Why 5G and platforms go hand in hand

As per surveys Companies are going to spend almost $5 trillion on the IoT in the next five years.The Internet of Things (IoT) is disrupting businesses, governments, and consumers and transforming how they interact with the world. Companies are going to spend almost $5 trillion on the IoT in the next five years — and the proliferation of connected devices and massive increase in data has started an analytical revolution.

To gain insight into this emerging trend, BI Intelligence conducted an exclusive Global IoT Executive Survey on the impact of the IoT on companies around the world. The study included over 500 respondents from a wide array of industries, including manufacturing, technology, and finance, with significant numbers of C-suite and director-level respondents.

Through this exclusive study and in-depth research into the field, BI Intelligence details the components that make up IoT ecosystem. We size the IoT market in terms of device installations and investment through 2021. And we examine the importance of IoT providers, the challenges they face, and what they do with the data they collect. Finally, we take a look at the opportunities, challenges, and barriers related to mass adoption of IoT devices among consumers, governments, and enterprises.

Why 5G and platforms go hand in hand

Platforms are both driving the requirements of 5G and will provide the underpinning technology that will allow companies to capitalize on the opportunities it offers. 

There has been much discussion about when 5G will become a reality and who will be first to market. Verizon’s CFO stated the company is looking to test commercial services in 2017 (others are talking about 2019 or 2020) and AT&T and Verizon are in open disagreement about the fastest way to get the technology to market. What’s the rush? It’s not just about 5G’s promise of blazingly fast speeds, but its potential to open up the huge opportunities presented by Internet of Everything or Things (IoE/IoT).

As outlined in a paper by Professor Ian Brown of Oxford University in 2015, IoT/E spans different scales of deployment:

• Individual – typically spans smartphones and wearables used by individuals, where the intended audience for the data is likely to be the user themselves, perhaps their immediate friends and family, or maybe a bank (for mobile money apps) or their employers for work-related use.
• Community – includes connected cars, health devices and smart homes, linked to intelligent transport systems, remote alarms and heating systems, blood pressure monitors and so on. The data will be about speed, distance, airbag, crash locations, heart rate, blood pressure and diet, among other things. The audience for that data will be the doctor and other healthcare givers, car insurance companies, police, social networks, wider circle of friends.
• Society – meaning large systems like smart cities and smart grids, that rely on smart electric, gas and water meters, and traffic monitoring. The data will be based around consumption and billing, and traffic flow data. The audience for the data is regulators and authorities, utilities and other citizens.

It also involves four different kinds of communications models: back-end data sharing; device-to-gateway; device-to-cloud; and device-to-device. All of these will have to be catered to by 5G.

The platform revolution

The second terrific force driving 5G is the rapid rise of platform-based businesses. Over the last 20 years, and at an accelerating rate, they have and are reshaping established business models globally. By becoming a platform player, Apple, which almost went out of business in 1997, is now the world’s most valuable and profitable company.

Platform businesses scale very fast by exploiting the network effect, whereby a product or service becomes more valuable as more people use it, the more people they tell and yet more join in. Hence Airbnb, not yet 10 years old, is worth $30 billion – based on its last round of funding – surpassing the value of Hilton Hotels, founded in 1919.

Platform businesses can morph and grow by leveraging their assets in new ways, and indeed, by design they are highly modular and componentized to give them this agility; their systems and processes can be reconfigured, recycled and replicated very quickly. For example, Uber is planning to spend half a billion dollars developing its own maps (using cameras in its cars) because Google Maps aren’t detailed enough for its future business model of using driverless vehicles for all kinds of deliveries, not just passengers.

Crucially, successful platform businesses are built around customers – Uber and Netflix were triggered by their founders’ bad experiences -– and delivering a good experience every time.

