LOS ANGELES — Will 5G be a watershed moment for consumers or enterprises? The answer to that question varies wildly among technology leaders at the nationwide U.S. operators — AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile US, and Verizon — and in many ways depends on their market position and capabilities they have in place to target new opportunities.

Some want to reverse mistakes of the past and others simply recognize and want to reinforce where the bulk of their revenue comes from today. Regardless, much will have to change before these goals are realized.

“We learned a few things with 4G,” said Nicki Palmer, SVP of technology at Verizon. “You know there are a lot of others that use this fantastic network that we developed to develop their own business models and innovate on top of it. We are determined not to make that mistake again and to be better at it.”

The technology behind 5G requires a different mode of innovation and approach to partnership, she explained at MWC Los Angeles 2019. As such, Verizon has revamped the way it goes to market and is working with various companies of all sizes to explore and test 5G use cases in a lab.

5G can transform the way professionals scout for movie locations, the way movies are filmed and edited, and the manner in which movies are transmitted and streamed, Palmer said. “Sometimes the way to think about 5G is to think about what 4G can’t do” and there’s a lot that 4G can’t do in filmmaking and countless other industries, she added. “We’re just going to go deep in these different areas.”

T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray shared a different view, underlining the outsized emphasis on opportunities in enterprise amid the 5G push. The impact on consumers is effectively being undersold, he said.

“There is a lot of discussion on enterprise and what can happen in the enterprise space” with respect to industrial IoT, health care and automation, but 5G is also going to make the consumer experience significantly better, he said. “There’s a lot of things that are going to happen in the consumer space.”

Observers might point out that T-Mobile doesn’t have a legacy in enterprise on the same scale as Verizon or AT&T, for example. But Ray addressed that issue head on and tried to flip it toward the operator’s advantage. “We never had the network to compete effectively in enterprise — I can say that — but today we do,” he said, adding that the company is increasingly pushing into new verticals.

“The world of connected things is enormous [however] I'm as excited about consumer IoT as I am in connecting things” in the context of business applications, Ray said. “We don't spend enough time talking about the consumer benefits that will come.”

Sprint CTO John Saw takes a more middle-of-the-road view that strikes a balance between the enterprise and consumer opportunities in 5G. While 4G has served Sprint and other operators well, it’s essentially a generic data layer that was developed to spur innovation beyond the earlier confines of mobility, he explained.

“5G is actually designed purposefully for vertical industries. You can do a lot of things in 5G that you just don't have the scale and the capacity to deal with on LTE” networks, Saw said. Those capabilities include network slicing, low-latency applications and a massive density of IoT connections, he added.

Sprint’s initial 5G deployments on its mid-band spectrum provide the operator with a good balance of coverage and capacity that enables it to serve consumers, but it’s also making a bigger push into enterprise, Saw said. “I think we're in a really good position in terms of being able to provide sufficient coverage. That is exciting for enterprise customers as well as our consumer base.”

AT&T is all-in on 5G for enterprise. “We really think that the sweet spot for 5G, initially, is going to be the enterprise,” AT&T CTO Andre Fuetsch said. “We have dozens of trials underway to prove this out.”

Manufacturing in advanced and complex factories requires reliability, and sensing applications that feed on high bandwidth and network capacity present those environments as a real business case for 5G, he explained. 5G will also play a big role in the “office of the future” where devices can gravitate around new and interesting capabilities involving location, security, geofencing for authentication, and the automation of repetitive tasks, Fuetsch said.

With 5G “you can actually move from meters of accuracy down to centimeters,” he said. Enterprises will be able to create geofenced-in areas to control how data is generated or transmitted in particular physical locations, he added. “We think these are like really exciting use cases that will transform the office space and this is just one of many different examples.”

Fuetsch expanded on that thread by describing the freedom that operators will gain by moving beyond the form factor of smartphones. “5G really just completely opens up the aperture to a whole different array of devices,” he said. Self-driving cars and virtual reality applications will be impressive but he believes 5G is “going to be more about the smaller and mightier things that will really change our lives.”

Connected forks and toothbrushes could analyze caloric intake or plaque build-up, for example, he offered as a surprising example. When seemingly common everyday things can analyze and help people gain a better and more immediate understanding of their health it could guide people to healthier habits, he said.

“There’s so much to be excited about in 5G because it is a completely different architected network,” Fuetsch said. “I think those are going to be the things that 5G, and the use cases, that are really going to transform the world.”