provider and partner ecosystem. CSPs are walked through offer and network design, customer segmentation, upselling and cross-selling, and finally realize a B2B2X business model. The benefit of 5G in gaming is that it provides a fast, smooth, and responsive connection, with fine-tuned experiences tailored to the gamer’s geographic region, bandwidth, and quality of service. While every gamer wants a jitter-free experience, there is room for customization with 5G. With 5G, service providers can designate and use specific segments of the network to prevent the network from being overwhelmed to the point of lagging or crashing.

Service assurance

Operations centers are plagued by a multitude of different vendors and toolsets,  which makes managing the network devices and detecting anomalies a tedious and often manual task. In the 5G era, CSPs need a modern assurance solution that quickly correlates diverse data sets from different sources to provide a single complete view of the network. Using machine learning to provide actionable insights, CSPs can proactively identify issues as they occur.

Closed loop automation can enable CSPs to assume reliable quality of service across their network—wireless and wireline—while delivering “total experience” for both customers and their employees. Fiber networks can be differentiated services but must constantly be monitored for outages to prevent or reduce customer frustration. Using fiber-to-the-home as the CSP service, the lab experience uses a VR-enabled smart city scenario to emphasize the importance of fiber service assurance to help service providers deliver a reliable, positive customer experience and improve worker productivity.

Accelerating 5G innovation

Communications is critical to the future of innovation, and it will play a huge role in bringing the experiences of the lab to life. Labs demonstrate the importance of collaboration between industries. From construction to cloud gaming, these environments provide ideal, hands-on simulated spaces for CSPs to co-create B2B2X offers and new business models using emerging technologies from a specialized partner ecosystem.

Communications is the key driver enabling billions of people to work, socialize, shop, and play in the digitally connected world. With a lab-driven ecosystem mindset, the communications industry can and will help service providers and other technology companies explore and validate use cases that will accelerate new, 5G-enabled revenue opportunities.