If 2022 was all about large-scale 5G deployments and mass adoption of 5G handsets, what will 2023 bring to our industry?
A precipitous drop in the price of 5G chips and enhancements in 5G technology will begin to unlock use cases promised, but not previously delivered. Here are five trends IBM expects to see in the year ahead, along one highly anticipated trend we believe won’t happen in 2023.
#1: An emergence of 5G IoT
Cellular Internet of Things (IoT) is nothing new; for years, low-bandwidth chips have been facilitating the connection of sensors for smart networks in applications such as industry and smart cities. In fact, the phaseout of 2G networks has been hindered by the reality that perhaps billions of devices are still in use for low bandwidth and low cost IoT purposes.
The price of a 5G chipset in 2022 hovered around $40. For the most part, this kept the cost of 5G consumer smartphones above $300. In 2023, we expect to see the cost of the 5G chipsets cut in half. The effect of this cut will lead to a majority of smartphones being shipped with 5G by the end of 2023, but more importantly, enables a much larger ecosystem of connected things to become practical, along with much lower power consumption. Aside from making 5G handsets much more affordable, the new chips are likely to be embedded in a new generation of IoT devices, with higher bandwidth endpoints making a greater degree of connectivity and telemetry possible.
#2: Continued growth of fixed wireless access
While many of us who live in large cities take high-speed internet access for granted, many rural areas and villages lack the fiber infrastructure to enable the degree of bandwidth required to participate in today’s world of education, business, and entertainment.
Fixed mobile access will continue to bridge this digital divide in 2023. Rather than running DSL or fiber to remote locations, consumers can install a device connected by 5G from a mobile carrier that provides high-speed internet to the home. Verizon and T-Mobile have been competing in their efforts to bring this connectivity to more locations throughout the United States, and this will continue a rapid growth path throughout 2023.
#3: The investment in Edge Computing will only increase
The cloud has dominated the conversation around computing and data for some time, but edge computing is emerging as a major player in network architecture and data storage. As 5G networks reach higher levels of deployment, telcos have been rolling out mobile edge computing farms that bring the power of cloud processing closer to its users. In return, this reduces latency for higher performance, while increasing resilience. In 2023, look to telcos to lean heavily into expanding their services around the edge for enterprises as this architecture becomes much more pervasive around the world.
#4: We’ll see an increased demand for Private 5G
While ORAN received lots of hype and attention going into 2022, its adoption ultimately did not meet deployment expectations, which is a trend we except to continue into 2023 as telcos spurn ORAN in favor of mainstream 5G vendors.
Not stuck on the starting line is private 5G, where adoption on campuses, factory floors, warehouses, ports and mining will move out of the pilot stage, into deployment. Driving these use cases are industries where high resiliency of service and network stability are critical, and any down-time in the network has large financial repercussions.
There will be an overlap in both technologies and coverage between telco/public 5G and private 5G as devices leave the factory enabled for public 5G (for initial setup) and will then be “adopted” into a private 5G network.
Couple this move with reduced 5G chipset costs, and we can see how more robots, industrial machinery, retail and office equipment will likely ship out of the factory 5G enabled.
#5: There will be a new way to manage network policies
If our industry has largely solved the challenge of “let’s connect everything to everything else”, this has given rise to a concurrent concern: how to manage and regulate the connections we’ve built. For regulated industries like banking, it’s critical to have a tight handle on the way traffic flows. The move most enterprises have made to operate their systems in multiple public and private clouds has compounded this issue. In fact, network policy and compliance are so rigidly interconnected today, that it’s throttling the ability of regulated industries to innovate and scale. Expect to see new multi-cloud policy management solutions from many network vendors as they compete for what we’re calling SDN 3.0.
#6: The Metaverse? Not yet for many in telecommunications
The telco industry does not yet have a real understanding or working definition of the metaverse. While the metaverse’s capabilities have emerged in other industries and devices, it’s applications in telco are still unclear, which is why this trend won’t likely pick up speed in 2023. Expect the continued delivery of yet more bandwidth which will go on to support not just the metaverse, but upcoming technologies such as smartphone holography.
