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We recently had the pleasure of catching up with AT&T’s Jason Inskeep to discuss the opportunities the ongoing 5G rollout offers telcos ahead of our upcoming virtual event 5GLIVE.
What have been the biggest successes of the 5G rollout so far?
The biggest success for me has been the emergence of virtualization in the cellular world. It’s creating all new areas of opportunity to drive user experience to new heights.
What enterprise opportunities does the 5G rollout offer operators?
Operators are well positioned given their spectrum to find opportunities in the private space, using virtualization and licensed or shared spectrum models arising. These options were hard to consider in prior “Gs” due to cost barriers of entry.
What steps can operators take to overcome the deployment challenge?
Infrastructure will continue to find interesting ways to face the challenges of build time scenarios. Advances in technology can solve some of these deployment challenges and scale, and new business models are rapidly being created that shifts the onus of deployment, and can help make it faster and lower touch.
Where should investment be prioritised?
When dealing with edge technologies, there’s a need for new hybrid skillsets, for people that can speak the language for both the network and cloud applications. These resources are hard to find today and likely strongest within the operator community. While the technology will continue improving, the hybrid thinking mentality is going to become even more important. Investing in the technologies to take full advantage of the intersection of network and cloud applications is important, and training the people to do that is a big part of that investment.
How do you see the 5G ecosystem evolving over the next decade?
We are cultivating the ecosystem, and that takes time as we move to a 5G world at scale. That cultivation comes in multiple places, from devices and applications, to people. The fastest acceleration will occur as participants begin to see some uniformity in solution sets coupled with customer deployments. We’re still largely in an educational phase, but we’re turning the corner, and starting to see the benefits of 5G and edge computing together materialize.
To hear more from Jason, please join us at 5GLIVE on 18 May – tickets are free.
