Telecom professionals see private networks as key to 5G monetisation

According to Telecoms.com’s latest 5G survey report, 5G’s top monetisation capability in the next two years is enterprise private networks, while the mobile edge has slipped down down in relevance.

Among a bunch of other key findings, the survey report, Advancing 5G, explores the industry’s hottest question of how best to monetise 5G. With the need for pricing power to return to telcos more urgent than ever before, it seems imperative for telcos to explore and rethink the 5G monetisation models available to them.

In this year’s survey, 5G enterprise private networks seems to be the crowd pleaser, capturing three in five of all votes. Interestingly, Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) has slipped down in the list of most viable routes to monetisation (in the near term) compared to previous iterations of this survey.

As the report drills down into the main barrier faced in the deployment of 5G-SA, it appears there is still a lack of viable monetisation models to justify investments as the business case remains unclear. This very much marries up with the urgent need to rethink monetisation strategies, and more holistically speaking, the wider telecoms business model. Other key barriers include cost of deployment and managing both cloud-native and legacy components.

When it comes to vendor selection in 5G core two key approaches seem to emerge: most respondents opt for multi-vendor partnerships with a dedicated system integrator to manage integration and interworking and the second largest group of respondents select multi-vendor partnerships managing the integration process in-house.

Exploring the security of RAN infrastructure in 5G, the report states that there are more security concerns with open RAN as compared to traditional RAN infrastructure.

On a positive note, it is reported that almost half of the respondents believe the level of security testing being done by RAN equipment vendors, Open Testing and Integration Centres (OTICs) and O-RAN Plugfests is appropriate.

Another key finding reported is that the great majority of participants believe security checks will likely have a negative impact on user performance in 5G enterprise networks but around two in five respondents believe testing will allow them to strike the right balance between security and user performance.

If you fancy reading the full report for yourself, you can download it here.