Netcracker VP discusses commercialization and monetization of 5G
Ari Banerjee, Netcracker’s vice president of strategy, reflected on the prominence of 5G and related news that came out of Mobile World Congress, but noted that beyond just network implementations, operators need a path to use 5G to create new services that drive new revenues.
“It’s not just about the network,” Banerjee said in a recent interview with RCR Wireless News. In parallel, operators and vendors must answer the question, “How do you now provide the service, provision the service, how do you make money out of those things? There’s a lot of gaps.”
Looking past early 5G commercial network services, Banerjee discussed a more mature 5G ecosystem, the success of which is, to some degree, hinged on operators providing optimized network slices tailored to the needs of specific customers and services. He said automated network slicing “will become very critical for the success of 5G.”
Noting engagements with Japanese customers, Banerjee said there is ongoing work with friendly customers to investigate “how they can provide a dedicated network slice for the specific service. As you go further in the next two to three years, it will absolutely become much more critical. What’s going to end up happening is enterprise coming to the operator asking for specific [service-level agreements], which is this kind of latency, this kind of priority handling, this level of [quality of service], this level of caching, these kind of applications I want to run. The point is for operators to provide them with the right slices and connect them to those slices. We will see more and more of that as we move into the next few years.”
Netcracker is a software and services company that addresses the telco and cable markets. During Mobile World Congress 2018, the company announced its 5G monetization solution, which it describes as taking the risk out of the move from LTE to 5G, assisting in 5G-related business case development, and enabling “real-time, on-demand business models for low latency services, new touchpoints and digital identity management.”
Banerjee said of the transition from LTE to 5G, “There’s always risk involved when we move from one generation of wireless technologies to another. So in that timeframe, how do you de-risk your monetization environment? There will be incremental revenue opportunities. That’s the whole point.”
