Mobile operators are still burnt by 4G LTE and desperate to avoid the same mistakes or missed opportunities with 5G. Carriers have long lamented their inability to capture additional revenue and profits from applications and services that ride on their networks, and they see an opening to reverse that trend in 5G.

Couple that goal with the tens of billions of dollars most operators are investing in 5G spectrum and network infrastructure, and it’s no wonder there’s so much chatter about the edge. Indeed, the edge and services it enables might be the carriers’ best and final chance to glean new wealth from 5G.

“In the communications service provider space globally, there are customers who feel like they’ve missed out on this generation of wealth [realized] by other companies over the last decade, and they really want to make sure that they can participate in the next wave of growth,” Jonathan Davidson, SVP and GM at Cisco’s Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group, said during a recent press briefing.

“This is where I think the carrier edge is so critically important, because they do have proximity to users, and they do have proximity to things with their network infrastructure,” he said. 

Converting new 5G infrastructure into greater revenue and profits is a central theme for all operators, and delivering connectivity won’t cut it. Operators need to offer new capabilities and services that can monetize their 5G infrastructure at the edge with enterprises, Davidson explained. 

Private networks, edge computing, and network slicing present network infrastructure vendors and telcos with the best chance to capture the next wave of wealth that will be generated by 5G, Raj Yavatkar, CTO at Juniper Networks, told SDxCentral.

“I look at this as a way for us to help our customers succeed. They are going through a transformation of their business models to see how they’re going to monetize services that can be offered on top of 5G,” he said. “If they don’t do that, then you go back to the model where they just offered mobile connectivity.”

That traditional model won’t translate to profit growth for many mobile network operators because “there’s no way to monetize that beyond just basic service,” Yavatkar said.

5G and enterprise-centric service development provides telcos with a new opportunity, but only if 5G use cases are effectively translated into service assurance so a mobile operator can sell an enterprise assured service for a specific type of traffic, according to Yavatkar.

Network slicing is the mechanism for that because it can separate and protect a specific service offering for enterprises, he explained. Transport networks already provide a “very good hierarchical quality of service based on traffic. By extending that all the way end-to-end from the radio access network (RAN), all the way to the data center of the public cloud, I think we have a big opportunity, and in the process we can help our customers also monetize.”

Cisco partially frames this enterprise opportunity for telcos around what it calls the “carrier edge,” a distributed footprint of mini data centers that can decrease latency and allow operators to offer new services, Davidson explained. “Overall, bandwidth continues to increase, capex budgets are flat, [and] if you look at most of the service providers globally, their stock prices have remained relatively flat for five to 10 years.”

Cisco is working with some of its carrier customers to create new services and applications at the edge of their respective networks, and content delivery networks (CDNs) are one area of early focus, according to Davidson. “We’re already working with leading customers around the world on a roadmap of services to help them generate net new revenue,” he said.

“The pace and scale of innovation is phenomenal, and we want our communications service provider partners who are also selling that service to participate in an additional revenue stream as well,” Davidson said. 

Juniper Networks, like Cisco, has a rich history in enterprise and it’s also pursuing a two-pronged strategy split between operators and enterprises. However, “our first priority is to work with our telco customers because they traditionally offer this service to the enterprise,” Yavatkar said. The operator-led model is an easier lift with less friction because the underlying infrastructure is already available in most locations, he added.

The other model, which is being developed around specific industries that might want to use shared or private spectrum without the involvement of a network operator — private networks — presents Juniper with a chance to blend its strengths in WiFi and 5G, Yavatkar explained. 

“What we’re trying to do is extend the concept of network slicing in 5G to WiFi slicing,” he said, adding that WiFi is already transmitted via channels and WiFi 6 allows companies to map those WiFi channels to slices.

5G is an ambitious undertaking, and 5G network interfaces can be engineered to serve a higher density of users, which presents telcos with an opportunity to differentiate between unique types of traffic, Yavatkar explained. 

It all comes down to creative use cases and assured quality of service that enterprises can rely on for new operating models in industries like robotics, autonomous driving, public safety, health care, manufacturing, energy, and utilities, he said. 

“I think those kind of use cases are the ones that will be the next wave of innovation,” and the ability to capture that presents a significant opportunity for network infrastructure vendors, operators, and enterprises, Yavatkar said.