The promise of 5G—with a seemingly endless list of potential use cases—has been discussed by service providers for years. As a major evolution beyond 4G, 5G brings a more dramatic leap in capability than the transition from earlier LTE generations. Over the next 12–18 months, standalone 5G deployments will expand, allowing operators to begin realizing returns on their infrastructure and spectrum investments. This period will be pivotal for telecom reinvention.
At the 2021 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Verizon CEO and Chairman Hans Vestberg delivered a keynote demonstrating how a service provider can harness 5G’s distinct capabilities to drive innovation, reshape telecoms, and advance societal goals. Highlights included partnerships with Skyward and UPS to develop smart-city applications that rely on 5G as the core backbone for robotics and drone operations. Verizon also showcased programs that use 5G to promote digital inclusion and improve access to education.
Across industries—sports, education, smart cities and entertainment—leading organizations are collaborating with operators to transform their operations using 5G. Partners ranging from the NFL to major museums are exploring how 5G’s low latency and edge-compute potential can enable use cases like remote surgery, autonomous vehicles and cloud gaming. These examples reflect broad confidence in the performance gains 5G can deliver. Now the telecom industry must seize these opportunities, leveraging 5G as a platform to reach new customers with novel services and fundamentally reshape the telco business model.
The power of the 5G network
Delivering on 5G’s promise requires a shift in mindset. The risk is treating 5G merely as a faster version of 4G. In the 4G era, operators built networks but often captured only connectivity revenue while over-the-top providers monetized most services and content. With 5G, operators have an opportunity to change that dynamic. To capture greater value, they must go beyond connectivity and take a central role in delivering and monetizing services that depend on 5G’s unique characteristics.
The introduction of network-embedded services
Network slicing and the flexible capabilities of 5G allow operators to tailor network characteristics—such as speed, latency and reliability—to specific services. These tailored offerings can be considered network-embedded services. Operators will be able to present flexible, usage-based packages—similar in concept to the hyperscalers’ models—that can be dialed up or down to meet precise needs, opening possibilities that were not feasible in earlier telecom generations.
A commonly cited example of a premium 5G service is cloud gaming. In competitive online gaming, milliseconds of latency can determine success or failure. Through dedicated slices, operators can offer gamers predictable low latency and sufficient bandwidth to maintain a competitive edge. Many other mission-critical applications—autonomous driving, remote surgery, industrial automation—will also demand those high-quality network experiences. To deliver them, operators must enforce slice-specific policies via the 5G policy control function and monetize the differentiated experience by applying charging rules through the 5G charging system, turning high-value performance into revenue.
As network characteristics become integral to offers and use cases, tight integration between the 5G network, IT systems and business processes becomes essential. Network-embedded services are diverse and dynamic; a robust bridge between business, IT and network layers is required to manage service delivery, orchestration and monetization across the new 5G ecosystem.
The 5G value plane
The concept of a 5G value plane helps close the gap between business and IT. By combining service catalogs with charging and policy controls, the value plane links new digital experiences back to the complex layers of the 5G network. This foundation for management and monetization also enables improvements in related areas, such as digital customer experience management on the business side and automated network optimization on the technical side.
Historically, network optimization focused on capacity management, cost control and ensuring operational performance. While those goals remain important, 5G necessitates expanding optimization to include monetization and experience management. Operators should ask whether cell sites and services deliver the best possible profitability. The most effective way to capture value is to deploy high-value 5G Network Embedded Services where network quality is a core part of the product and the customer experience.
The coming year is likely to be decisive for telecom and 5G adoption. Operators can support a wide range of customers as they pursue 5G-driven initiatives and, in doing so, reinvent themselves. Telcos will move into new domains and may introduce non-traditional services for the first time. 5G represents a critical inflection point that requires operators to innovate and adapt to meet rising demands and accelerating technological change. Ultimately, 5G will enable a new marketplace built around service models, agility and the economics of value-driven offerings.
(Photo by Jez Timms on Unsplash)
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