Why 5G Value Plane is now plain to see

With 5G now emerging as a commercial reality in some markets, much of the early activity is happening in private networks. These provide an early opportunity for service providers of various types to monetise 5G Value Plane. However, as public networks add further coverage, 5G will enable an even larger number of use cases. The technology enables opportunities from selling network slices for specific functions to enabling assured experiences.

All of these capabilities bring potential to not only enhance user experiences but to increase revenues, thereby justifying the substantial investments being made in 5G networks. For this to be maximised, greater understanding of the 5G value plane is needed and organisations are preparing to fully exploit revenue generation across the entirety of 5G. Here, Jim Morrish, a founding partner of Transforma Insights, interviews Avishai Sharlin, the general manager and head of Amdocs’ Technology Division to establish the extent of the opportunities that are becoming real across the 5G Value Plane

What is the 5G Value Plane?

Avishai Sharlin: At the macro level, 5G is a phenomenon. It is fundamentally different to the cellular generations that have gone before in three key ways; the role of software, the linking together of policy and charging, and the commercial potential.

We are seeing a transition of networks to become software driven. The network becomes a software component in a digitised ecosystem, and the opportunity, as well as the challenge, is to tie these together into one holistic concept and derive benefits. Closely linked to this is the coupling together of policy and charging, where 5G systems must augment traditional charging with support for a vast array of 5G-based business models. These include a range of IoT and other business models for which network policies are essential to the overall solution. […]

Why is 5G seen as such a huge potential enabler for new services?

Avishai Sharlin: The huge potential is due to the software-centric nature of 5G, and the fact that the potential to adapt services to match market needs is near-limitless. 5G represents a huge opportunity for service providers to get into a dialogue with end users and then quickly execute on those discussions. The initial opportunities we see today are service providers catering for B2B ecosystem needs whether small or large, in the form of campus area deployments.

The network is agile to the level that it can support different tailored connectivity packages catering for specific application needs. This change will better enable services to be targeted to specific markets.

What is the potential for those services themselves?

Here we should look to a potential future world, and take inspiration from the role of the webscalers today. Through their massive growth, these companies have enabled millions of people to innovate fast. In the past to develop a new business proposition would have involved buying IT infrastructure, servers, a location to put the equipment in, and many other investments.

Today webscalers enable new business propositions to be deployed in a scalable way, in a split second. We may see the same phenomenon happening in 5G, with many small entrepreneurs having access to sophisticated tools to accelerate their innovation, with no bandwidth limits and with many cloud capabilities at hand. This will create a mega potential for new innovation and new business opportunities and will open up the whole ecosystem.