Amdocs plans to showcase the use cases and multi-vendor solutions from its Texas-based Americas 5G Experience Lab at the upcoming MWC Barcelona 2023 event.

Opened last May, the lab gathers service providers, enterprises, and ecosystem partners to leverage private networks and edge applications across industries of health care, manufacturing, field tech, and more.

The software company believes building future networks is all about meeting individualized enterprise needs, Amdocs Group President Anthony Goonetilleke noted in a statement.

Goonetilleke told SDxCentral in an earlier interview that he believes “the next five years are going to completely democratize technology.” Big tech companies may not be going anywhere, “but the way they operate and function will change,” he said.

According to Ragu Masilamany, VP and Global Head of Solutions Engineering at Amdocs, the purpose of the lab boils down to “two tracks.”

The first is to help create value propositions around private networks for enterprises. “Going from 4G to 5G, the difference that we see is it can really be a multi-vendor ecosystem. It's almost there in terms of plug and play, but we bring a combination of the solutions [making] up private networks that actually purpose them for enterprise needs,” Masilamany told SDxCentral.

“The second track is around the vertical applications for the industries,” he continued. “5G is not about the G or the 4G-plus-one, but it's more of the ecosystem that [it] enables – software, edge, cloud. We bring those pieces together, along with the private networks to create horizontal and vertical solutions that actually enable our partners” to experiment with solutions and take them to market.

The lab’s focus for upgrading network operations within different sectors exemplifies the words of IBM VP Steve Goetz claiming the next key evolution of the telco operator is to expand its role into a catalyzer for cross-industry transformation.

According to Masilamany, “enterprises don’t care about 5G.” What they’re really looking for are business problems to solve that “naturally extend” their specific IT infrastructure.

“They're looking for how to actually integrate with existing 5G infrastructure, existing data infrastructure, existing cloud infrastructure, and bring … a combination of independent software [vendors] hooked together as a solution,” he explained.

Telehealth, as an example, requires a unique combination of data security, seamlessness, and universal access. Because of these specific industry needs, health care has been one area where blockchain technology is predicted to play a big role in its data governance.

The lab’s use case in telehealth leverages an edge solution allowing doctors to virtually “scrub in” to an operating room remotely to provide additional expertise in surgical scenarios. The application is very network demanding.

“There's some pieces of the compute by technical nature [that] need to be on prem because it is in either high volume, low latency demands or [because of] security and the data governance around it,” he added. “So there's some real need for them to essentially be able to leverage that – the edge cloud part of it.”

Masilamany says the lab currently faces two challenges in this demand. The first is taking applications written for a public cloud and scaling them to “work in a smaller footprint in an edge cloud or near cloud.”

“Specifically, when you take it out of the labs into the field where they can work in harsh environments [does it] still deliver the value … does the edge application work out of the box? They probably don't in most cases if it's not written for it, having said that, is it solvable? Yes, it is solvable,” he explained.

The second is being able to manage the flexibility and quantity of devices connecting to its specific network. Whether it operates on CBRS [citizens broadband radio service] or licensed spectrum, does the solution have the flexibility? "I think we have some ways to go. We are [also] constrained by how many devices that you have or the variety of devices you have doesn't really realize the use cases.”

“I can't just go out in the market [with] every connected device – a HoloLens with 5G, or an IoT sensor with the CBRS spectrum on it, or 5G-enabled cameras – it's very niche still,” he continued.

Masilamany remains optimistic that both issues are improving “quarter by quarter.”