Investors and shareholders are increasingly losing their patience with telcos, which have promised that their enterprise revenue will soon overtake their consumer business. At the same time, enterprise end users are not yet convinced that today’s 5G can address their pressing key pain points in line with the IMT-2020 vision most 5G suppliers are preaching.
The first article in this series discussed why telco operators need to reinvent themselves. In short, there are significant opportunities in both consumer and enterprise domains, but operators need to transform their platforms to address these new opportunities in an increasingly competitive environment. Despite the entry of hyperscalers in the telco domain, telco operators have the experience, physical assets, and technology expertise that no other entity has in the market. For example, current 5G cell sites are set up to transfer more than 200 Terabytes (TB) per day, a monumental feat considering any network, let alone wireless. In the fixed broadband space, connections transfer TB worth of data every day for consumers, especially if we consider 4K content and immersive applications. These require significant expertise that only telco operators possess.