Discussions about 5G can quickly get into the technical weeds, but enterprises need more than an industry insider’s perspective, according to executives at AT&T and Ericsson. 

“Whereas 4G has often been the backup network, if you like, you see that what 5G brings actually enables the mobile network to become the primary network, and that’s one of the key critical pieces,” Ericsson’s marketing SVP Stella Medlicott said at today’s 5G Next discussion hosted by Chetan Sharma. 

“We’ve been talking about this now as an industry probably for four or five years now in anticipation of 5G coming, and now I think the world has kind of caught on with actually what 5G can really bring,” she said, adding that despite the undeniable wave of interest surrounding 5G, it’s important to focus on real use cases and proof points that showcase the capabilities of 5G for myriad businesses.

“We see this as the next industrial revolution, and it’s really about talking to businesses about their needs,” said Sarita Rao, president of integrated and partner solutions at AT&T Business. As such, AT&T’s conversations with businesses have shifted to focus on scenarios that require the bandwidth, mass connectivity, and low latency of 5G, she explained. 

“We start that way because our customers know their business better than we do,” Rao said. “It’s a constant growth, but to me the exciting growth is the opportunity with those enterprise customers to look at those use cases and build on those.”

Some expectations and assumptions about what 5G can do for enterprises have also shifted during the global pandemic and provided AT&T with an opportunity to think about 5G more broadly, she said. “I think the pandemic has given us more of a reason to look at things in a remote environment and given us a broader sense of use cases.”

The COVID-19 crisis has also highlighted the scope and impact of the digital divide, even in wealthier countries that weren’t typically mentioned in discussions about lack of access to affordable and reliable connectivity, Medlicott said. As work and education rapidly shifted to homes in the early stages of the pandemic, it became obvious “that some people don’t even have access to the tools or the network capabilities to do that,” she added.

AT&T is, in the area of health care, exploring the use of 5G’s bandwidth capabilities for cancer cell research, and low latency mixed reality for chronic pain management and cognitive behavior therapy, according to Rao. “I love both of those because they’re something that we didn’t think about years ago as a possibility,” she said. 

Some enterprises have relatively simple, or at least simple to understand, goals with 5G, including the flexibility to reconfigure factory infrastructure in a manner that will “release the constraints that a lot of organizations have in how they configure their environment,” Medlicott explained. 

Ericsson is also seeing significant traction in the automotive, transportation, aerospace, and mining sectors, she said. Enterprise challenges are manifested in many different ways, but Ericsson is especially emboldened by the opportunities for 5G because “what it enables is almost limitless. It’s almost held back by our own creativity,” Medlicott said.

The complexity of the ecosystem, including all the enterprises and scenarios where 5G can be applied, is an area that the wireless industry is striving to address with more vigor, according to Medlicott. “We won’t have a lot of the ideas or some of the use cases that will come out of this,” and this requires vendors and operators to collaborate with academia, startups, and companies that weren’t previously considered part of the wireless ecosystem, she said. 

Rao pulled further on that thread noting that this expanded ecosystem requires AT&T and others to be open minded and willing to experiment or shift strategies to meet the unique needs of enterprises. “The ecosystem environment, I think, is going to be one of the most complex to manage” and “we know we’ve only scratched the surface of the potential,” she said.

One of the most important things that network operators and vendors can do is to clarify what 5G can actually do for enterprises, Rao said. Identifying use cases is a good step, she said, but that use case language has to evolve into specific details about what 5G can or will solve for businesses.