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Fran Heeran, Red Hat’s vice president of Global Telecommunications, examines the current state of tech in telco, with a focus on 5G and its evolution. What worked, what didn’t, and based on these lessons, what service providers can do to prepare their infrastructure for a more profitable future.

5G today

5G connectivity has been an important evolution for mobile networks and the consumer experience with service providers continuing to modernise their networks to deliver the connectivity and speed that consumers and businesses now expect. While the technology adoption has been the fastest of any mobile standard generation, the return on investment has struggled to deliver, with direct consumer premiums remaining elusive and service providers facing sustained competitive pressures, including with OTT providers.

While increased speed and bandwidth for consumer applications is important, the significant commercial growth opportunities reside primarily in developing and monetising 5G enterprise services: moving beyond basic connectivity and turning those ultra-fast, low-latency networks into high-value enterprise platforms.

Monetising what’s next

Network infrastructures continue to become more distributed and more complex, expanding from large centralised data centres to smaller edge computing facilities. Radio network build-out is becoming more dense, providing a larger number of far edge locations and the potential for ultra-low-latency services.

As 5G evolves into 5G Advanced and eventually to 6G, it will increasingly cater for new device types (such as wearables, augmented reality, drones), including both standards and more cost-effective technology options, leading to new business opportunities for service providers and enterprises. This means that service providers can and will redistribute network workloads with a more disaggregated, edge-based design according to cost, performance, and business requirements. The increase in edge capabilities in combination with the availability of ultra-low latency connectivity represents both new opportunity and a change in how networks and associated supporting applications are built and deployed.

To learn from 5G, we first need to get the foundations right with a more holistic approach to building infrastructure for the requirements of the future.

Fundamental #1: Common cloud

Being ready to capitalise on the latest innovation and pivots in demand necessitates having the most flexible foundations in place. In many cases this means moving to a common cloud-native platform approach (à la T-Mobile, Orange, Safaricom or Turkcell). That is, consolidating and standardising infrastructure across workloads – whether IT or network, including traditional, virtualised and cloud-native apps side by side. By design, a common platform bridges operational silos and drives consistency in management. Importantly, common cloud does not mean single cloud, rather a consistent standard approach to infrastructure design and use, providing optimised environment configurations for different workload types across.

Having this operational commonality and functional flexibility enables greater control of cost, risk and complexity. This is especially critical at a time when digital sovereignty has become a significant priority. A service provider can more easily support the large scale, multi-workload hybrid cloud and distributed networks that hold the enterprise edge opportunity.

Fundamental #2: Open source and open platforms

Building on the common cloud platform, service providers need to implement openness in network design from open source software to open APIs at every layer. Open source is driving innovation in many areas, including AI, thanks to the rapid development possible with many contributions from a large global community working transparently and building on each other’s ideas.

This will also apply to 6G, where new services will come from many different areas of industry and enterprise, not just within telco. We will need a broader ecosystem of industrial players to participate. We are already seeing a definite trend towards more openness and collaboration, with service providers making more contributions to open source projects than before and working more proactively within communities towards a common goal.

Fundamental #3: Operationalise automation and AI

Cost optimisation continues to be a top priority and this means a renewed focus on implementing holistic, meaningful automation within existing 5G networks, and using AI to streamline business and operational processes.

AI is changing how we both build and operate networks, with its ability to provide deep intelligence across networks and functions, from radio to core and IT. By integrating AI into network management systems, providers can automate more complex tasks, optimise and tune resource allocation in real time leveraging programmable platforms, and proactively identify and resolve faults faster. For example, data and insights provided by AI can be added to closed-loop systems to elevate the actions taken. As well as improving network reliability and performance, this drives down operational costs and accelerates service deployment.

The increasing complexity of telco networks and associated operations has brought with it a significant rise in data volumes residing in isolated databases across different organisational structures. Applications typically are deployed where the data resides requiring that an AI platform must be both flexible and consistent across a hybrid environment.

As in many other industries, telco providers will want to deploy a variety of small as well as large language models, with small language models being trained with specific data for targeted use cases. This approach provides service providers more choice and control to select and train the best technologies for their business. An AI platform must therefore also be model agnostic.

Time to act

New revenues will be driven by networks designed and built for both people and machines, at massive scale. They will support consumers, enterprises and a rich, open development ecosystem with seamless onboarding, the optimal mix of options for performance and price and fully automated operations.

Taking a proactive approach to identify opportunities for comprehensive modernisation and monetisation of networks, with a clear focus on transitioning to a common cloud-native infrastructure will be critical. This includes embracing cultural change to break down operational silos, standardised design and management, and disaggregated architectures. Championing openness in telco architectures is no longer optional but a strategic imperative.

These advancements will position service providers to secure a leading role in the next wave of digital transformation for businesses globally.