5G: new market entrants, opportunities - and disruption

By Faheem Tabassum

Enterprise 5G and Edge computing will create new markets, new market entrants, and new partnerships between organizations that until now have not been obvious members of the same ecosystem. Acting now will start to unlock some of that value for your business. Early movers will pull away, and in any particular vertical market, will soak up the opportunity ahead of the laggards.

There is little doubt that 5G, and Edge computing, will create new markets and new market entrants.

5G is well-heralded – businesses know it’s coming, and can already see early infrastructure roadmaps. This is unusual for such a disruptive technology, which has often arrived unnoticed, and often in very short timescales.

Large incumbents in different vertical markets, seeking to consider the relevance of 5G and Edge computing to their businesses, therefore have the opportunity to take early leads – and to avoid potential disruption as 5G infrastructure becomes available. 

What will be needed is new thinking, fast action, and a preparedness to invest early in early 5G pilots.

The key for every business is to start now - and to focus on the current challenges and opportunities that sit inside the business, and how 5G can address these into the future.

The start point is to ask whether 5G will disrupt your business, provide you with the ability to disrupt others, or whether 5G brings incremental change to your business.

If it's incremental, you can take immediate steps using existing 4G networks to test early concepts. For example, you might start working with drones on 4G today, knowing that you are gaining experience and creating and testing new opportunities early on, including ahead of your competitors. You can start with reliable connectivity today, and move to massive machine communications, with super-fast low-latency connectivity, when full 5G infrastructure becomes available.

If it's disruptive, the stakes are bigger and more-complex (but potentially more-rewarding, sooner). Once again using drones as an example, you might seek to disrupt the asset management sector by using drones to photograph housing developments for funding purposes, as part of the lending criteria, but the disruption in this example would embrace legislation around flying drones over built-up areas, around permission to photograph property, and around accreditation of images. In other words, the disruption is enabled by 5G but goes beyond the 5G technology, affecting multiple industries.

Away from specialist devices such as drones, industries such as commercial real estate will need to rethink their development plans if they are to provide effective 5G networks for the tenants they hope to attract in the future, who will demand the next-level services 5G enables. And businesses that, until now, had not considered connected partnership, will do so once 5G is ready.

That in turn creates new opportunities for companies to work together, and with infrastructure partners such as Optus, to build new ecosystems that might well require changes to (for example) legislative frameworks in the future. 5G is the delivery mechanism that changes the way businesses operate at a number of different levels - not solely at the technology level or the organisational level.

Opportunity in many forms

To see the opportunities that 5G disruption can create, you need look no further than the office. 5G networks will detect video collaboration traffic and allocate it to guaranteed high-speed, low-latency streams. At the same time, background web browsing will be allocated to a business-as-usual channel, and if I'm also performing multiple financial transactions, the network will route that data to a secure, high-speed link. The 5G networks will segment data to optimum channels, allowing high-speed connectivity, and new ways to create customer experiences.

As another example, moving away from the office to the mine, 5G will allow cameras to be mounted onto existing vehicles to capture real-time data about the location of the vehicles, and capture anomalies and issues such as potholes or obstacles in the road, and then to allow AI engines to analyse this new source of data. We have been very good historically at collecting data, less good at analysing it. When the mine has 5G, the data and machine learning will be able to draw down the insights unavailable until now.

In both these examples, new partnerships will be created, between organizations that until now have not been obvious members of the same ecosystem. They might be VR partners who work with you to create virtual offices to plan 5G fitouts, or to walk new employees through a mine's layout.

5G is upon us, and it will create new opportunities, and new levels of disruption for those businesses not ready for it. Acting now will start to unlock some of that value for your business. Early movers will pull away, and in any particular vertical market, will soak up the opportunity ahead of the laggards.

More information and content on 5G and how your organisation can benefit can be found here: https://www.optus.com.au/enterprise/5g