DTWS: Splicing, not slicing – operators need to rethink 5G enterprise business models

Network slicing has long been touted as one of those 5G capabilities that will enable mobile operators to target enterprises with dedicated bandwidth for their business apps and network-as-a-service (NaaS) offerings. The reality is that there’s far more to selling such services than simply offering a connection – and operators need to adjust their mindsets and business models if they ever hope to monetize them. That’s according to an expert panel on a session called 'NaaS and network slicing: Owning the opportunity' at the virtual Digital Transformation World Series event on October 28. The session, sponsored by CSG and falling under the Forum's Autonomous Networks and the Edge theme is available to watch on-demand here.

While private enterprise networks were seen as an initial use case for network slicing, commercialization has been a challenge. This is partly because it requires operators to shift their traditional B2C mindset to a B2B or even B2B2C mindset, and partly because enterprises want solutions, not just connectivity.

Willing to pay

In other words, enterprises are willing to pay for network slices that are an amalgam of network components – each with different key performance indicators (KPIs) and service level agreements (SLAs) – spliced together to create a useful solution. This makes it more a case of “network splicing”, said Dan Warren, Director of Advanced Network Research, Samsung Electronics.

“It’s never a single solution,” he explained. “It’s always where you need the combination of different sets of KPIs and SLAs, different sets of services.

Greg Tilton, CEO, DGIT Systems, agreed, saying his company has been doing just that in its Catalyst smart-city project with the City of Dublin, Ohio in the US. The project is exploring how to combine different best-of-breed architectures with a network layer and orchestration architecture that enables mission-critical apps to meet required KPIs and SLAs.

Splicing services together

“We've been splicing different types of services together, not just network services,” he said. “We combine some edge compute with a 5G network slice, some video analytics and an application service to meet some of the smart-parking requirements of the Catalyst. There's different ways of stitching these different things together, and you need to be able to do that quite dynamically to leverage all the capabilities of all these technologies.”

In terms of orchestration, for example, DGIT starts with service components that are designed to be autonomous and reusable, which enables operators to adopt a catalog-driven model to dynamically combine those components into composite services.

“One thing we find is that change is inevitable – you combine things one way, and then next week there'll be some smart marketing person who wants to combine them in a different way,” he continued. “So you model things to be autonomous and reusable. Then you can be agile and responsive to market demands and avoid unnecessary IT cycles.”

The only way for smart cities

Doug McCullough, CIO, City of Dublin, Ohio, stated this approach is necessary for smart cities because they take a best-of-breed approach to different projects which have different requirements and KPIs. For example, a best-of-breed architecture combining analytics and edge computing for managing vehicle traffic at an intersection won't be suitable for other smart-city services like smart parking or smart buildings.

“We may have dozens of different technical architectures that we are interested in. So the level of orchestration and automation between those is very important,” McCullough explained.

In other words, observed George Glass, CTO, TM Forum, what McCullough is really buying isn’t a private 5G connection but an assured path. “He’s describing an intent from the customer's perspective, and he wants us as operators and solution providers to deliver that intent against an SLA or SLG [service level guarantee].”

Heart of the matter

This gets to the heart of the commercialization challenge for network slicing and NaaS, said Warren of Samsung. “Enterprise customers do not care about the various technologies being spliced together – they simply want a service that works and is worth what you’re charging, and this requires a serious mindset shift on the part of mobile operators,” he said.

“You’ve got to get off the page of trying to sell the technology and actually sell the overall service composition, which as a whole is made up of multiple parts where lots and lots of network slices need to be combined back together to make a simple offer.”

This also means operators have to rethink how they’re going to charge for slicing or NaaS services. Alla Goldner, Chair of the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Use Case Subcommittee, Linux Foundation, thinks that operators need to be able to charge for network slicing not just by subscription, but also by consumption and the overall service experience.

In other words, rather than charging for individual slices or functions, operators will charge for the collective experience or service being delivered, and that will be underpinned by the guaranteed services that 5G network slicing and NaaS can deliver.

“That really opens a lot of new use cases and monetization strategies for service providers in their communications for enterprises,” she says. “Only then is there any new monetization strategy.”

Warren agrees that there’s a lot of potential for a more simplified model of charging for enterprise customers. “I think that is a real catalyst, and it's certainly what enterprise customers are looking for.”

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