5G Orchestration: A New Revenue Source for Mobile Operators

Next-gen carrier-grade monitoring is key to realizing successful and profitable outcomes.

5G lettering with dark blue background

With projections for subscriber growth slowing while investments in 5G networks continue to rise, mobile carriers are under increasing pressure to find new revenue sources. A recent study found that the U.S. wireless industry anticipates adding approximately 7.7 million net-new postpaid phone customers by the end of this year. However, customer growth is expected to slow, resulting in a decrease in revenue growth for mobile operators. 

Constraints on CapEx due to diminished revenue from connectivity mean there is a growing burden on communications service providers (CSPs) to bring in new revenue in order to continue to be successful. Dynamic new services made possible by 5G and its cloud-native architecture offer the promise of critically important revenue opportunities. That said, the provisioning of such services will have to be automated if they are going to be commercially viable. 

5G Orchestration Offers a Path to Profit 

CSPs looking to generate revenue in the B2B space will first need to understand the enterprise priorities and business models that would benefit from new services. Industry verticals, such as healthcare and manufacturing, are examples of where services might be effectively focused. Once targeted, the next challenge becomes creating those services. 

In the past, new services would be created manually, often taking months to reach the market. 5G orchestration offers a quicker path to profit by automating specifically targeted services that can then be torn down when no longer needed—thus saving on precious resources. As the standards for fully supporting dynamic slicing evolve, promising new business cases will present CSPs with opportunities to drive important revenue streams. 

CSPs will be able to partner with B2B exchanges around 5G network slicing to improve the customer experience at sporting events, for example, or in edge computing for gamers. Dynamic orchestration, when done right, can support the entire end-user experience, allowing decisions to be made in real-time for location and workload management, including mobility from core to the edge.

No matter the use case, commercial success for orchestration will depend on having a stream of data from multiple sources that is consistent, regardless of which node is responsible for automated decision making. 

The Key to Automated Orchestration Is Visibility Without Borders

As CSPs explore 5G orchestration on the path to revenue growth opportunities, achieving what NETSCOUT calls Visibility Without Borders—seeing from the access network to the data center, to the cloud, and everywhere in between—will be vital for successfully automating orchestration.  

NETSCOUT’s scalable Visibility Without Borders monitoring solution, which is designed for today’s highly complex cloud environments, helps CSPs gain actionable insights into 5G networks, applications, and services. This next-gen software monitoring solution relies on NETSCOUT Smart Data—real-time analysis of packet data that delivers a high-fidelity, centralized view into the performance characteristics of all infrastructure and application components, including their dependencies. Armed with these real-time insights and analyses, CSPs are able to make 5G orchestration automation possible. 

Automation is essential to lowering the cost of orchestrating new and innovative services, which in turn will provide invaluable revenue opportunities for CSPs. 

NETSCOUT delivers the visibility needed to make that automation possible. 

Learn more about NETSCOUT end-through-end visibility for 5G services.