Boom – 5G meets platforms

These examples offer just a glimpse of future requirements and business possibilities: Imagine what could happen when the agility, speed and scale of platforms is combined with the agreed requirements, so far, for 5G, which include:

• Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) –  successive access technologies have increased capacity and throughput, and reduced latency, and 5G will be no exception. Verizon was the first to break with gigabit per second barrier in trials in April 2016. In May its CEO said 5G could be used for the national rollout of its broadband and video service, FiOS. AT&T says it has achieved speeds of 15Gbps in tests with Ericsson and will start a field test with “friendly” customers by the end of 2016.
• Ultra-reliable and low latency (uRLL) – 5G takes this to a whole new level with sub-millisecond targets, opening a world of new applications.
• Massive Machine Type Comms (mMTC) – as existing systems were designed for one device per subscriber and relatively large data volumes, they cannot support billions of devices nor their different demands, such as passing tiny amounts of data efficiently.
• Network slicing to provide what each service requires – that is, commoditizing connectivity and making it possible to offer network as a service in much the same way that cloud providers have commoditized compute and storage infrastructure as a service.

This is a demanding set of requirements and likely there will be more design goals put on the table before they are narrowed down. The ICT world around 5G is changing as fast as the network, and who knows what new applications and user needs will emerge between now and the initial 5G deployments, never mind throughout its lifecycle. Operators must be ready for the technical challenges of managing this and to capitalize on the new opportunities.

Managing complexity, monetizing services

No one company can address all the challenges and opportunities alone – the complexity will be greater than ever. Partnerships and ecosystems, enabled by platforms, are the key.

Take autonomous, self-driving cars as an example. They promise fewer fatal accidents, less traffic congestion, more navigable cities and environmental benefits. However, features like cooperative collision avoidance demand ubiquitous, totally reliable communications – way beyond what we have today. Moreover, vehicle and municipal sensor information will need to be exchanged in real time between perhaps thousands of cars in the same area, overcoming many potential sources of signal interference.

The ecosystem involves car manufacturers, city authorities, traffic signal manufacturers, communication service providers, traffic data providers, other drivers and more. These partners all need to be able to exchange data and information instantaneously to provide a safe and pleasant experience for everyone.

Platforms allow the delivery of digital products and services between producers and consumers, hiding the complexity from them. Through open, standard architectures and APIs, new partners can be on-boarded quickly and new services assembled almost instantaneously. Super-fast, reliable connectivity is a critical part of this. The whole thing has to be automated because manual intervention is way too slow.

How to be 5G-ready

TM Forum’s pioneering member companies are engaged in a number of programs to help service providers and other companies prepare for the transition to 5G and make the most of it when it arrives. One example is our groundbreaking work and research on the orchestration (including automation) of services running on hybrid (combined physical and virtualized) and virtualized infrastructure. Many other efforts are focused solely on virtualized infrastructure.

Another is our suite of standardized, open (that is, available for use by everyone without charge) application program interfaces (APIs), which has been endorsed by nine of the world’s largest network operators – Axiata, Bharti Airtel, BT, China Mobile, China Unicom, NTT-Group, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone – in their quest become platform-based businesses, by making select assets available to third parties.

To give you some idea of their combined reach, scale and scope, Vodafone has operating companies in 28 countries or territories, plus with partners it operates in 52 more. China Unicom and China Mobile between them have more than a billion mobile subscribers.

The nine telcos have been joined by nine major equipment vendors, which will deploy these APIs in their products and services, as mandated by the nine network operators.

Keep it open, keep it fast

A third work stream is working to define the necessary components of an open platform architecture that can support ecosystems with the necessary agility, speed and scale. Here one of our proof-of-concept Catalyst projects is looking at automating drone flights as a platform-based service that uses 5G network slicing to ensure redundancy and quality of service, in a project championed by Vodafone.

The Operations Center of the Future effort is all about the processes and business aspects of platforms, and the Forum has a long-established pedigree in both. Our Business Process Framework (part of the central Frameworx suite of templates, guidebooks, best practices and much, much more) has been a huge success for network operators all over the world, and has been constantly evolved by them to meet new market needs.

Customer centricity and data analytics are also a great focus of attention in the Forum, and again proven suites of tools are available.

Platform-based businesses are driving the need for 5G, but 5G will also allow them to expand and innovate services in ways we haven’t thought of yet. We cannot predict exactly what is going to happen, so the trick is to ensure we are as ready as we can be to take advantage of market opportunities, partnerships and technology.