Wireless network operators have spent billions of dollars to acquire spectrum for 5G, and billions more to deploy that spectrum. The returns on those investments are hard to quantify, because operators need the efficiency of 5G just to keep up with bandwidth demands from their current customers.
But what about new customers — is 5G helping network operators pull subscribers away from competitors who may not offer as much 5G coverage? Even if that is happening, it may not be the most important way for operators to monetize 5G.
Ishwar Parulkar, CTO for Telecom and Edge Cloud at AWS, sees wireless network operators gradually coming around to the realization that a new type of network enables new business models.
“In the last year, telcos across the world have been enhancing their networks and offering APIs that provide access to network services, giving observability into and programmability of telecom networks,” Parulkar wrote in a recent blog post. APIs are application programming interfaces, and by sharing these with software developers, network operators can enable new applications that enterprises may be willing to pay for.
“Every telco we are talking to is looking at it, at different levels of interest and investment,” said Parulkar. He named Verizon, T-Mobile, Telefonica, Orange, and Liberty Global as partners that have already announced collaborations with AWS.
As operators roll out standalone 5G core networks, they gain the ability to expose more network APIs and enable network slicing. Rashmi Varma, President of Innovate5G, which helps enterprise customers build private wireless networks using CBRS spectrum, said this can lay the foundation for “business models where we are inviting applications to be able to give a quality of experience.”
Varma noted that most application developers “don’t know anything about 5G networks.” She said there’s a role for engineers who can bridge the gap to “create marketplaces that expose network APIs towards the application businesses, because I think that’s where the new business models reside, not necessarily in the capex that we spend on the infrastructure and try to recuperate it from consumers by selling out SIMs.”
AWS is perhaps the biggest player trying to bridge the gap between app developers and telcos. The cloud giant wants its stable of software developers to start building “network-aware” applications, meaning that applications could discover the best edge node to host a workload in real-time, or tell the network to provide a certain level of latency or bandwidth between two given points.
AWS’s Parulkar said technical gaps between software developers and network engineers are not always the biggest hurdle. “The main challenge has been the mindset of an industry that has for decades done things a certain way,” he said. Parulkar sees telcos now starting to move “towards software defined practices, towards new consumption models, going beyond just slabs of data and minutes. … It has taken some time, but I think the industry is now seeing it.”
By Martha DeGrasse, Inside Towers Contributing Analyst
This article represents the opinions of veteran telecom industry editor and journalist Martha DeGrasse, an Inside Towers Contributing Analyst with features appearing monthly. DeGrasse owns Network Builder Reports and contributes regularly to several publications. She was formerly a writer and editor with RCR Wireless and a TV business news producer.
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