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Accelerate industry digitalization and win in the 5G B2B market

5G deployment and industry innovation is now accelerating. It’s now time to unleash 5G’s potential commercial value. It’s crucial that carriers prepare the IT capability, cooperate with partners and explore innovative ICT services to meet industry demands.

Ma Ning
10 Nov 2020
Accelerate industry digitalization and win in the 5G B2B market

Accelerate industry digitalization and win in the 5G B2B market

Sponsored by: Huawei

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5G was launched globally with over 92 carriers in 38 countries/territories and has become a catalyst for the creation of new commercial services, both for consumers and enterprises. 3GPP Release 16, highlights not only 5G's continued enhancement, in terms of high bandwidth and low latency, but also its extended applicability to a wide range of vertical industries, to increase network performance and deployment efficiency. This has opened a host of enterprise opportunities towards Smart Grid, Smart Manufacturing, Smart Port etc. that has resulted in improved productivity & efficiency, automation of high-risk areas, innovation and simplified processes. According to GSMA, potential revenue for carriers from B2B can reach over USD 600 Billion by 2025.

With 5G we see three major trends:

  1. 5G enables verticals industries from the previously consumer dominated services.
  2. Carriers’ value proposition needs to change, from connectivity provider to an integrated ICT service provider.
  3. The monetization changes from traffic volume to value based ICT services.

Incidentally, the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated digital adoption across national governments, vertical industries, enterprises and societies. Carriers on the other hand, have been stretched, on delivering the true meaning of ubiquitous connectivity. For example, during the pandemic in China, the CDC conveyed more than 2.6 billion medical instructions through video ring back tone, to ensure their citizens could understand visually, to counter the pandemic quickly. Though carriers agree, that the greatest opportunities for new 5G revenues will come from B2B segments, delivering just connectivity still remains their core business and they are yet to become a strategic supplier of services for the enterprises today. The key challenge they face is the inability to offer tailor-made services in a timely, cost-effective, agile and scalable manner. Questions that carriers should ask are, “what are the new ways to monetize 5G and B2B telecom services?” With this, we believe the carriers will need to consider new 5G channels, operations platforms and business models to achieve future B2B success. First of all carriers need to build up new 5G channels, and implant them into the vertical production process and the B2B business operations. For example three tier-1 carriers in China together released a 5G messaging white paper outlining their commitment to support rich communication services (RCS) working together with an ecosystem of partners. With native entry, telecom-level security, enhanced video and AI chatbots, 5G message could stand out from OTT hyperscalers by improving service efficiency and customer experiences for the enterprises, and by closed-loop business through strong interaction. Secondly it is strongly recommended to newly build a robust digital BSS platform, which is proposed to enable new 5G operations, to fit into 5G operations and support 5G orientated business including: B2C, B2B, B2H and IoT etc. The following principle needs to be considered: Firstly this platform should be cloud native in architecture to enable agile operations and to monetize the new 5G business. The traditional waterfall development model is ineffective as the requirements are put into a pipeline, sorted, prioritized, and implemented. Now, with microservice-based components, scrum DevOps and continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD) processes, it enables faster development and implementation from months to weeks, regardless it being in public and private cloud. Secondly it must be decoupled and configurable to separate business from technology layers and to allow maximum business agility, which enables short time to market from weeks or months to days or even hours rather than . Since 5G brings new network capabilities such as 5G slicing, MEC etc., the BSS platform should support pre-configuration of new network offering, for instance for Private Networks and cloud-network synergy services. In order to handle future complex and improve operation efficiency product and offering management, pricing, charge, and settlement should be automatically completed in the preconfigured or rule templates. Thirdly BSS will need to be open and ready for the future in order to integrate with industry solutions especially when faced with complex industry applications. In principle, there are three levels of openness: 1) ready to use open APIs, 2) design and build new APIs as required using integration tools, and 3) open for onsite agile development. We recommend it to be in compliance with Open Digital Framework to accelerate concept-to-cash, reduce network & IT costs, and enhancing digital customer experience. Last but at least carriers will need to transform into being an integrated service providers to capture new 5G B2B business opportunities. According to latest insight vertical industries need Cloud Computing, AI, Automation and Intelligent management to accelerate their digitalization. The value of Carriers in 5G era is to provide these ICT infrastructure and provide serviceable offering to vertical industries and partners, who can leverage these service-oriented capabilities to develop industry application to serve the enterprise customers. For instance, Chinese operator is building a drone service platform with industry partner. These drone service could be used for drone logistics, grid power routine check and road unblocking etc. Carriers must monetize these value-based services with new business models which is ecosystem symbiosis with industry partners. Therefore, it is crucial that the billing and charging system is capable of realizing multi-dimensional monetization and being open and flexible for different industry scenarios. 5G deployment and industry innovation is now accelerating. It’s now time to unleash 5G’s potential commercial value. It’s crucial that carriers prepare the IT capability, cooperate with partners and explore innovative ICT services to meet the industry demands of the present and future. With joint operations & partnerships it helps break new ground, mitigates risk, and leverages best practices of technology know-how to ensure successful commercialization of services across various B2B industries. Visit www.huawei.com