5G promises new opportunities for mobile operators to address the enterprise market like never before, provided vendors don’t get there first.
According to a panel of experts at Connected Britain on Tuesday, the next generation of mobile technology could put vendors in the driving seat.
With 5G networks potentially connecting more people and objects than ever before, "the B2B market is going to be bigger by orders of magnitude than B2C," said Mischa Dohler, head of telecom research at King’s College London.
This poses a challenge to operators’ position in the value chain because "the Ericssons and Ciscos are locking themselves into the B2B market," he said.
"In the B2C market, the mobile operator procures the best deal from the vendor," he said. However, in the enterprise market, particularly in areas like machine-to-machine (M2M) and the Internet of Things (IoT), vendors build the platform, establish customer relationships, and then procure connectivity on their behalf.
"Suddenly it’s the vendor playing the operators off against each other" to get the best deal for their customer, he said. "It flips the model."
One operator, at least, is not particularly phased though.
"It would be taking a smaller slice of a much bigger pie," said Paul Ceely, head of network strategy at EE.
With the kind of capabilities promised by 5G networks – such as extremely high capacity and low latency – "the B2B opportunity [for operators] is much bigger," he said. "We need to be flexible and agile enough t o take advantage of these opportunities that come along."
