We were lucky enough to be invited to the 5G Realised event earlier in the month, from which we took away the key message the collaboration will be the ultimate key to successful development, deployment, adoption and commercial success.

Accenture made the comment that in each of the new value chains, there are at least five to six partners required to make it possible, and that in their opinion, the only really immediate consumer use case is for in-fill broadband (e.g. fixed-wireless access in areas cables can’t reach).

The comment about partnership and collaboration was repeated by many during the event, and was a key theme. Brendan O’Reilly (Telefonica O2, CTO) commented that collaboration was the new ‘C’ for mobile operators to focus on; Customers, Coverage, Capacity, Collaboration.

Howard Watson (BT Group CTO) commented that 5G would spur the resurgence of voice, but not necessarily for mobile phones, but other devices – you can think of voice controlling other things like smart speakers, cars, even security devices.

Watson continued to press the point that 5G would enable operators to finally deliver on the promise of Fixed-Mobile-Convergence (FMC) that they’ve been trying to achieve for many years already.

Politely disruptive

Graham Baxter (Three UK, COO) discussed how they’ve been busy transforming their entire operation, and partnering with SSE on a dark fibre backbone across the UK. A mobile operator executive sitting next to me commented that along with their significant investment in radio spectrum, Three UK are ‘politely disruptive’.

Naturally, the mobile operators talked a lot about networks and the complexity and costs of rolling those out. Andrea Donà (Head of Networks, Vodafone UK) commented that before you can get too worried about the services, you need to make sure you have the underlying enabler sorted out.

Donà further commented on how, in the face of declining revenues, the existing business models for mobile operators are unsustainable and cannot be relied on for the future of 5G.

He commented that connectivity would be a very small part of a mobile operator’s 5G revenue plan, and their work was focusing on converging networks to create lower cost enablers.

With a lower cost base in your enablers, he commented, it was possible and necessary to switch to a service view of your network.

When are verticals not verticals?

Videos

Thanks to our friends at Juliet Media we’ve been able to share the video of the opening remarks and presentation from Accenture. For more videos from the event please visit Juliet Media’s Vimeo collection here.