrown around a lot in recent years. Changing work patterns have persisted, the economy has been shaken, energy prices have soared, supply chains have been put under intense strain, and we have seen demand for IT skills increase as the pool of available talent has gotten smaller. This kind of disruption is not always good, but it does facilitate change and innovation, strengthening our resolve to build, grow, automate and overcome. That is why, despite the tumult of the past year, we are about to turn the page and mark a new chapter in our technological journey. That chapter starts with the metaverse, and who knows where it might lead.
The internet has become so tightly woven into every facet of daily life that it was only a matter of time before it morphed into something new. For many, the metaverse is the next logical step in the evolution of the internet.
We do not have to think too far back to remember the days of Web 1.0 when data was stored in centralized servers and indexed with hyperlinks. Dial-up modems were our only portal to the online world, and cellular 1G did little more than complement what needed to be done on desktop PCs and cumbersome laptops. In the past two decades, we have witnessed the rise of social media, unrestricted sharing of high-fidelity data and unrelenting democratization of connectivity. Web 2.0 has been the status quo for more than a decade, creating a need for 2G, 3G, 4G and eventually 5G networks. Connectivity is no longer a binary state. It is a constant.
Now we are cruising toward Web 3.0. Information is becoming decentralized, content is becoming user-directed and self-controlled, artificial intelligence and machine learning are altering how we work and play, edge computing is being leveraged to bring advanced processing capabilities closer to users and technologies like blockchain are creating secure, tamper-proof ways of engaging with the online world. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are now part of our everyday lexicon. The stage is set for the metaverse – a fully realized virtual world that is connected and interactive, allowing people to share content and connect in ways that have until recently been the reserve of science fiction.
The change is coming, and here are the trends that are going to drive it.
#1: 5G will continue its rollout and become critical to the development of the metaverse, and 6G will become part of the conversation.
The metaverse will only succeed with a combination of edge and cloud compute, reinforced by a robust 5G infrastructure. Moving toward the metaverse without 5G would be like embarking on Web 2.0 without 3G or 4G. Would social media be what it is today if uploading a picture on the go took several minutes? Or if a Netflix video took several hours to buffer? Sites like Reddit would have remained text-based communities, and YouTube would never have been established. The low latency and high capacity of 5G facilitate seamless connectivity for millions of users, enabling workloads to be split between the device, edge and cloud – something that will be crucial to the successful application of the metaverse.
5G provides a firm platform for near-limitless innovation, but 6G will amplify this potential, further enabling the merging of physical, digital and virtual worlds via truly ubiquitous, low-power communication and sensing.
#2: Cloud will become the preferred platform for payment and revenue models as network operators seek tosimplify the path to new opportunities for monetization
We are already seeing telecom operators moving their operations to public, private or hybrid clouds, and that march will continue through 2023. As 5G continues to roll out and metaverse applications become more readily available, operators will need new and digitized ways of managing subscriptions and user activity. Subscriptions will potentially become more nuanced as more capabilities open up to the end user. Instead of paying a flat fee for "X" amount of 5G data per month, there will be countless opportunities to roll out additional and supplementary services. Cryptocurrency will likely play a key role, and subscribers will be allocated personalized and unified billing models based on their needs and how they engage with the metaverse.
We have already seen the needs and demands of users and enterprise customers shift during the pandemic. The shift to virtual learning, remote working and telehealth created a wave of new revenue opportunities for operators that many struggled to seize due to complex business support systems (BSS). That will change in 2023, with telecom providers embracing real-time, hyperscaling cloud-based systems that allow them to pivot, tailor and personalize the way they structure and monetize their services consistently across a common pool of subscribers and customers.
#3: Communication service providers will become more than vehicles for connectivity and evolve into orchestrators of the metaverse
The opportunities for communication service providers (CSPs) as the metaverse springs into being will be overwhelming at first. As mentioned, monetization and revenue models will evolve to take advantage of new use cases. Still, the most successful CSPs will be those that see their role not as arbiters of connectivity but as orchestrators of the metaverse. These CSPs will aim to simplify and unify the journeys of consumers, partners and enterprises and become metaverse platform providers. Take SK Telecom and their Ifland platform – a dedicated metaverse platform that plans to utilize a global alliance of mobile service providers to offer users a range of metaverse services "out of the box." We are likely to see more CSPs follow a similar path, reframing themselves as metaverse providers rather than limiting their value to only billing subscribers for basic connectivity.
The true extent of the metaverse is yet to be realized, but it is set to revolutionize more than just how we game, shop or socialize. It will become a new economy in and of itself, providing millions of jobs and generating billions in revenue. It will create entirely new experiences, open the door to new use cases in healthcare, learning, advertising, working and help us create a greener, more sustainable society. Players in the telecoms industry are uniquely poised to design, shape and monetize the value chain on which the metaverse will be built.
As Peter Drucker once said, “The best way to protect the future is to create it.”
