5G offers telecom carriers a golden opportunity to move up the value chain from mass-scale, standardized B2C commodity products to higher-value enterprise solutions for B2B and B2B2X (businesses offering services to enterprise or consumer end-customers). Doing so will result in new revenue streams spanning a wide variety of industry verticals.
A timely new report, The CIO’s guide to 5G as a business growth engine, emphasizes that in order to fully realize the tremendous potential of 5G–along with the lion’s share of new revenues–telcos must apply a broad, comprehensive strategy in their 5G deployment that goes well beyond merely enabling 5G’s broader bandwidth.
The report delves into exactly how to do this by evaluating your systems’ readiness for modern, 5G-ready billing and other key capabilities.
IT/OT Convergence for 5G
The report explains that telcos must fully transform their core network in order to handle the complexities of moving from commodity products to new and highly lucrative service-based solutions. The report goes on to emphasize that our impending new 5G age demands a new convergence between telecom operational technology and information technology (see image, below).
Specifically, telco BSS must be modernized alongside the modernized OSS infrastructure required to enable 5G communications.
OSS/BSS Convergence and Network Slicing
The report proceeds to explain in detail what a successful convergence of telecom OSS and BSS looks like in practical terms.
On the operational side, for example, the report explores how 5G will enable telcos to utilize network slicing to provide highly tailored solutions that match the needs of customers across a range of verticals—enabling the Internet of things (IoT), to name just one vast use case—while using minimal infrastructure at maximum efficiency (see image, below).
Source: STL Partners
Telcos can now design, deploy, customize, and optimize various network slices running on a common network infrastructure to meet the specific needs of a broader set of customers – whether in different industries, geographies, or both.
However, the new modern capabilities of network slicing on the OSS side must be accompanied by corresponding new modern functionality on the BSS side, without which telcos will be frustratingly unable to exploit this opportunity.
BSS and Monetizing 5G
Simply put, to monetize modern 5G operations, telcos will require modern, 5G-ready BSS, capable of readily answering such key questions as:
- How can we ensure that more complex charging data is accurately and reliably processed?
- How can we charge for a capability that cannot be easily standardized or productized?
- How can we provide customers with visibility over how they are being charged for services used in this more complex environment?
- How do we ensure our network policy controls fully align with each customer SLA, which will vary dramatically depending on a wide array of variables, including the customer’s industry, geography, and unique KPIs?
The report proceeds to go into crucial details as to how to prepare now for enabling future advanced B2B and B2B2X use cases, and how to evaluate systems that will enable modern 5G-ready billing, charging and policy management with full confidence in the face of unprecedented complexity.
Download your copy of The CIO’s guide to 5G as a business growth engine today. Bursting with supporting primary and secondary research insights, including interviews with telecoms operators and technology vendors globally, this report will provide you with a clear understanding of how to strategically meet daunting challenges of 5G, and realize its tremendous potential.
