In the 5G era, operators are thinking of providing differentiated services to drive new monetization opportunities, according to Spirent Communications

The key objective of 5G is to enable new monetization avenues beyond the traditional connectivity business model. Service providers should think of their networks as a platform that can provide 5G “network as a service” capabilities on which various outcome-based business models and applications are built and delivered across multiple verticals and industries. And at the heart of this “network as a service” platform is the 5G SA core.

The SA core must be built using true cloud-native principles, so the complexity of its architecture presents major challenges. The many different virtual network functions must be deployed, configured, and managed in a tightly coordinated manner. This can be a daunting task for service providers, who are already struggling to keep up with the pace of change in the telecom industry.

Automating the deployment, configuration, and management of the 5G SA core can help to overcome these challenges while reducing costs, improving efficiency, and accelerating time to market.

“I think everybody can agree that one of the key drivers of 5G is to drive more and more monetization opportunities. In the 4G world, the business model was around the provision of the connectivity. But when it comes to 5G, the operators are now thinking of providing differentiated services to drive new monetization opportunities,” said Anil Kollipara, senior director of product management at Spirent Communications, during a presentation at RCR Wireless News’ Test and Measurement Forum 2023.

Kollipara noted that use cases can range from providing fixed wireless access (FWA) to high-definition video and AR/VR, adding that these are some of the new differentiator services that the operators are looking to provide and are already providing to the end-customers to drive more monetization opportunities. But new services and the supporting software infrastructure need to be able to be offered faster.

“We need to completely automate the lifecycle of the network. Think about a scenario in which specific micro-services need to be updated in the network. They cannot take months or weeks to do that, or even days. This needs to happen in a couple of minutes. And we have examples from the enterprise that this needs to happen in such short timeframes, the only way that that will happen is through complete automation of the lifecycle,” said Kollipara.

He added that it is very important for application services and as-a-service business models to be completely automated and integrated on top of the network platform,reduce the time it takes for ordering a service by an enterprise customer to provisioning it, configuring it and delivering the service—which needs to happen in an automated fashion. “Operators have to think of the network as a platform that delivers these unique capabilities, and that is completely automated and integrated, on which these other service business models would run and deliver,” Kollipara said.

He went on to say that Spanish operator Telefonica estimated that the integration of the Spirent Landslide offering with its 5G core automation platform has led to a significant improvement in the time it takes to test and validate functionality, performance and security throughout the lifecycle of its 5G private network stack.

“Telefonica is delivering an enterprise application, which provides low latencies to the end customer. They have deployed edge applications on the cloud. Think about a scenario where Telefonica wants to deploy this to the customer on day zero. So they have integrated our Landslide solution as well as the automation packages that Landside provides, so they can test the service on day zero to make sure that the end-customer receives the kind of quality that they are expecting. At the same time, this is automated completely in the sense that this kind of application runs on a 24/7 basis. So anytime there are some changes or upgrades that are happening to the web service, [these] are automatically tested and made sure that the end customer is receiving the quality of service and the SLAs that have been guaranteed,” Kollipara said.