The Mobile World Congress, which concluded last week in Barcelona, witnessed the 5G sales pitch almost everywhere. But for many executives present at the world’s most important connectivity industry conference, the key challenge was how to overcome the rollout stage and develop new commercial prospects so that all stakeholders could benefit from it.
If you are planning to replace your phone, the likelihood of you purchasing a 5G smartphone and a 5G subscription at the same time is pretty high. Thus, there is a special automated update for that. Yet Patrik Cerwall, Head of Strategic Marketing, Business Area Networks at Ericsson suggests that some customers also have a demand for more speed or, perhaps, for gaming.
With operators in Europe, the US, Japan, and some regions of the Middle East looking for new ways to boost income streams, 5G as a service represents a significant future opportunity opinionates Cerwall. The same strategies are being implemented by carriers in India to profit from 5G subscriptions because of the monetary gains tied to it. Cerwall continued, “There is a new service innovation that is happening, but it also depends on how you manage to sell it.”
He uses the example of how some operators provide cloud gaming as a service to customers in their own nations, which empowers them with the opportunity to charge customers for more expensive packages that include network slicing and latency guarantees. The next generation of mobile internet connections, known as 5G or fifth-generation mobile services, offer substantially higher data upload and download speeds.
Reliance Jio and Airtel launched 5G services in India last year. In the upcoming months, both the telecom operators have vowed to finishing the 5G deployment in all significant Indian cities. Airtel already has over 10 million 5G subscribers spanning across the country.
Yet, the construction of 5G networks is capital intensive and consequently expensive. Thus , 5G opens up new use cases and revenue opportunities that were not feasible during the 3G–4G period. Additionally, 5G augments network speed and the amount of data that can be captured and processed.
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According to industry insiders and analysts, the debate has extended beyond faster download and upload times. Instead, the sector is considering how to profit from 5G’s potential. Avneesh Prakash, Vice President of Mobility and IoT at Tata Communications, claims that 5G is bringing together a wide range of industries to collaborate on issues that, in the past, lacked the appropriate technology and training to be solved.
“This should yield and will result in truly saleable propositions to the end customer,” he claims, citing the automobile industry in particular.
