Carriers Still Figuring Out How to Monetize Investments in 5G
Use cases and how carriers will make money from their massive investments in 5G and advanced networks are still taking shape, experts said Tuesday during RCR Wireless’s virtual 5G monetization forum. They repeatedly encouraged providers to be as flexible as possible.
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5G, and eventually 6G, could fundamentally change manufacturing, predicted David Rolfe, Volt Active Data head-product marketing. If industry is able to figure out how to improve communications on the factory floor, using 5G, “where it’s absolutely reliable,” then you can “untether” everything in the factory, Rolfe said. “You can reconfigure workplaces and factories dynamically,” he said. You could have factory floors where robots are throwing things to each other and there are no more conveyor belts, he said.
Automation will take time, Rolfe said, noting electricity didn’t transform manufacturing for decades, until old technology was fully phased out.
5G will never be used for some of the potential use cases of the future, such as flying cars, Rolfe said. The wavelengths 5G uses aren’t suitable for flying vehicles “because you get too far away too fast and if a leaf gets in the way you lose connectivity,” he said. 5G could be used to tell a car where to go, “but it has to have a plan if you lose connectivity -- it has to be self-sufficient,” he said. A commercial airliner knows exactly what to do if it loses connectivity, Rolfe said.
Living in Ifland
The metaverse offers carriers one way of monetizing their investments in 5G and for consumers to take advantage of faster networks, said Michael Lesniak, global director-strategic partnerships at South Korea’s SK Telecom. The company is invested in ifland, a virtual world launched last year, he said: “You can do anything in ifland.”
For the carrier, ifland was “a way to start” in the metaverse, Lesniak said: “We can use mobile. We can extend it to the web if we need to. We can do all these things where we have strengths, and it gives us a way to really be active.” You see news accounts that virtual platforms are “dead,” but that’s not true and some are very popular, he said. The challenge for carriers is that virtual platforms use a lot of data, Lesniak said. “A pretty standard mix of 4G and 5G is enough” to keep up with usage, he said.
Lesniak noted enhancements are coming for 5G that will expand the places subscribers can use ifland, for example, on a high-speed train. “I don’t think we’re 100% there yet, even in Korea,” he said: “There’s more to come.” Users don’t expect to have to wait for a virtual world to load, he said. The metaverse attracts the youngest subscribers, but also people in the 40s and 50s, Lesniak said. A lot of older people “were dreaming about these technologies, this is what they have been waiting for,” he said.
5G started with “a lot of hype,” and the only really successful use case now is fixed wireless access, said telecom consultant Rahul Atri. Technology is “moving way faster than before,” but new use cases aren’t evolving as quickly, he said. Whenever a new “G” evolves, carriers make claims about things they will now be able to do, Atri said. “Get into the data, understand what you can do with the data, and formulate use cases,” he said. Telecos have to “reinvent” themselves to get the most out of 5G, he said: “It might be a platform, it might be services, it might be use cases.”
The Open Grid Alliance starts with the premise that the “internet we build is not the internet we’re going to need,” said Matthew Trifiro, chief marketing officer of tech provider Vapor IO, who spoke on behalf of the alliance. “There are services and capabilities that simply can’t be delivered from the cloud today,” he said. Most traffic today is between machines, which requires much faster connections with more precise timing, he said. We’re moving from Mbps to “terabytes per second” and going from a world where interconnections happen in data centers to interconnections in neighborhoods, he said.
“Re-architecting” networks “at the edge” is complicated and requires coordination among dozens of companies, Trifiro said. “Even simple things take 20 or 30 vendors,” he said.
Top financial opportunities for providers include working with companies to build private wireless and wireline networks and with localities and companies on video monitoring and analytics, Trifero said. Augmented- and virtual-reality, autonomous driving and the metaverse, “I see none of that in demand,” he said: “I don’t know of a single enterprise that’s adopted AR at scale, or VR at scale.” Video cameras are being deployed faster than data can be analyzed, he said. Every factory wants to automate, especially following the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.