Why should operators transition to 5G Standalone—and how?

Beyond the technical considerations of 5G Standalone, operators need to focus on use cases and go-to-market strategies

There are around 45 commercial 5G Standalone deployments in the world right now, and there’s a perceived hesitancy among operators to make the move; this despite the pressing need for operators to realize new 5G service revenues. During the Telco Cloud & Edge Forum (on-demand here), we asked excerpts from Kore Wireless, Reliance Jio and Telenor why operators should make the jump to 5G Standalone, and how they should think about doing it. 

Bottomline: 5G Standalone gives operators the technological abilities to support new monetizable use cases, but doing so requires focused development of those use cases, and concurrent development of a plan for selling them. 

Back to the question of why move to 5G Standalone—Telenor SVP Terje Jensen said, first and foremost, it “actually provides better customer experience.” Beyond that, “We also see that 5G Standalone comes with new functionalities, for example, providing network slicing, better supporting maybe local breakouts, which is even also contributing to low latency services for example.” He also mentioned support for massive IoT, aerial services and private 5G for enterprises. 

Kore Wireless VP of High Bandwidth and Fixed Wireless Access Jeff Noska continued a refrain that 5G Standalone is the real 5G that will underpin “revolutionary technologies” like network slicing and wireless fiber. “Standalone is going to be vital to all of the promises we’ve been hearing about the past five to seven years.” 

On behalf of Reliance Jio, which operates a massive 5G Standalone network in India, SVP of 5G and 6G Aayush Bhatnagar called out two dimensions. “It expands the business opportunities beyond the consumer segment. It opens up opportunities for enterprise and private 5G and also, from a network transformation standpoint, it provides an opportunity to move to a cloud-native deployment, so to leave the legacy behind and to evolve to a better architecture, more efficient architecture.”

What goes into the transition to 5G Standalone? 

Jensen identified two big pushes operators will feel as it relates to 5G Standalone. The first is customer demand for something that requires this architectural and operational evolution. The second is the efficiencies and enhancements operators gain around network assurance and optimization. But turning on the network, itself not really easy, isn’t enough, he said. 

“You actually need to productize that as well. And that was also important to prepare, which is then, of course, not technical, but it’s, of course, goes back to the whole organization.” The nature of that organization is another important piece. “There are discussions around competency needed to prepare the different network functions…It goes across all the units in the organization…And this typically takes a bit more time to prepare the non-technical things than only the technical things.” 

Noska made the point that wherever operators are on the journey, they need to plan and test today for whatever will come up in the future both technical and business-related. “Starting on the wireless side is really important,” he said. “And then, looking at those future capabilities and maybe you start testing today, say if you want to build something taking advantage of multiple slices, whatever that’s going to actually commercially look like the ability to do SD-WAN today on wireless services will translate into that.” 

Referencing Reliance Jio’s own journey, Bhatnagar said it took a new cloud-native core along with reimaging people and business process aligned with cloud-native OSS/BSS, as well as interworking with the existing 4G network. He gave the example of support for Voice over New Radio (VoNR), which would be the 5G equivalent of VoLTE, and network slicing. 

More on the latter: “Slicing is not just a technical concept…It is also a concept which is to be packaged and offered to the end users, to the enterprises for example. So, our network slicing technology was also a bit challenging because we had to package it properly for enterprises. So, it has been a journey. The evolution has not only been in the network but also on the skillset and also, on the processes. So, it has been a journey on all fronts for us.”

In demand 5G Standalone use cases

Delivery of a network slices in of itself is a use case customers want that requires 5G Standalone, Jensen said; specific to Telenor, he noted demand in emergency services and remote control of heavy machinery. The common denominator is that both require guaranteed support of multiple video feeds. 

Noting that this activity is still in a trial period, he said these use cases “come with willingness to pay…because it’s also a demonstrated value from the enterprise that they are increasing their safety, increasing the efficiency. So they are able to, are willing to pay more in order to get these kinds of services…We are not selling 5G Standalone as a service. We are selling other services which are asking for 5G Standalone.” 

Noska gave the example of retail access across a large geography, which requires similar levels of network performance despite what public networks can support market-by-market. As retailers use AI for order taking, point of sale wireless traffic increases, and video analytics help fewer workers work more effectively, “All of that requires extensive bandwidth that doesn’t exist today in an LTE environment or in a low-band environment…All of that is building the need for standalone and for 5G in general.” 

Bhatnagar said Reliance JIo is using its 5G Standalone network to stream 4K video of Indian Premier League cricket matches to users; the users can then toggle in real time between different camera angles. “This is something which would not be achieved with LTE, both the camera switching happening in real time as well as 4K streaming.” 

On the enterprise side, he said Reliance Jio has supported the oil and gas, retail and mining sectors in a range of applications, including virtual reality and robotics. “There are many use cases both on the enterprise side.” 

Final messages from the panel reiterated the idea that the move to 5G Standalone goes hand-in-hand with generating new service revenues. 

Noska emphasized that the move to cloud-native 5G opens up use cases that are “absolutely monetizable” because they make businesses more efficient. And back to the importance of selling business outcomes rather than selling technology, he said operators have to “make sense not just from the standpoint of how do I monetize this one thing or pay back my investment, but how do I enable these new technologies and how do  enable these unique use cases is going to require the operators to think outside of their typical boxes because we’re trying to build non-typical technologies and things that haven’t existed yet and enable things that haven’t existed yet. So, think through the flexibility as you build out the operational side of the technology.” 

Bhatnagat said a 5G Standalone architecture “is the cake, and on top of the cake are the revenue and monetizable services…That is the icing on the cake. So I think there are two aspects—technology and business—…that we should look at.”