5G Showing Signs of Progress Based on MWC Last Week, Experts Say
5G is moving closer to maturity, based on what they saw and heard at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week, industry executives said during a TelecomTV webinar Tuesday. Questions remain about how to monetize 5G and about the future of open radio access networks, speakers said.
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Appledore analyst John Abraham heard lots of concerns at MWC about what will happen in the economy, and “that’s obviously causing concerns for what might be the take-up [rate] for potentially new applications, be it on the consumer or enterprise side,” he said: “There are questions about what are the specific applications to focus on, and that varies by region.”
But Abraham said he also saw signs the 5G ecosystem is maturing. “There seems to be a better acknowledgment of the challenges that lie ahead,” he said. Industry is still waiting for 3rd Generation Partnership Project's Release 18, which has implications for software design, he said.
The MWC demonstrated real progress for the wireless industry, with 1 billion 5G connections at the end of last year, said Juan Carlos Garcia, senior vice president-technology and ecosystem at Spain’s Telefonica. 5G previously lacked “scale,” he said. “We are seeing a significant amount of things connected to 5G, all kinds of vehicles, drones flying taxis, cars, remote trains, and also a wide variety of devices,” he said. MWC showed the technology is ready, he said.
Revenue growth for carriers is likely to come through massive IoT and industrial applications, Garcia said. “We have been for many years already trialing use cases in many sectors, and you can see the potential there,” he said. Consumers still aren't willing to pay more for 5G than for what they had before, despite enhanced service, he said. “We’ll have to find ways in which we partner with application service developers to really monetize … new opportunities in the consumer segment,” he said.
Private 5G and enterprise offerings are “the name of the game," agreed Rolf Eberhardt, Hewlett Packard Enterprise head-Orchestration, Communications Technology Group. Eberhardt heard a lot at the MWC about bringing dedicated edge applications closer to customers. “The key question is who is going to do the first step on investing in data centers around the edge,” he said: “Let’s hope that the industry can take a step forward in 2023.”
Providers should “start the conversation” with companies about how to combine Wi-Fi and private 5G, and new applications will emerge as a result, Eberhardt said. The goal should be “5G stand-alone core as a service,” he said.
“There’s a lot more willingness to engage with industry -- that has been a challenge in the past,” Abraham said. The wireless industry, broadly speaking, “has moved on from where we were a year ago,” he said.
The 5G ecosystem is “really maturing,” said Azhar Sayeed, a chief architect at software company Red Hat. New use cases are emerging to “take advantage of this connectivity that exists today and build a monetization model on it,” he said.
The executives saw signs of progress on ORAN. The ORAN “ecosystem has certainly strengthened and improved,” Sayeed said. All the big equipment makers are “participating actively in the open RAN community,” he said. Red Hat is looking at three requests for proposals “specifically around open RAN,” he said. But the pace of growth has been slower than expected a year ago, he said.
ORAN technology is “technically feasible” based on more than 200 trials so far, Garcia said. “We had concerns about efficiency and security, and we have seen in this mobile congress most of the critics addressing these topics and giving signs that we are getting maturity there as well,” he said. Big operators have been preparing for ORAN for years and are prepared to move to “massive deployments,” he said.
“5G isn’t exactly what you would call an easy-to-manage technology,” Eberhardt said: “If you’re talking about a multivendor core, it gets even more complicated.”
Speakers considered the Open Gateway application programmable interfaces initiative unveiled by GSMA a sign of progress (see 2302270069). The announcement was one of the most important made by the tech industry in the past decade, Garcia said.
One of the “Achilles' heels” of the wireless industry is “we haven’t been that great at talking the language of the enterprise,” Abraham said: “There are different operators talking different languages and that’s why it makes sense to have one initiative headed by GSMA to try to bring it all together.”
Sayeed was more skeptical, noting GSMA has launched similar initiatives in the past and “the traction … hasn’t been [that] great in the past -- hopefully this time it will be better.” The “intention, the ambition is right, the proof will be in the pudding in terms of execution,” he said.