The three (not so) easy pieces of 5G service assurance—orchestration, the edge, and end-to-end visibility
Here’s a hypothetical: A manufacturing enterprise has looked at its options for gaining production efficiencies and opted to use various video analytics backed by private 5G. A partner is engaged, radios are secured, and an on-prem core with additional overhead for mobile edge computing is put in place. Because of end-to-end, dynamic service assurance solutions, everything works as it should; the solution provider(s) make money, the end user gains efficiencies and potentially opens up new revenue streams.
In the hypothetical, an access control system uses cameras to identify authorized entrants, quality assurance happens as video is fed into an ML-equipped analytics platform, and AGVs are effectively “driven” by a software system ingesting video feeds. And all of that will continue to work as it should so long as end-to-end system latency stays below 25 milliseconds (a number I made up for expediency). But spikes in latency above that threshold mean people queue at entrances, defective items get through QA, and AGVs bump into one another. In this scenario, whoever sold the system has agreed to meet that latency SLA (again, based on robust service assurance processes) in exchange for money; not meeting the latency SLA means regular chargebacks and/or the risk of losing the account.
Charles Thompson, vice president of product management with Spirent, speaking at the recent 5G Monetization Forum, available on-demand here, laid it out. “One of the interesting things that we look at, at Spirent, especially from the service assurance perspective, is what does it take to successfully monetize 5G? And what we’ve seen and what we’ve been hearing consistently from all the partners that we work with is that the monetization opportunities and the revenue will be tightly tied to these strict SLAs.”
Traditional approaches to service assurance, Thompson said, are further complicated by the parallel developments of cloud-native networking and Open RAN along with 5G. Cloud and disaggregation, respectively, introduce more velocity and more vendors into a total solution. Doing this in the real world, he said, means, “It’s actually being rolled out, iterated and deployed in daily increments in many instances. You’ve got so much coordination between these different pieces and parts. There’s a lot that can go wrong in a 5G environment.”
Service assurance that pays
So how can an operator work with its partners and customers to scope out, instantiate and continuously uphold business-critical SLAs? Thompson identified three key areas.
First, orchestration and validation—operators have to understand “where you’ve not delivered the services as anticipated…and as monetized, so that you don’t have SLA violations, so that you’re not doing chargebacks, and so that your customers continue to see your environment as leading edge.”
Second, and in recognition that delivering a latency-sensitive application may require a push of processing power out to the edge, operators need to understand the shift from centralized, comparatively static environments to a more dynamic, distributed approach. “It’s constantly changing, constantly evolving, workloads shift literally dozens of times a day.”
Third, Thompson said, “We at Spirent firmly believe that 5G requires what we call an end-to-end visibility approach. If we look at the assurance market historically, what we see is a very segmented type of a view where organizations had a bit of visibility in perhaps their backhaul, a bit of visibility in their fronthaul, a bit of visibility in their fixed wireless environments and so on, but nothing that brought the full picture together. Worse yet was the fact that much of that was static. It didn’t evolve with the pace of the infrastructure.
“Service assurance is a critical component of making sure that organizations have a successful 5G deployment and that when they’re trying to monetize their services, they’re doing so successfully and within customers expectations.”
For 5G, there’s “no single path to revenue”
In the larger context of 5G monetization, Spirent looked at the trends across its 2,600 5G-related engagements; the company said that it had more than 800 new 5G-related engagements during 2022 to help inform the report. Those customers are mostly CSPs, but also network equipment and device manufacturers as well as hyperscalers and others.
5G revenues have thus far been relatively hard to come by, the report notes, but Fixed Wireless Access is a bright spot and the company is keeping an eye on how video-rich experiences from gaming to live broadcast and remote monitoring, as well as private networks, will develop into new revenue-sources—if operators and their vendor and testing partners can nail down consistency in 5G services, which will probably come with end-to-end (Standalone) 5G.
One of the prevailing themes that the company is observing, it said, is that “there is no single path to revenue that most service providers will follow. Instead, providers will pursue a variety of new 5G service offers aimed at incremental growth combined with targeted efficiency programs.”
Read more on Spirent’s report on 5G monetization here.
Final thoughts on 5G service assurance
Bottomline, Thompson said, 5G networks and use cases will be dynamic and will continuously evolve given the cloud-native architecture and need for a flexible operational environments. No amount of lab testing will translate into real world service assurance perfection. “Much of the learnings will happen in the real world. If providers don’t embrace a more active, more dynamic approach to assurance, their visibility and their ability to deal with issues as they arise is going to be extremely hampered. And as we all know, you only get one first impression with your customers to really establish yourself as a differentiated vendor in the 5G environment.”
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