DENVER—During a panel discussion at this year’s Connect EXPO, industry leaders offered insights into what some of the most lucrative use cases for 5G might be. AT&T VP of Mobility & Access Architecture Gordon Mansfield acknowledged how impactful 5G will be on several industry verticals, but then commented briefly that next year, he expects significant movement in the 5G consumer market. To find out more, RCR Wireless News caught up with him to ask: Why next year? What’s changed? And more critically, how does AT&T hope to profit?
5G for everyone, everywhere
“From an enterprise perspective, you can build out customized solutions to serve whatever they are trying to do. But, if you think about the consumer side, it’s a little bit different because I’m not building it for what you want; I’m building it for what everybody wants — not even everybody in the U.S., but everybody in the world,” Mansfield said. This, he continued, creates a “very different dynamic” in which the entire ecosystem must align itself in service of the same goal.
“We often talk about slicing, but how is slicing going to be handled in the phone? It starts with the phone… And then if you go up the food chain a bit more to the app developers [and ask] do they want to do it one way for an android system and another way for the IOS system?” he said, suggesting that consumer services like network slicing cannot be offered unless all the necessary players are delivering them “consistently across the entire ecosystem.”
“All that’s in place now, though, and it wasn’t until recently,” he continued. “Now that that’s there, the concept of slicing in a consumer environment is possible in the next year or so,” adding that because most applications have all the bandwidth that they need, it is more reasonable to expect that consumer will use slicing to get consistently lower latency rather than a way to increase bandwidth.
Wearables is another consumer use case that Mansfield predicts will take off next year, driven by well-established devices like smart watches, but also by the newer, lightweight AR glasses that are hitting the market from vendors like Nreal Light. Supported by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Spaces XR Developer Platform, Nreal Light’s glasses are slim and wireless, making them much more desirable as a consumer product compared to earlier devices.
Monetizing consumer 5G
In order for such devices to be as sleek as they are, however, some of the glasses’ processing power has to be offloaded onto the user’s smartphone via wireless tethering — at least for now. This is an important detail for Mansfield to bring up because this tethering requirement provides a potential revenue opportunity for AT&T.
“Is there a way to monetizing the tethering process?” he posited. “I can tell the device whether the consumer is entitled for a specific experience.”
When it comes to the first application mentioned — network slicing — Mansfield questioned whether a carrier could charge for lower latency. While he shared that going to the general consumer and offering lower latency, even for a small price increase, might not be the best approach; instead, he suggested targeting more niche consumer markets, like gamers, who have been shown to be willing to pay more for a better gaming experience.
Mansfield pointed out that this group of customers is interested in a having a mobile gaming experience that resembles what they get in their home, and latency is at the core of this. “Gamers already understand lag. If I say latency, they may not understand, but as soon as I use lag, they get it,” he provided. “That’s an easy market to penetrate.”
The bottom line, Mansfield reasoned, AT&T can’t simply charge more for basic connectivity unless all of its competitors are doing the same. “You always have those competitive dynamics, so instead it’s about putting incremental capabilities on top of [that basic coverage].”
