It’s that time of year again—time to identify the key trends that will help us prioritize objectives, projects, and budgets to drive growth in the year ahead.
The great news is that 2024 promises to be a year full of potential. Five exciting trends will help operators tap into this opportunity and turn it into revenues.
Today’s post will discuss these trends and how automated assurance is the key to maximizing returns.
Trend #1: more enterprises will come to operators for private 5G
From smart factories to Industry 4.0 and much more, today’s enterprise is powered by digital.
It’s the key to enabling the digital enterprise, with ultrafast connectivity, high capacity, and ultra-low latency. So, it’s no surprise that the private 5G market will reach $7.7 billion in 2027.
The potential for increasing revenues is excellent for the operators who will manage these networks on behalf of their enterprise customers.
Recent market activity
Operators worldwide have taken note and are taking action, with more than half of all operators making enterprise 5G network services available in 2023.
Some recent examples from the past year include the NFL’s announcement that it will deploy private 5G at each team’s home stadium and the BBC, which leveraged private 5G to stream the coronation of King Charles.
Automated assurance for capturing the private 5G opportunity
Private 5G networks often run mission-focused services. This means that high-performance levels are a must.
With more enterprise customers looking to enjoy the benefits of 5G on their campuses, the pressure to deliver such performance will only continue to grow. As such, being able to detect degradations and experience-impacting issues is a strategic imperative.
This is where automated assurance comes into play, with capabilities for:
- Identifying trends, patterns, and outliers that indicate performance issues.
- Determining the required response for accelerated resolutions.
- Optimizing operations by detecting anomalies as they occur.
Trend #2: businesses will continue to seek the efficiencies of NaaS
The network has become more programmable, containerized, and dynamic, enabling operators to transform it into a service offering – network-as-a-service (NaaS).
NaaS means lower infrastructure costs and greater management support for enterprise customers. It also means that operators can go beyond connectivity and generate additional new revenue streams.
The opportunity is so great that the global NaaS market will reach $46.6 billion by 2027.
Recent market activity
Recent developments in this domain include Verizon’s Mobile Onsite Network-as-a-Service offering, Global Fabric, BT’s multi-cloud NaaS, and Vodafone’s telco-as-a-service strategy.
Automated assurance for capturing the NaaS opportunity
A NaaS offering is delivered through a complex multi-vendor, multi-domain, multi-cloud environment with stringent performance demands. Meeting the mandate requires an accurate view of the network, real-time performance optimization, and auditable performance data.
Automated assurance is the key to achieving these capabilities. It delivers on-demand performance insights, optimization, and the data required to understand what’s happening inside the network.
Trend #3: the adoption of open RAN will continue to grow
An open RAN enables operators to mix and match equipment and software from any vendor into one standardized solution that reduces equipment costs while improving network performance.
With these and other benefits, open RAN promises great promise, and the market is expected to generate approximately $3.2 billion in annual revenues by 2024.
Recent market activity
In 2023, DISH Wireless launched a virtual open RAN 5G network with Samsung. AT&T said it will spend $14 billion over five years with Ericsson in a shift to an open RAN network architecture. Vodafone announced that it will deploy 2,500 open RAN sites by 2027. And that’s just a few of the many initiatives launched last year.
Automated assurance for capturing the open RAN opportunity
As the gateway to mobile connectivity, delivering an optimized customer experience depends on the performance of the RAN. When there’s an issue, calls will drop, downloads will be slow, and connectivity will be patchy.
Avoiding this is all the more challenging in an open RAN environment with its multiple vendors, interfaces, and protocols. Assuring service in an open RAN network requires a new kind of monitoring.
AI-powered automated assurance is the answer. It provides historical and real-time performance data from every vendor with radio-to-core correlations. This way, operators can ensure that the performance of the open RAN is comparable to that of an optimized single-vendor environment.
Trend #4: leveraging network data to fuel external monetization
The operator’s network constitutes a goldmine of data about subscriber behaviors, preferences, location, and more. This data is sorely needed and valuable for businesses to better understand customers for growing revenues and streamlining operations.
When operators can clean, segment, and analyze network data at scale, they can create value-driving offerings to third parties and tap into a lucrative data monetization opportunity.
As a great aggregator of data and generator of insights, this is where automated assurance comes into play.
Market activity
Operators all over the world are already leveraging automated assurance for external monetization. Some recent examples include:
- A European operator created an offering for a local municipality looking to enhance road infrastructure planning.
- In North America, an operator empowers a transportation services provider to make more informed decisions about which lines and routes need to be added or augmented.
- In EMEA, an operator leverages assurance-driven roamer and other analytics to enable a mass event producer to better plan and orchestrate crowd management.
Automated assurance for external monetization
With automated assurance, operators can turn network data into a new kind of offering that brings value to their customers and creates new revenue streams for the business.
Trend #5: GenAI will be deployed for multiple use cases in telecoms
Generative AI is a transformative technology that has proven its potential to drive innovation, improve operational efficiencies, and enhance subscriber satisfaction.
It took the world by storm in 2023 and is slated to continue to shift paradigms for operators in 2024.
Recent market activity
AT&T launched its Ask AT&T tool, which is based on an early version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and is used by over 68,000 employees to write code, support customers, summarize meetings, and more.
Vodafone is using genAI to analyze customer conversations and provide a diagnosis. And BT is developing a generative AI-powered digital assistant to improve the service experience for its EE customers.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
GenAI for taking automated assurance even farther
Another great benefit of genAI is in how it can help operators take automated assurance – their key to tapping into new revenue opportunities in 2024 – to the next level:
Automated anomaly detection – GenAI can analyze patterns in real-time and, more accurately than ever, detect anomalies that indicate potential faults and other incidents.
Automated root cause analysis can form a hypothesis about the root cause of a failure and suggest actions for resolution.
Predictive analytics for automated assurance – GenAI can generate predictive maintenance guidelines to minimize network downtime.
In closing
Looking ahead to 2024, operators have many opportunities to generate new revenues and drive growth. Whether from private 5G, NaaS, open RAN, or external monetization, automated assurance is at the heart of it all. And when you add sophisticated AI into the mix, it couldn’t be more exciting.
To learn how AI-powered automated assurance from RADCOM can help you capture the opportunity in 2024, we invite you to contact us at marketing@radcom.com.
