5G holds promises we never imagined for our personal and professional lives. Through ultra-low latency, higher speeds, and ability to partition, or slice, network resources, businesses and industries are changing the way they operate and now how we live. And, of course, Telcos are providing the network for this pervasive transformation.
This transformation presents significant benefits for operators, empowering businesses with speeds up to 100 times faster than 4G. According to industry analysts, IDTechEx, 5G will be a $720 billion dollar industry by 2030. For Communication Service Providers (CSPs), 5G translates to new revenue streams in use cases like AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality), autonomous cars, IoT applications and smart cities. 5G may even enable uses such as remote surgery and automated manufacturing. These new vertical market sectors are critical as fixed and mobile phone profits become commoditized. Through 5G deployment, CSPs will achieve the optimized interconnectivity needed to serve these emerging markets, bringing us closer to a fully digital business landscape. As CSPs transform into Digital Service Providers (DSPs), they must seek intelligent OSS solutions like no-code orchestration that activate and deliver the diverse services needed to serve these markets. An automated OSS stack is essential for operators to monetize their billion-dollar 5G investments. No-code orchestration will also help operators provide their end users with an optimal customer experience through automated service provisioning and onboarding. Customer experience is a vital consideration for telecom operators, as experts like Forrester project massive revenue gains from marginal improvements in customer experience.
Conventional OSS challenges
5G gives CSPs the power to create and deliver innovative services like smart metering and predictive resource conservation. Combined with telco-specific use cases such as real-time customer management, modern policy control, online charging and mediation, these capabilities help operators extract far more value from their networks.
However, conventional, self-hosted OSS tools are costly, siloed and complex. As a result, manual OSS orchestration is untenable for 5G rollouts and contribute to the delay of introducing these services from operators resulting in lost revenue. Many operators are only beginning to understand the importance of software-defined OSS orchestration in achieving 5G monetization. 5G generates vast amounts of data that costly legacy networks cannot handle. As traditional OSS tools struggle to contend with the deployment and operational demands of 5G markets like logistics and manufacturing, operators must update their hardware-based OSS tools with automated, cloud-native, digital-first service orchestration solutions.
Business models and IT infrastructure needed for 5G monetization
In the past (especially with 4G rollouts), CSPs have struggled to monetize their network investments. This was largely due to an overwhelming focus on the consumer market and Telcos’ role as mere connectivity providers. With 5G, Telcos can remedy this.
Beyond its complexity, 5G has been prohibitively expensive for providers to deploy and difficult to monetize. No-code orchestration addresses these cost and complexity issues. By implementing no-code orchestration in their IT infrastructure, operators can ensure a positive ROI and long-term monetization for their billion-dollar 5G investments. Intelligent no-code orchestration is a cost-saving solution that automates service lifecycle management, facilitating the shift to the Telco cloud for service providers.
The best no-code orchestration solutions combine zero-touch automation, rapid service design and web-scale agility to orchestrate any technology and any service. These solutions should adhere to TM Forum standards and the six pillars of AWS well-architected framework. With many new revenue streams, operators need multi-domain, multi-vendor OSS solutions. These solutions must collate data automatically to provide precise business insights while automating service lifecycle management across physical, virtual and cloud network infrastructure. Automated OSS service orchestration allows operators to increase revenue in their current business lines and secure new revenue streams.
No-code orchestration and 5G monetization
As the telco industry approaches digitalization, operators must redesign their monetization models and transition from solely selling broadband connectivity. This shift has substantial financial benefits for operators, enabling them to serve new vertical market sectors with differentiated services. This requires a shift to autonomous networks enabled by automated OSS service orchestration. These intelligent service orchestration solutions save costs by reducing time-to-value for 5G service deployment, allowing operators to deploy within weeks instead of months through agile end-to-end service activation.
5G networks will rely on automated solutions like no-code orchestration to operate, monitor, recover, optimize and reconfigure their services and applications. This marks a shift from passive networking to intelligent networking, offering enhanced security and cost-effective simplification of multi-vendor platforms.
Network slicing, another key feature of 5G infrastructure, helps operators partition various parts of their network to fit specific use cases and purposes. This capability helps operators deliver the right resources at the right time to the corresponding parts of their network, enhancing agility when serving these new vertical market sectors. Automated OSS service orchestration facilitates network slicing by orchestrating and activating the specific network elements needed to create the network slice. Ultimately, no-code orchestration empowers operators with real-time dynamic modification at high speeds so they can monetize their 5G investment in a timely fashion.
Future-proofing 5G networks through multi-domain no-code orchestration
With the bandwidth demands of 5G services deployment and their related vertical market sectors, network operators must leverage intelligent OSS service orchestration tools that glean actual business insights from huge amounts of data and reduce time-to-market for service deployment and activation. Traditional OSS stacks are expensive, siloed and complicated, and will continue to struggle with respect to launching new services or adapting existing ones driven by the demand of 5G services.
Through no-code orchestration, operators can simplify their 5G deployment and accelerate time-to-revenue in multi-vendor ecosystems. As 5G defines the future of global connectivity, OSS automation defines the future of agile 5G deployment by streamlining service lifecycle management to the economic benefit of operators and the performance benefit of end-users.
