Last week we assessed prospects in 2025 for private 5G, fixed/mobile convergence and AI-driven cybersecurity. This week in our last issue of 2024, we turn the spotlight on other big 5G hitters: Open RAN, network slicing, and ambient IoT – the new kid on the block.
We know the year MNOs would like 2025 to be, the year of ROI for 5G, or as one of our peers put it, the year of 5G Monetization. This wish has been expressed in past years, but there is little doubt there is a determination among operators now to make this come true.
Wireless Watch has been describing how operators are irritated by promises of great new technologies under 6G when they have invested billions of dollars in 5G which has yet to be recouped. A consensus among operators is emerging that while there may be some scope for further radical advances at the radio level, for example around Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces to improve signal gain at high frequencies, changes at the Core will be only evolutionary from now on. There will no radical new 6G Core.
For monetization, some hopes are being pinned on differentiated services enabled in part by dynamic 5G network slicing, benefiting from enhancements coming in under 5G Advanced. 3GPP Release 18, introduced around mid-2024, was the first under this banner of 5G Advanced, with two more to come.
China Mobile in November broke new ground with its package of differentiated services underpinned by Huawei’s early release version of 5G Advanced, billed as 5.5G. Other operators will follow in 2025, although we should note that consumers in other countries will be less willing to stump up extra cash for temporary or permanent fast lanes, when ARPUs are already much higher.
There is also the demon of network neutrality, given that regulators in many markets, including the US and the European Union, have yet to finally determine exactly how that will intersect with 5G network slicing. There is talk of network slicing being permitted for essential traffic management and for specialized services, but whether the latter would extend to fast lanes at mass public events is unclear.
There are some indications that so long as additional spectrum is made available for privileged slices, so that other users are not directly affected, then it will be allowed. Some of these issues will come to a head during 2025 as operators seek to deploy 5G network slicing commercially beyond trials.
Open RAN is another conundrum. We do not quite agree with the assessment of some peers, such as Dell’Oro Group, that 2024 was a bad year for Open RAN.
That assessment was based on declining revenues during 2024, but that does little more than reflect 5G deployments slackening in a number of key markets, as saturation approaches, rather than a weakening in the general position of Open RAN.
We do agree that the greenfield Open RAN boom is over, as operators such as Dish Wireless in the US, now trading as Boost Mobile, and Japan’s Rakuten Mobile, that built new networks around the technology, have now more less finished their rollouts. Advances now must come as established brownfield networks upgrade, but we are seeing some major deployments, examples being AT&T and Deutsche Telekom.
There has been concern that Open RAN has failed to bring about the generation of strong new vendors that had been hoped for, but at least Mavenir ended 2024 on a high after struggling to keep up with the cost of investing in becoming a significant force. As we reported two weeks ago, Aramco Digital – the technology subsidiary of national oil company Saudi Aramco – was on the brink of investing $1 billion in the Open RAN evangelist.
Then, AT&T announced that Mavenir will supply radios as part of its enormous $14 billion five-year Open RAN deal where Ericsson is the primary supplier.
Even before opening the floor fully to multivendor participation in individual RANs, Open RAN promised to stimulate innovation and add value around the RIC (RAN Intelligent Controller). We anticipate RIC capabilities becoming more widely available during 2025, spawning a number of smaller startups that will enrich the movement around the edges, even if they remain peripheral to the big players.
We anticipate 2025 also being a year of advance for some sectors of the IoT. For higher end applications, the full version of RedCap introduced with 3GPP Release 17 in 2022 will increasingly feature in RFPs. We will also see more interest in global IoT tracking services enabled by services that combine LEO satellite with terrestrial 5G for more ubiquitous coverage.
These include the 3GPP-compliant hybrid satellite-based Cat-NB connectivity service launched in the first quarter of 2024 by O2 Telefónica and Californian satellite connectivity service provider Skylo. This provides unified Cat-NB terrestrial and satellite coverage across Europe and North America.
Such deployments contradict the idea put around, perhaps by advocates of the non-cellular LoRa WAN alternative for low power IoT connectivity, that Cat-NB’s success is confined to China, just because AT&T decided to end its Cat-NB service in the US.
It may be that on the IoT front, 2025 will be most noted as the year ambient IoT got off the ground. It is a fair bet because there is pent up demand for ambient IoT, where devices harvest electrical energy from the environment, or from RF signals that also transmit data over existing IoT networks and services.
This is because reliance on batteries for small devices deployed at large scale for applications that do not consume much power is an unnecessary overhead, both in terms of opex and capex. It also raises environmental concerns since disposal of batteries has become a major problem with the massive increases in numbers. Disposal at such scale in landfills has been causing some metal pollution and contamination of underground water through dissipation.
Harvesting ambient energy can either avoid use of batteries altogether in many low power devices, or at least prolong their life through recharging. It is worth noting that self-charging devices have been with us for years, such as some watches.
These may either pick up charge from the wearer’s movement, or ambient body temperature. In the first case kinetic energy is converted to electrical energy, while in the second it comes by exploiting the heat gradient inside the device.
Neither of these may be available for a stationary standalone device, with options including background RF energy associated with transmissions in the area, and vibrations caused by wind or low-level seismic activity. There is also scope for directed power from RF signals beamed at the device which also carries information. WiFi and 5G themselves come into the equation here.
Such self-charging mechanisms are sometimes described wrongly as zero energy, when in reality they are just low energy. They may not even be net zero if the RF signals carrying the power ultimately came from electricity generated with some fossil fuel input.
Still, never mind the branding, ambient IoT will be growing on the back of both economic and environmental concerns.