Operator survey: 5G services require network automation

The diversity of services and new 5G infrastructure demand greater operational flexibility and autonomy. Operators must engineer their networks to provide the best possible experience and performance, working agilely to deploy new, desirable services.

5G service decisions are still evolving. Globally, 5G non-standalone (NSA) networks are proliferating and many operators do not have 5G standalone (SA) yet. This means that service types such as network slicing, low latency, edge applications, etc., are still some ways in the future. When SA is available, building an efficient "operational wrap" to deliver and manage advanced services will rely on new analytics and automation technologies to differentiate 5G capabilities.

Heavy Reading's 2023 5G Network Analytics and Automation Operator Survey aims to help the industry better understand the status of network analytics and automation and provide insights into operators' strategies. (To download a copy, click here.) At the start of the survey, one question looks to understand which 5G services operators believe to be the most valuable in supporting revenue growth.

The figure below shows the weighted average scores across several 5G services, with operators ranking "mobile broadband subscriber growth/retention/high prices" first and ahead of the other options. Enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) is the anchor service for 5G NSA and generates nearly all 5G revenue today. This scoring infers that operators are keen to grow their core businesses, which will involve greater efficiencies and new mobile packages that offer superior or premium features at an added cost.

"Private 5G" and "network slicing" rank second and third, respectively. Heavy Reading expects their importance and popularity to increase as additional operators deploy 5G SA and can support full autonomy. "Performance SLAs for enterprise services" is currently the lowest ranking (fifth) of all service choices but is likely to be a valuable market, especially for network slicing and private 5G.

"Connected devices (e.g., cars, watches, other IoT devices)" ranks just above performance SLAs in fourth. Internet of Things (IoT) is a sizeable market within 4G, but the massive machine-type communications (mMTC) use case has yet to be realized in 5G, as technologies such as RedCap remain underdeveloped.

Smaller operators have a different opinion from larger operators on the revenue growth question. For mobile operators with less than 9 million subscribers, private 5G ranks first. This result perhaps indicates that smaller operators feel they are already exploiting eMBB services and see little scope for further revenue growth with SA.

Which services are the most attractive for 5G revenue growth in your organization? (Rank in order, where 1 = the most attractive)

Given the survey results above and the desire for operators to grow their revenue and retain customers, it is evident that automation will play a fundamental role in future 5G services underpinning cost efficiencies and quality of service. Service diversity and the 5G disaggregated cloud native infrastructure will mandate automation across the network (i.e., provisioning, testing, operation, fault resolution and maintenance), specifically for the following aspects:

Operators are highly motivated to deliver advanced services and drive business growth and revenue to recoup the costs of their significant 5G spectrum and network investments. However, supporting a diverse and evolving portfolio of 5G network services will require automation to provide service visibility, efficiencies and network performance excellence.

For more information, check out this archived webinar.

This blog is sponsored by Spirent.