The News: New Research from the Ericsson Mobility team provides encouraging evidence for communication service providers (CSPs) worldwide by identifying a correlation between 5G uptake and revenue growth. Read the Ericsson Press Release here.
MWC 2023: New Ericsson Mobility Report Shows Greater 5G Uptake Catalyzing CSP Revenues
Analyst Take: Ericsson issued a special Mobility Report edition this month – called the Business Review edition – in the lead up to MWC 2023. The report focuses on monetization opportunities as they relate to 5G highlighting a positive revenue growth trend since the beginning of 2020 in the top 20 5G markets. These top markets account for about 85 percent of all 5G subscriptions globally, which correlates with increasing 5G subscription penetration in these markets.
5G worldwide momentum is gathering speed and gravity as there are now 230 5G networks in commercial service, sporting a growing subscription base that surpassed 1 billion. Through building a critical mass of networks and subscribers, I anticipate that innovation and monetization will accelerate across the 5G ecosystem as CSPs become more confident in their 5G capabilities and developers gain more 5G working knowledge, especially across 5G standalone (SA) implementations.
From my view, the recent Ericsson Mobility Report highlighted key consumer trends such as 5G’s role in driving new service packaging, cloud gaming services, 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) growth, and the impending and swift proliferation of new 5G device form factors. In the enterprise and public sector realms, there is the trend identified of opening up 5G networks more to application developers, the increasing intermixing of 5G and private networks, and broad adoption of 5G wireless wide area network (WWAN).
Specifically, I anticipate the value of 5G WWAN will expand as CSPs and enterprises gain more knowledge of key benefits such as zero-trust network access (ZTNA) security service, which removes default access and uses an adaptive verification policy to protect information, as well as intrusion detection systems (IDS) and intrusion prevention systems (IPS), which identify and stop prospective data security breaches.
I see 5G strengthening the value proposition of IoT monitoring systems, such as AWS Greengrass and Microsoft Azure IoT Control, which provide remote visibility into analytics for data from sensors and other devices. Through 5G capabilities, such IoT monitoring systems can help streamline bringing cloud processing and logic locally to edge devices. Additionally, integration of SD-WAN traffic steering, which classifies traffic and matches application requirements with network characteristics and conditions, gains a 5G ecosystem boost including across SASE implementations.
I believe enterprises will adopt more combinations of private mobile networks and 5G public networks (i.e., network slicing) according to their use case needs. For example, in nomadic scenarios where an enterprise that uses fleet vehicles selects a private network for its site and adds public 5G network slicing to attain coverage for their vehicles beyond the range of the private network. This way enterprises can assure continuity of policy control and application performance across both networks.
Key Takeaways: Ericsson Issues New Mobility Report – Business Review Edition
The new Ericsson Mobility Report indicates that the future is looking brighter for CSPs in their key objectives of generating greater 5G revenue and advancing 5G monetization. I believe through 5G real-world use cases, such as Day-1 connectivity for fixed and temporary sites, FWA coverage across rural areas, improved connectivity for distributed workforces, and fleet vehicle management, will deliver significant improvements over 4G/LTE implementations paving the way for a wider array of use cases to turbocharge the 5G value proposition.
Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.
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Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
