It also finds that 34 per cent of MNOs are planning to offer commercial 5G services to this sector by the end of 2019, more than doubling to 84 per cent by the end of 2020. More than 65 per cent of European operators said that their enterprise customers have already expressed interest in 5G services.
The survey reports that they Europe are optimistic that they will be able to leverage early 5G deployments to enhance existing enterprise services, such as unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN). Operators in Europe have identified healthcare as the sector that offers the most revenue potential for 5G. This is closely followed by government and public sector in second place, while automotive and manufacturing jointly occupy the third spot.
In addition, nearly all operators in the region believed the overwhelming use case for 5G in the enterprise will be to replace existing fixed-line connections with mobile services. This was backed up by their claims that the most common types of devices they expect to ship to support 5G services in the early stages will be routers, PC dongles and eventually, handsets.
More than 70 per cent of those surveyed expect to achieve a greater than 10 per cent reduction in operational expenditure once 5G is deployed, likely due to the the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning in increasing automation of 5G operations and maintenance. Operational cost reduction is also expected to be driven by software-defined self-service and provisioning, the efficient 5G radio wave form squeezing more value from spectrum assets, and virtualisation enabling 5G networks to be controlled by commodity servers in data centres.
“Operators of 5G networks can support mission-critical enterprise communications, with performance backed by service-level agreements,” commented John Delaney, associate VP of mobility research at IDC. “Our research shows that mobile operators are optimistic about the potential for 5G to support an expansion of their role in the enterprise market.”
“The survey clearly demonstrates that operators see 5G as a means to restore value around core connectivity services for business customers.” said Matthieu Loreille, VP head of consumer, enterprise and technology marketing at Amdocs. “5G technologies such as network slicing will allow them to tailor the performance, security level and characteristics appropriate to each business, opening up differentiating monetisation opportunities. Furthermore, by leveraging additional technologies such as artificial intelligence, edge computing and hybrid cloud, operators will be strongly positioned to support enterprises in their digital transformation journey. Effectively, this enables them to shift connectivity to the heart of their solutions with meaningful value-added services on top such as cybersecurity, cloud migration, hybrid cloud operations and many more.”
Conducted on behalf of Amdocs by market research and consultancy firm IDC, the survey interviewed C-level executives and other senior management from 105 MNOs across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. In-depth qualitative interviews were also conducted with a selection of respondents.
