Lagos, Feb. 16, 2024: Ericsson, a multinational telecommunications company has in its mobility report outlined four areas of opportunity for 5G that Communications Service Providers (CSPs) worldwide are addressing to drive business growth.
In its mobility report called the Business Review 2024 on Thursday, Ericsson addressed how CSPs are evolving or aiming at finding new revenue opportunities to transform their businesses.
According to the multinational, the report shows that CSPs worldwide are currently offering or exploring services and go-to-market models for different levels of engagement and maturity across the four areas.
It said the four areas included Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), a superior and more efficient version of 4G mobile broadband.
“Another area is the Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) and Wireless WAN opportunities: these target the residential broadband and enterprise segments, offering value pools for service providers with higher average revenue per user (ARPU) compared to traditional mobile broadband services.
“Also, a key area is the differentiated connectivity solution opportunities such as private network for enterprises or utilising network slicing capabilities of public 5G standalone (SA) networks to offer a differentiated service to consumers or enterprises.
“The last one is driving innovation and ecosystem growth: this offers the potential to access new value opportunities, allowing application developers to innovate on a large scale,” it said.
Commenting, Mr Fredrik Jejdling, Executive Vice-President and Head of Networks, Ericsson, said the first step of the 5G value journey had been taken, but it was still in the early stages.
According to him, looking back one can see how the deployment of 4G together with a global device ecosystem laid the foundation for the app economy, enabling today’s mobile broadband business.
Jejdling said that leveraging the evolving capabilities of 5G networks to create new value pools would be essential for service providers to reach profitable growth.
“Till date about 290 5G networks have been launched commercially, of which more than 40 are offering services based on more advanced 5G standalone technology.
“As communicated in the November 2023 Ericsson Mobility Report, global 5G subscriptions have topped 1.6 billion, comprising 18 percent of all mobile subscriptions.
“In addition to the business potential of enhanced mobile broadband for CSPs already offering the service, the report documents the growing success of Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) as a means of facilitating broadband to the home in markets,” Jejdling noted.
According to him, the report also addresses the central role 5G can play in accelerating industry productivity.
Jejdling noted that a 5G logistics case study reported 20 per cent improvement in productivity and 15 per cent lower capex compared with Wi-Fi.
He explained that 5G private networks are now being deployed at scale for digitalisation programmes pursued by enterprises.
“An Ericsson survey of private networks across 15 countries and 10 industries, shows the main early use cases to be connected workers, autonomous equipment and sensors,” Jejdling said.
