Network equipment vendors are driving a shift in how mobile connectivity will change in a 5G environment. Whereas previous leaps in network technology — 2G, 3G, and 4G — were primarily focused on consumers and the opportunity to reach and sell more services to more individuals, 5G represents a very different approach.
5G is being led by and positioned for enterprise services. Multiple factors are driving this reorganized effort and vendors are excited to shape new uses of their technology, but this new era of mobility is also changing how vendors must strategize, collaborate, and build networks based on a much broader set of capabilities.
Previous network upgrades were driven by consumers, and use cases most heavily adopted by consumers were eventually embraced and adopted in the business world as well, says Peter Linder, head of 5G marketing in North America for Ericsson. Standardization and other efforts were also largely defined by consumer interests, but 5G has flipped that equation on its side, he added.
5G Presents New Enterprise Escape Routes
“The 4G movement was extremely homogeneous. We were talking about a smartphone, and we were talking about delivering data to that smartphone,” Linder said. “Everybody got the same thing,” and it was repeated on a global basis with little differentiation across 4G LTE networks, he explained.
The 5G opportunity is essentially twofold: enhanced mobile broadband and industrial applications for enterprise, said Houman Modarres, director of enterprise marketing at Nokia. Mobile technology has always been about a “great escape of some sort, but it does have a new dimension now with 5G,” he explained. “The enterprise has now escaped the building…It’s escaped the campus even, so that’s kind of the next escape.”
This transformation in the makeup of wireless networks has prompted vendors like Ericsson and Nokia to develop strengths in different industry sectors and go deeper into how network capabilities can be used for different businesses.
Data has been escaping the enterprise for many years as businesses move critical assets to the cloud, but 5G is accelerating that transformation in new ways, according to Modarres. “There’s another wave — we think it’s probably even a bigger wave because now across the industries, across the more asset-intensive, physical industries that same thing really stands to happen,” he said. “There we’re seeing the networks escaping the traditional perimeters too.”
Manufacturers and other hands-on industries aren’t as far along in their digital transformation efforts at IT-centric businesses because they can’t simply virtualize physical, asset-intensive operations and declare victory, Modarres explained.
“If it’s about connecting everything and getting the information, making sense out of that information, making good decisions, then you do need industrial wireless applications in the wide area,” he said. “You need a combination of capability and performance that hits the sweet spot for that type of wide area broad-based application.”
That said, it’s still very early days for 5G in this context, particularly among enterprises that have machines with 30-year lifecycles and rigorous operational environments.
“Every ‘G’ of wireless has been six months away for three years,” Modarres said. “There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done on the ecosystems for these industries…We’re going to get there but it’s not a quick, one-shot deal when it comes to 5G for industrial.”
5G Beckons Diversity of Applications
Now that consumers, businesses, and municipalities have a much greater stake in the foundations of 5G, different industry sectors are asking for specialized applications. “Instead of people coming in and asking for very large quantities of one and the same thing, people are coming in and asking for smaller quantities of more different things,” Linder said. “This is more about variety in many small things building up to a larger business volume.”
Instead of talking about use cases and how network technology is going to be used, it’s more important and meaningful to talk about where the technology is going to be used, according to Linder. “It’s about identifying these rough categories of places, it’s about going there and saying ‘hey, what is the thing that makes us want 5G in this place in the first place,’” he said.
Identifying that initial need or opportunity helps guide vendors in 5G conversations with network operators and enterprises. Every venue for mobile connectivity in business is unique and vendors are spending a lot more time and resources working through those nuances on a collaborative basis. “We need to figure out how you nail each and every category,” Linder said.
In the mobile context today, most of the “smarts” reside in devices and the cloud, but 5G is changing that dynamic. “The network will be low latency and high performance, and with capabilities to carve out slices for different purposes. The cloud will be distributed closer and closer to the users with mobile edge computing evolution, and then devices can be made leaner,” Linder explained. “We can talk about lean devices instead of smart devices, so devices can have less processing, less memory, less battery and be cheaper.”
Ericsson has partnered with more than 30 academic institutions and collaborated with businesses in about 50 industries to learn and develop new ways to make use of 5G, according to Linder. “In the past it was sufficient for us to talk about phone guys, network operators, and vendors. And between the three of us, we sort of defined where the mobile telecom ecosystem went. Now it’s become much broader,” he said.
Network operators and vendors have been targeting the enterprise through many iterations of cellular technology, but the potential reach and capabilities delivered by 5G are presenting an entirely new outlook for many businesses. “Enterprises have always been a highly desirable, coveted customers for service providers,” Modarres said.
“Enterprises want outcomes. They don’t want a sticker that says, you know, 5G inside,” he said. “Pragmatically 5G will make an impact as soon as for a given industry the ecosystems are in place to drive use cases that drive first order outcomes and these are different for different segments.”