The role of the telecom operator is changing and, according to Steve Goetz, VP and senior partner at IBM, that role needs to drive cross-industry business transformation.

Operators invested heavily last year pursuing spectrum, building scalable fiber networks, and tapping into 5G-enabled fixed-wireless access (FWA) services, all in the name of expanding a scalable infrastructure of ubiquitous connection.

“The investments that are being made by the telcos [for] spectrum [and] network assets to deliver the promise of 5G to their clients is quite intense. And as a result of that, the telcos really do need to figure out what their role is going to be going forward,” Goetz told SDxCentral.

For telcos to position themselves as “agents of change” for businesses across new industries, he says “the backbone of the whole thing is the intersection of connectivity and compute at the edge. That's the Rosetta Stone – if you will – of what allows the telcos to have a stake and a claim in this game.”

The annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) event is a meeting-mania for Goetz, who stated that these annual discussions have marked key progress points in this evolution of telecommunication operators enabling “a purpose-led dimension to this technology.”

At MWC three years ago, “90% of those meetings focused on the need for horizontal architecture, having an open, hybrid, secure architecture that enables best-of-breed technologies that are going to plug-and-play at any given point in time,” he explained, adding an industry emphasis on future proofing that design point.

In 2022, that need was a given: “You can't even enter the room unless you have either understanding or investments made from a technology standpoint in that domain,” Goetz said.

The focus then became about how to monetize that structure. This was where Goetz said global-systems integrators like IBM became a key ecosystem player in helping service providers become agents for business transformation, “because we have invested a lot more than they have in terms of industry verticals.”

With MWC 2023 approaching, Goetz anticipates this year will be about tactical execution. “There's hard money that's been invested in this stuff, so it's not an aspiration. It's a requirement,” he stated. “There'll be a lot of focus on what competitive advantages [carriers] have with 5G like latency and control over data traffic.”

As IBM works within different operator “channels,” Goetz says tapping into new markets with the right services to maximize its monetized impact will be a chief focus.

Just as the telecom industry virtualizes its technology and augments its capacity and connection speed, Goetz believes virtual and augmented reality industrial use cases will further drive the cross-industry involvement in transforming business operations.

Dell’Oro Group expects network-intensive applications like the metaverse will drive the next 5G evolution, deemed “5G-Advanced."

“I think there's an enterprise dimension to the metaverse and I think there's a consumer dimension to it,” Goetz explained, noting the enterprise side to have a more imminently approaching value. “Being able to uplift a workforce to a level that they otherwise couldn't be through extensive hands-on training that is virtual is a really, really interesting use case. … I see a lot of enterprise productivity enhancement that can take place as a result of this faster than I do at the consumer end.”

Goetz referenced a published report from IBM’s Institute for Business Value (IBV) on how the metaverse will play into retail applications – a sector he believes will be one of the “hot industries” for these investments.

The report’s outlined applications include new product development, manufacturing and supply chain operations, store and space design, employee training, and enhanced customer experience. The report states that the metaverse “will disrupt industries from gaming and music to fashion, automotive, and real estate. It promises to expand the traditional idea of retail and consumer experience, going beyond stores, sites, and apps to create immersive commerce-enabled spaces that bridge the digital and physical worlds.”

With the Open Metaverse Forum forming this month and the Telecom Infra Project pushing network readiness, the open-architecture evolution Goetz has witnessed in telecom is going to be similarly adopted in the development of an open-source, collaborative metaverse environment.

“There's a tremendous amount of productivity improvement and customer experience opportunity when you have connectivity and compute with low latency and the customer [is] able to literally feel the merchandise in a virtual way," Goetz said. "So it's endless in terms of those types of opportunities.”