Mobile operators are faced with a series of challenges that hinder their ability to monetise mobility. Markets are saturated so growth is gone and, in some markets, the cost of providing a bit of data is already greater than the revenue doing so can generate.
However, mobile is far from over as a money making opportunity. Operators have huge potential to monetise their cellular networks with value added services (VAS), new offerings and by continuing to operate in leaner ways.
A new whitepaper, available today, details the key technological and service battlegrounds, revealing how operators will transform their cellular infrastructure from being a cost burden that generates declining revenues into an engine of future growth and profitability.
5G to the rescue
A traditional telecoms view is that 5G represents yet another opportunity for mobile operators to invest billions in spectrum and radio access equipment that enables the business cases of other organisations.
However, 5G isn’t more of the same for several reasons.
5G will be brought to market in innovative ways, relying on increased automation, often utilising supporting or backhaul infrastructure that already exists. In addition, it will open up new opportunities because of the low latency, high speed it offers.
These attributes will make it an enabler of new services and provide operators with greater flexibility because of its ability to enable fixed mobile substitution.
Even so, 5G is not without its challenges or costs. It will be necessary to maximise spectrum utilisation, minimise deployment costs and operate 5G networks as efficiently as possible if the benefits are to be achieved. Tick all of those boxes and 5G is an opportunity to change the game for cellular operators.
There’s a real chance here to be more than the providers of infrastructure to the highly profitable providers of mobile services – operators can be the providers of those services if they adopt the correct strategies.
