What does the 5G future hold? Oracle’s senior director of product marketing, Jean Lawrence, discusses the opportunities for communication service providers to transform digital marketplaces into platforms for experiences and the IT capabilities that will be critical to their success.
We stand on the brink of the 5G era and its promise to provide new business models and ways for customers and businesses to interact. 4G communication networks enabled the explosion of new marketplaces and platforms, such as Airbnb, Uber, Facebook, and more.Â
So, what will the 5G future hold?Â
This is a critical question for communication service providers who deliver these networks. They have traditionally provided the roads these services speed along, but now the lines between road and vehicle are blurring. Communication service providers have the opportunity to play a crucial role in transforming marketplaces from mere points of transactional contact to platforms for experiences.
What Does the Success of 5G Platforms Rely On?
5G platformsOpens a new window will succeed with innovative partnerships and co-creation between the communications industry and other industry verticals. Service providers will bring powerful new capabilities with 5G, such as the ability to create dedicated network slices for specific purposes, each with its own metrics and pricing. Scenarios like remote surgery and self-driving vehicles will require extremely low latency slices, whereas scenarios like entertainment can tolerate lower latency but require much faster data rates.
Let’s consider a scenario of service providers using their 5G capabilities Opens a new window to foster digital
marketplaces and platforms: virtual reality in-stadium experiences. During the current pandemic, some
sporting events are just starting to resume, but it may be a long time before stadiums are packed with
tens of thousands of fans. What if a communications service provider creates an ecosystem that
enables fans to have a virtual in-stadium experience from the comfort of their homes?
In such a case, service providers could partner with leagues from any sport to stream games live in virtual reality and deliver an immersive experience to views at home. They could create a dedicated high speed, low latency 5G networkOpens a new window for these services. In-stadium 5G-connected virtual reality cameras could stream the game, and fans could enjoy a real-time, lag-free experience. There’s also the possibility of a digital marketplace where the customer can purchase these services as well as 5G-enabled virtual reality headsets and other add-on experiences. Service providers must embrace and foster collaboration and co-creation with other industries like sports entertainment for these platforms to be successful.Â
Learn More: What 5G Means for the Real-Time Data MarketOpens a new window
IT Capabilities That Will Enable Marketplaces
Service providers require several key IT system capabilities to enable marketplaces. Some of them are listed below.
1. Modern monetization
Service providers and their platform partners need the flexibility to charge for many types of service, including usage-based charges, one-time charges, and recurring charges, all potentially combined into bundles with time and volume-based discounts to encourage uptake. In
a virtual reality in-stadium platform, this could include bundling a VR headset with a monthly
subscription to view unlimited football games streamed in VR with no extra data charges.
Furthermore, digital marketplaces are underpinned by multi-party business models that depend
upon rich capabilities to settle revenue among the participants. An agile, cloud-native monetization
solution is foundational to the financial success of digital marketplaces.
2. Zero-touch partnering
In the 5G era, service providers will foster long-term ecosystem partnerships. They will also require the agility to spin up and spin down partner relationships for opportunistic offers such as one-time events. They must be able to automate partner onboarding, service fulfillment, and commercial management in a zero-touch fashion to capitalize on all types of marketplace opportunities.
3. Omnichannel buying and care
Today, customers expect to “hop†seamlessly from buying services on an app to a website to a retail store. The services offered by a digital platform must be enabled in a common, flexible catalog that is published on all channels. This way, customers can purchase and get help with their products and services on any channel at any time.
In Closing
The ongoing digitalization of businesses is a huge growth opportunity for the telecom industry. The industry promises to bring significant value to the digital transformation of multiple industries. Although the telecom sector already has the technology in place, it still faces the challenge of understanding and developing a relationship with a new breed of consumers. This challenge can be best resolved with a platform that efficiently bundles a variety of capabilities from different providers. Such an approach will create a fundamental role for the telecom industry as the provider of the marketplace.
Learn More: What Is 5G: A Complete ExplainerOpens a new window
What are your thoughts about the opportunities for CSPs in the 5G marketplace? Comment below or let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We would love to hear from you!