Over 70 percent of mobile operators believe that ownership of access networks and edge cloud infrastructure will give them a competitive advantage over public cloud providers in the 5G era.
According to a survey conducted by Heavy Reading, for Accedian, found that more than half of mobile operators expect to introduce network slicing within two years of commercial 5G launch, and over a longer timeframe.
Another 61 percent will have “extensively deployed” network slicing. By harnessing access and mobile edge ownership, and new networking slicing capabilities, operators can guarantee and monetize new levels of customer experience.
However, the ability to deliver and make money out of “customer experience” rests on guarantees of service reliability and quality. Operators need to commit to commercial SLAs that can be measured and delivered. Key to this will be gaining complete insight into application, service, and network performance, the report said.
More industry verticals and enterprise customers addressed by new 5G use cases and services will need highly varied and deterministic guarantees on availability, throughput, and latency.
The report said that the “experience chain” from access, to edge, through “backhaul” and to the core network is incredibly complex, and gaining performance visibility across the entire stack is vital to understand the real customer experience.
More than 74 percent of operators rated unified performance visibility across all network and application layers as a key capability in 5G networks, together with analytics, both real-time (65 per cent) for closed-loop automation, and analytics at the network edge (54 percent).
Accedian Chief Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer, Richard Piasentin said: “5G promises to open up new revenue opportunities from outside the telecoms sphere, but that’s only possible if operators can commit to the service guarantees and experiences that these new vertical industry customers need.
“Cloud and mobile connectivity are far more than just an abstracted Ethernet cable; running reliable, global networks, that are increasingly distributed across hybrid virtualised and physical infrastructure, is a complex business. The only way to ease the pain is to gain an intimate knowledge of how those networks function—empirical performance analysis data and its correlation and visualisation are essential in assuring the quality of experience.”
