5G is poised to equip network operators with tools and capabilities that will allow them to transition from connectivity service providers to digital service providers, says Phil Twist, vice president of networks marketing at Nokia.

“Although there is a clear technology transition within the networks, there’s also a business transition in the way that communications service providers will address their customers and the opportunities that they will face,” he told SDxCentral in a phone interview. That dynamic change will necessitate new business models, partners, and offerings, he explained.

As 5G deployments continue, network operators will move from being primarily aimed at consumers and devices into organizations that offer business services specifically tailored for different enterprises by supporting “machine-type communications rather than people-type communications,” Twist said. “Those types of new services I think give a huge opportunity for different ways to present content, different ways to present services, different ways to monetize, and that is going to be part of the overall transition.”

Nokia, which has signed 42 commercial 5G contracts with operators as of earlier this month, has also participated in more than 100 5G trials and expects momentum to grow during the next few years. Most operators are embarking on the journey to 5G with initial upgrades to their RAN because the air interface can increase coverage and capacity in the near term, but deeper network infrastructure upgrades are a critical part of the network evolution plan, Twist explained.

New 5G radios are important, but operators also need the distributed core network and converged cloud infrastructure to build a smart network fabric that can glue the various elements of 5G together in a software-defined environment that delivers on the quality and experience required to support the promise of 5G, he said.

“We expect to see continued investment in the SD-WAN part of an operators network progressively in line with the evolution toward the new services of 5G,” Twist said. Roughly half of the operators currently engaged with Nokia on 5G are also asking for help with features and capabilities beyond the 5G RAN, including SDN, he said.

“If there’s a weak link in the chain it’s actually the standardization process because the true promise of 5G comes with 3GPP Release 16,” Twist said. That next step, which is expected to be formalized during the first half of 2020, will support network slicing that will support increased reliability and new services derived from lower latency.

“We need the standards and specifications to let us do this end-to-end network wide in a smooth and consistent way,” he said. “Without the specifications in place you can’t do it multi-vendor, you can’t do the interoperability testing of it to bring these multiple components together unless you buy it from one vendor.”

Twist contends that Nokia’s technology is running ahead of what the standards bodies have formalized to date but Release 16 will help the market coalesce around a common framework and guide operators on their network evolution journey.

“You can see a spiral of investment in technology, which allows you to monetize new use cases. New use cases get traction with the market, create demand, which then require more investment in the network infrastructure and so on,” he said, adding that network slicing will be offered as-a-service for many time-sensitive and high-demand applications.

Nokia is also looking beyond 5G RAN by developing more granular and automated controls over network infrastructure with assistance from analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), Twist explained. “It won’t be possible for a human to be able to manage and operate a 5G network without the support of some kind of analytics and AI,” he said. “If we reach the level that we want to reach, which is zero-touch, on-demand network slicing, then that will be a critical part of it.”