In some ways, 5G is like a new Star Wars movie. The anticipation has been building for so long, and expectations for what it will deliver are so ambitious, that it’ll be tough for reality to live up to the hype. Fortunately, the time for anticipating is over. This year, 5G services go live.
What will the coming months hold as 5G shifts from idealized hypotheticals to real-world implementations? Where will it have the biggest impact soonest, and how will the market evolve? Here are five 5G predictions for 2020.
#1: 5G will start to become enterprise-grade WAN transport
The fancier use cases (IoT, Smart Cities, connected cars) may get more headlines. But the 5G service likely to generate the most actual revenues, at least in the near term, is as a substitute for fixed wireline connectivity. People tend to think that modern service provider infrastructure goes basically everywhere businesses need it, but that’s just not the case. There are still plenty of dark spots, even in mature and saturated markets. 5G fixed wireless solutions can connect them for a fraction of the cost, in a fraction of the time, vs digging trenches for fiber. Even if customers can only get a couple hundred megabits per second over the air, that’s good enough for most applications.
#2: When it comes to use cases, 5G will remain in an experimentation stage for the near future
Unlike past network evolutions, the success of many emerging 5G services will depend on 5G networks being built out to closely align with specific use cases. Beyond fixed-line substitution and capacity expansion for 4G networks the list of potential 5G enabled use cases is long - connected vehicles, Smart Cities, gaming, and many others. Right now, no one knows which will take off first or be most profitable. Expect to see mobile operators experimenting with many different use cases at smaller scales and using what they learn to drive network investments.
#3: Look for the industry to fragment around vertical-specific use cases
Along those lines, fulfilling the promise of 5G will require mobile operators to roll out network slices for vertical applications (Smart Cities, autonomous vehicles, mobile gaming) that have very different characteristics and requirements from one another. In this world, the traditional service provider model - build the network and customers will come - won’t fly. Network slices must be tuned to the use case they’re supporting.
Rather than trying to be all things to all customers, look for service providers to specialize in targeted vertical industries and customers and/or to partner with customers to prototype and develop applications on private 5G networks or through new interfaces. All this requires them to move beyond the traditional telecom ecosystem and outside their comfort zone. Those who succeed soonest will be the ones who best understand those use cases, identify which should be fast-tracked, and align their business development and capabilities behind them.
#4: Truly automated virtual mobile networks are coming, because service providers have no other choice
Mike Wilkinson,
Chief Product
Officer,
Infovista
From a practical perspective, enabling new vertical-specific 5G use cases will require operators to have far more intelligence and flexibility at the edge. But historically, the more functionality you push out to the edge, the more difficult and expensive the network becomes to deliver and manage.
As use cases proliferate, the breadth of edge services and resources will grow far too complex to control using conventional techniques. The only solution is to make edge networks much simpler to manage and, wherever possible, completely autonomous. If your network can’t automatically provision, monitor, and optimize the services running on it, the list of 5G use cases you can deliver will be much smaller than your competitors.
#5: Operators will begin exposing APIs to make their services more consumable for developers
Historically, service providers have not been great at refining what they do to better support industry. That’s going to change, starting this year. But even if they want to, operators can’t become experts in all the requirements and characteristics of every vertical their networks need to support - particularly when it comes to development of new 5G enabled verticals where “industry needs” is a fast-moving target.
In a 5G world then, mobile operators will need to open up their network slices and services via APIs. By doing so, they can empower developers who do have the necessary vertical expertise to embed 5G services directly into their applications. This is a very different consumption model than what operators are accustomed to. But those service providers who can bring new API-enabled network services to development communities soonest will likely be the early winners in 5G.
It’s all about connected mobility and the application experience
One common thread running through these predictions is that 5G application experiences will be a lot more customized and diverse going forward. This will enable business models - which in turn will rely on application performance. This introduces key questions around assuring connected mobility - will applications perform where and when they are needed and around scaling - how will applications perform as use cases and at network usage scale.
This all means operators will need far more visibility into the user and application experience to validate that 5G networks are running as they should. That requires next-generation planning, testing and monitoring tools spanning the full network lifecycle. By arming themselves with these insights, operators can accelerate the rollout of new 5G initiatives and execute on what those new experiences require - in 2020 and beyond.
