Special Report: Enterprise 5G enablers
Enterprise and private cellular networks may still be a small part of the mobile landscape in terms of the users they support, or the revenues they generate for operators or vendors, but they account for the lion’s share of growth in an otherwise squeezed industry. However, enterprise networks need to serve a huge diversity of applications, locations and organizations without sacrificing the economies of scale that come from standards and common frameworks.
This challenge has encouraged the emergence of new vendors, service providers, developer communities, and chip and device designs, all aiming to address the varying requirements of the 5G enterprise.
And those requirements will get even more diverse if predictions of an ‘industrial metaverse’ turn into reality. While most metaverse discussions have centered on consumer experiences that blend physical and digital worlds seamlessly, some of the more serious R&D and forecasting actually concerns the application of such technologies to enterprise environments such as smart factories. A few operators already claim to have industrial metaverse projects underway with large corporate clients (see item below on SingTel and NTT Docomo), and industrial needs are one of the factors that have driven technology majors, including Qualcomm, to seek to set standards in this area.
But there are many enablers that will need to be developed and put pragmatically in place if such visions are ever to become meaningful and able to be monetized. Some of these are highlighted in our Special Report today, from the emergence of integrated SIM to the latest RF front end technologies – both critical components if the vendor community is to develop the variety of devices and modules that will be needed to power all the use cases envisaged for enterprise and IoT networks in future.
Of course, spectrum is another key enabler, and while some countries have opened up spectrum to a wider range of deployers in the hope of stimulating enterprise 5G, in others, the issue is still highly divisive, as seen in the latest disputes surrounding the upcoming Indian 5G auction.
In the end, much of the real power in the enterprise 5G value chain will flow to the companies that can control the orchestration and AI/analytics layers, which will be essential to ensure that each enterprise and user gets the specific capabilities and quality of service they require. That may be achieved by slicing, as demonstrated by Ericsson in China last week; by software-defined subnets, as touted by Nokia’s CSTO Nishant Batra; or by standalone private networks, which are being offered by a wide range of providers including the hyperscalers (Google has recently joined AWS and Microsoft Azure in this space).
The latest report from Wireless Watch’s sister service, Rethink RAN Research, focuses on how edge computing will become an increasingly important enabler of enterprise 5G use cases, and of successful deployer business models, especially when combined with small cells. The hyperscalers and the operators will be just two of the groups of companies that will aim to combine edge, 5G Standalone, AI, orchestration and new devices to create new enterprise services and experiences, and to generate new revenue streams – preferably long before that industrial metaverse becomes fully real.