The diversity of 5G’s capabilities has always been its great differentiator against previous mobile generations, with the potential to support a huge variety of different connectivity requirements for multiple industries and applications.
During the first wave of 5G launches, this versatility remained a promise rather than a reality. Only one point of the famous NGMN use case triangle was clearly visible – enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), but little evidence of massive machine-type communication (mMTC) or ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC).
With the finalization of Release 16 of the 3GPP standards last year, and the start of work on Release 17, at least the base specifications were in place to allow radio networks to be optimized for non-broadband capabilities. But implementation of the 5G core, and the 5G Standalone architecture, will be the real breakthrough for operators searching for business models that go beyond broadband. The core will enable them to allocate capacity and spectrum dynamically to different services, verticals or use cases, with each slice optimized in different ways.
That will be a long term prospect for many operators, but a tiny handful have already embarked on 5G SA deployment, including the Chinese trio, T-Mobile USA and Australia’s Telstra. In the meantime, though, most operators will wait for a couple of years (or far longer) to be sure they can see the business case for deploying a 5G core at scale and implementing complex, multi-connectivity platforms such as slicing. It is a big leap from 3GPP specs that enable ultra-low latency or ‘five nines’ reliability, for instance, and MNOs finding a sufficiently lucrative market to justify the roll-outs.
That brings us back to the versatility of 5G. Very few operators will succeed in identifying a strong growth and profit model for just one 5G capability, such as massive device support or sub-millisecond latency. The key will be to deploy a flexibly configured network based on dynamic optimization and cloud-native core technologies, and then apply the radio capabilities of 5G to as many different enterprise and consumer applications as possible.
Some of these will fit clearly into the NGMN/3GPP triangle, but others will be emerging requirements that were not a significant part of the discussion at the start of the 5G journey, and many will need to use a combination of different 5G connectivity attributes. In this issue, we highlight the emerging interest in 5G positioning – hardly discussed in the pre-commercial 5G days, but now on the lips of large vendors like Huawei and large operators like Vodafone, as they perceive a need for precision that goes beyond that of the satellite solutions.
We have examined the potential convergence of 5G and broadcasting several times over recent years, but in the short term, they are often still competing for users’ eyeballs and dollars – and the recent Super Bowl, always a key test of emerging technologies, showed 5G scoring several points. In the past, cellular broadcasting systems have not made much impact on TV viewing or on operators’ pockets, but enhanced capabilities within new 3GPP standards, and changes in the ecosystem and user habits, could make broadcast a far more significant part of the 5G business case than was envisaged 5-6 years ago.
Another cellular use case that remained in a niche in the 4G era is fixed wireless access (FWA), but as with broadcast, this is likely to change on 5G networks because of the enhanced capabilities of the RANs, and changes in user behavior, especially in opening up enterprise potential.
A combination of little-predicted use cases, with new takes on well-established ones, will create a 5G service landscape that may not map entirely to that infamous triangle, but will certainly enable canny operators to leverage the network’s diversity in order to expand their business models significantly in the 2020s.