A new 5G-monetization-focused Ericsson Mobility Report publication outlines four opportunity areas that communications service providers worldwide are addressing to drive business growth.
Called Business Review 2024, the report is the second special business edition of the established Ericsson Mobility Report. It addresses how communication service providers (CSPs) are evolving, or aim to evolve, service offerings, address new revenue opportunities and transform their businesses.
Ericsson Mobility Report Business Review 2024 shows that CSPs worldwide are currently offering or exploring services and go-to-market models to different levels of engagement and maturity across the four areas.
The four areas are:
- Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB): a superior and more efficient version of 4G mobile broadband,
- Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) and Wireless WAN opportunities: these target the residential broadband and enterprise segments offering value pools for service providers with higher average revenue per user (ARPU) compared to traditional mobile broadband services.
- Differentiated connectivity solution opportunities: such as private network for enterprises or utilizing network slicing capabilities of public 5G standalone (SA) networks to offer a differentiated service to consumers or enterprises.
- Driving innovation and ecosystem growth: programmable networks (network APIs) offer the potential to access new value opportunities, allowing application developers to innovate on a large scale.
Fredrik Jejdling, Executive Vice President and Head of Networks, Ericsson, said, “The first step of the 5G value journey has been taken, but it is still in the early stages. Looking back, we can see how the deployment of 4G, together with a global device ecosystem, laid the foundation for the app economy, enabling today’s mobile broadband business. Leveraging the evolving capabilities of 5G networks to create new value pools will be essential for service providers to reach profitable growth.”
To date, about 290 5G networks have been launched commercially, of which more than 40 are offering services based on more advanced 5G standalone technology. As communicated in the November 2023 Ericsson Mobility Report, global 5G subscriptions have topped 1.6 billion, comprising 18% of all mobile subscriptions.
In addition to the business potential of eMBB for CSPs, the report documents the growing success of FWA as a means of facilitating broadband to the home in markets such as the US.
The report also addresses the central role 5G can play in accelerating industry productivity. A 5G logistics case study reported 20% improvement in productivity and 15% lower capex compared with Wi-Fi.