By: Rui Paiva

Recent GSMA figures found that communications service provider (CSPs) revenue outside of core services hovers around the 20 percent mark. To drive ROI on the $1 trillion in investments in 5G, CSPs are eyeing B2B revenue opportunities in the manufacturing, financial services, retail, healthcare, oil and gas, agriculture and mining sectors to target their big push into digital services. However, supporting applications in these verticals comes with risks that neither CSPs nor the enterprise customer can afford to let slip through the gaps.  

The transformation opportunity

5G presents an opportunity for CSPs to capture new revenue streams from industrial digitization. In cases such as network-as-a-service (NaaS), network exposure is becoming a reality through the transformation of core telecom network assets into digital assets. With 5G, the dynamic provisioning and scaling of network capacity and resources are available for the first time. The vision of managing the NaaS in the same way as a developer might manage cloud resources on Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud is happening through a combination of scalable infrastructure and the next generation of digital business support systems (BSS).

The 5G network evolution has presented an abundance of new business opportunities for CSPs in verticals such as industrial automation, security, healthcare, and automotive. To capture the opportunities and leverage their NaaS capabilities, CSPs are deploying automated BSS support systems capable of expanding non-telecom value chains, while supporting new business models through open interfaces.

Figure 1: New business opportunities
click to enlarge

The world’s digital connections are becoming broader and faster, providing a platform for every industry to boost productivity and innovation. To illustrate the range of possibilities, let’s look at the healthcare industry, where connectivity-enabled innovations can make it possible to monitor patients remotely, use AI-powered tools for more accurate diagnoses, and automate many tasks so that caregivers can spend more time with patients.

This technological transformation of the healthcare sector offers numerous opportunities for telecom operators to penetrate new value chains and initiate