Quebec City, Canada – While 88% of mobile network operators (MNOs) are set to deploy 5G standalone (SA) in the next two years, many are still searching for the tools that will enable these networks to generate revenues from enterprises and industry. This is according to joint research findings from Heavy Reading and EXFO Inc., the communications industry’s test, monitoring and analytics experts.

EXFO worked with Heavy Reading analysts surveying MNOs across North America and Europe to understand their approach to 5G SA and the revenue opportunity it presents. Nearly half (49%) of MNOs are planning to deploy 5G SA within the next year, while a further 39% will deploy 5G SA within one to two years.

The main drivers for deploying 5G SA are to support enhanced consumer offerings such as virtual reality, augmented reality and mobile gaming; accelerate time to market for new services; and offer network slice-based services.

While 76% of MNOs believe service assurance will be necessary to sell advanced 5G services and meet stringent service level agreements (SLAs), operations teams don’t have real-time visibility into how outages and degradations impact customers whether they are humans or “machines” (critical, latency-sensitive applications and devices like emergency services or factory floor robots). 65% of MNOs say that this lack of actionable insight is preventing them from automating networks and fault resolution, which are essential to meeting demanding performance expectations in enterprise applications.

Specifically, most MNOs said they need a range of new tools and capabilities to generate revenues from 5G services:

• 86% say they need real-time network, service and quality of experience intelligence
• 85% say they need to be able to monitor per-service and per-device performance.
• 81% say they need AI-driven anomaly and fault detection, as well as root cause analysis.
• 82% say they need monitoring of end-to-end network slices.

“The opportunity to generate revenues from 5G SA lies in automated networks, which means service providers must deliver on enterprise service level agreements. This survey with Heavy Reading reinforces what we hear regularly from our customers, mobile network operators want greater service assurance and analytics to deliver actionable insights into network performance and user experience,” says Philippe Morin, CEO at EXFO.

“This is where EXFO’s unique, adaptive approach to service assurance comes into play. By taking a source-agnostic approach to data collection and analytics, combined with a fully cloud-native architecture, our service assurance platform integrates with legacy and new 5G systems to provide a unified, end-to-end view of customer experience, device and network performance.”

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