One of my favorite parts of my job is speaking with communication service provider (CSP) leaders spearheading the transformation of our industry. For years, these executives have guided their organizations through rising costs, economic headwinds, and ongoing challenges to differentiate and innovate. By most measures, they’ve done an incredible job. 5G connections grew at a 66% year-over-year growth rate through 2023, making it the fastest-growing mobile technology to date.

This is a remarkable achievement that few outside the industry fully appreciate. Nevertheless, when I talk with these leaders, there’s a clear sense of restlessness. Even after major updates, their networks still support largely the same traditional services. The more revolutionary offerings that 5G was supposed to enable have yet to materialize, at least at scale. Why is it proving so hard to unleash the truly transformational benefits of 5G? There’s a straightforward answer: because we haven’t fully implemented it yet.

Remember, 5G was meant to provide three overarching new capabilities: enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC), and massive machine type communications (mMTC). So far, most 5G networks support just one, eMBB. This allows for higher data rates, but the parts of 5G that enable truly differentiated services – and foundational capabilities for tomorrow’s 6G networks – are still in progress.

Here's the truth: there is no killer app around the corner that will solve all of telecom’s challenges overnight. We’ll only get where we need to go by reimagining how CSP networks and businesses work. 5G is catalyzing this transformation, and 5G standalone (5G SA) provides our most powerful toolset yet to unlock new business models and efficiencies. But before that happens, we have to complete the more transformative 5G changes. Let’s take a closer look at what’s slowing 5G transformation and what we can do about it.

Barriers to Transformation

The speed and scale of 5G network updates have been unprecedented and shouldn’t be understated. The problem is that most of these upgrades represent 5G radio deployments, not full 5G SA. The vast majority of 5G networks still use legacy cores, supported by legacy network operations. To unlock more transformational 5G capabilities, we need to finish the job. That means deploying cloud-native 5G Cores, yes, but more importantly, adopting the open disaggregated architectures, agile development models, and DevOps ways of working that characterize the modern software-driven world.

What’s holding up this industry evolution? CSP leaders cite several common challenges:

• Disaggregation is complicated. As operators progress through next-generation deployments, they’re looking to disaggregate both vertically and horizontally. In the radio access network (RAN), for example, they want the flexibility to use radios from one vendor, baseband units from another. They want to build best-of-breed solutions with network functions from different vendors, all running on the operator’s preferred hardware and management platforms. This flexibility is essential to differentiate and innovate, but it brings significant complexity – especially for CSPs accustomed to monolithic single-vendor solutions. Suddenly, it’s the operator’s job to integrate, validate, and support all these applications and vendors, or find a partner to help.
• Assuring CSP-grade performance is extremely difficult: In core and data center environments, most CSPs have made good progress virtualizing NFs. In the RAN and far edge, however, performance requirements are far more stringent – especially for capabilities like URLLC, which underpin entire categories of new potential service offerings. There’s no shortcut to overcoming these technical hurdles; it just takes time and testing.
• Each environment is unique: More than anything else, CSPs need solutions to simplify operations in cloud-native, software-driven infrastructures. But unlike with enterprise environments, there are no one-size-fits-all automation solutions. Every operator’s network is different, and the vast majority are brownfield environments, so most CSPs have no choice but to live with what they have while they evolve.
• Visibility and assurance are still fragmented. CSPs have long relied on network vendors for element management systems, but these usually provide visibility into just one domain, and often, one vendor’s equipment. As a result, assurance teams typically have to collect faults and measurements from multiple siloed systems to understand what’s happening in the network. This model has always made multidomain/multivendor management and automation harder, but as CSPs adopt fully virtualized 5G environments, it breaks down altogether. There’s no way to support stringent 5G SLAs, for example, if faults get reported in one place, performance in another, configurations managed in another, with human beings scrambling to correlate everything in real time.

Principles of Transformation

These are significant challenges. But no matter where you stand today in this journey, the basic requirements to move forward are clear: flexibility, visibility, and (especially) automation. Those principles should guide every organization’s transformation, and they imply concrete goals that all operators should be working to achieve.

For example, every CSP should be taking steps to achieve end-to-end visibility and tooling. From planning to provisioning to assurance, there’s no way to operate a vast, highly dynamic, cloud-native environment when all network data and tools live in domain- and vendor-specific silos. We should be working to move everything to common, horizontal cloud platforms that can support any application, any domain, any workload in the same way, using the same consistent toolset.

Since most operators have brownfield environments with both virtualized and appliance-based infrastructure, this unified approach must encompass both new and legacy worlds. There is little value in a new management system or observability engine that can’t monitor the entire footprint.

We should also avoid rigid approaches to automation, and instead seek to enable flexible composability based on standardized data models. To support brownfield environments, automation should provide the modularity to change individual components and inject custom scripts as needed.

Getting Started Despite the challenges, CSPs I speak with are making important progress in multiple areas, including:

• Building programmable telco networks: Vodafone is working with VMware to improve customer experiences by applying network programmability and intelligence to the RAN. At Mobile World Congress 2024, they showed how an operator can use VMware’s RAN intelligent controller (RIC) to dynamically reroute subscriber traffic based on the available performance that each tower can support.
• Deepening relationships with content providers: Multiple CSPs are also exploring using network APIs to share more data with over-the-top providers, enabling new partnerships to optimize user experiences.
• Offering new enterprise edge solutions: One European CSP is developing new edge solutions to advance their enterprise portfolio. They’re building out a framework to support distributed small cells tuned for specific enterprise applications, such as low-latency industrial edge applications, that will all be managed and orchestrated from a central hub.
• Implementing Open RAN service management and orchestration (SMO): While much of the industry views SMO as a future technology, one North American CSP is already using it in 11 regional hubs and a centralized data center. They’ll be able to centrally manage all of them – with end-to-end visibility, provisioning, and orchestration, and visibility – as they advance their open RAN initiatives.

Looking Ahead Clearly, we still have work to do to complete 5G transformation. But as long as our efforts are guided by the foundational requirements of next-generation networks – flexibility, automation, programmability and end-to-end visibility – we’ll get there.

Ultimately, we have no other choice. To cement telecom’s future, we have to master modern cloud software operations, and we have to complete the 5G SA journey, or we’ll be asking the same questions a few years from now when we get to 6G.

The good news: Here at VMware by Broadcom, we’ve been working with several CSPs to get “un-stuck.” Reach out when you’re ready to do the same.