Many of the big, demonstrable leaps fueled by 5G for enterprises are still under development, Kyle Malady, EVP and CTO at Verizon, said today at GSMA Thrive. 

While much of the foundation for 5G has already been laid by Verizon, including its low-band 5G network and a smaller footprint on millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum, the operator is also assembling a public mobile edge computing (MEC) platform running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and a private MEC running on Microsoft Azure. 

Verizon is using multiple flavors of SDN to bring all of this under the umbrella of 5G, but it still needs developers, enterprises, and entrepreneurs to help it realize a more broad vision for 5G. 

“As we continue to build our networks, we continue to work with the ecosystems to develop on it. We're starting to see a lot of great developer interest in the platform and testing both the 5G and mobile edge compute and how they can work together, and harmonize, and how they make new great experiences,” Malady said during a presentation at the event.

“We’re just really in the early stages of it right now,” he said, adding that even though the networks are live, Verizon will continually add more capabilities and foster the development of applications and services for enterprises.

Many of the key features of 5G — higher speeds, lower latency, security, and device density — deliver ideal conditions for enterprise applications, said Sampath Sowmyanarayan, president of global enterprise at Verizon Business. As such, the operator has designed and built ecosystems for large enterprises to make the transition to 5G, he said.

“We’ve created an ecosystem where enterprises can work with us, but also our partners to implement 5G in their facilities because this is a large platform and ecosystem play for us,” Sowmyanarayan said, adding that Verizon’s MEC deployments with AWS and Azure, and other arrangements with IBM and Cisco are also designed to strengthen that effort.

He also claimed that security is built into 5G, and not an overlay function. “It’s there in the [radio access network] functions, it’s there at the core, and even at the edge, security is kind of built into the fabric of 5G.”

Verizon’s recently announced private MEC service extends that security posture to enterprises further by keeping data on site and minimizing the potential attack surface, according to Sowmyanarayan. 

5G enterprise proof of concepts and small deployments will continue through 2021, but 2022 is when the 5G for enterprise opportunity will scale and gain traction after specialized use cases are developed for 5G, he said. “We have to go down and work with developers to design those applications, and hence the ecosystem play.”

Competition in the 5G enterprise market will come from other carriers and large technology companies, Sowmyanarayan said, arguing that Verizon is as much a technology company as it is a telecom provider. “The foundation of any digital transformation most companies do is the network. Having an agile, software-defined network is kind of the foundation of anything you do on top of that. We do that,” he said. 

“This is a long term play for us,” Sowmyanarayan said. “We build the platform. We want to be the best network, but we also want to be the network that's designed for the enterprise. So, we are in it for the long run, and we are building the foundation of that.”