Page 94 - SAMENA Trends - March 2020

ARTICLE SAMENA TRENDS

ARTICLE

5G as a Driver for Collaboration

It will take more than just ‘another, faster
Internet’ to achieve acceptable ROI for 5G
rollouts, instead requiring active analysis of
both sides of the equation: optimising costs
as well as increasing the value of services (or
telcos’ position in value chains).

Despite their revealing alternative name, ‘LTE (Long-Term Evolution)
networks’, 4G networks created a major shift in both perceptions and
adoption of communication services. This, in turn, led to the relatively
early launch of the next evolutionary step: 5G networks.

Massive changes in data bandwidth provoked a tectonic shift in
customer perceptions of what ‘mobile’ meant. I witnessed the
revolution that was the 3G rollout, when, in rural areas, high (for the
time) bandwidth together with competitive bundled pricing put mobile
providers in direct competition with outdated fixed-line providers,
effectively killing old-fashioned access networks. 4G development and
wider smartphone adoption made this trend even more evident. 5G is
now starting out in pretty much the same manner, with FWA driving its
adoption.

At the same time, making the business case for network rollout is
becoming ever more challenging, as new network generations emerge
Maxim Nartov more rapidly and start to overlap with increasingly widespread OTT
Customer Solutions Director services and mature market penetration. It will take more than just
Nexign ‘another, faster Internet’ to achieve acceptable ROI for 5G rollouts,
instead requiring active analysis of both sides of the equation:
optimising costs as well as increasing the value of services (or telcos’
position in value chains).

Different ways of managing costs are already being widely
discussed across the industry. The 5G technology stack comes
well equipped in this respect, thanks to both internal optimisation
(based on virtualisation and cloud technologies) and the potential
for collaboration. Together with pressing spectrum issues, RAN and
infrastructure sharing are becoming key topics in these discussions,
opening the door to cross-operator collaboration on a particular area
or tower, or even on radio equipment. This has already started to
create additional requirements for inter-operator settlement, but wider
adoption, together with dynamic spectrum capabilities, will take place
once network slicing technology has truly come into play, leading to
more dynamic schemes to manage those settlement streams.

94 MARCH 2020