LIVE FROM AMDOCS EXPERIENCE 2017, BERLIN: The real opportunities for 5G are in the enterprise market, with consumer applications well served by existing mobile broadband technologies, argued Scott Petty, Vodafone Group’s enterprise tech chief.

“What’s really exciting is that almost all of the use cases for 5G are enterprise focused. Giving gigabit speeds to consumers, the handset’s not fast enough to cope with that, there are no applications to use it, you just have faster mobile broadband than you’ve got,” Petty said.

“But we absolutely need to do that for enterprise use cases. Being able to create machine-to-machine applications, integrated supply chain, industrial applications,” he continued.

Access-agnostic core
Petty’s opinion is that “too much of the discussion around 5G is about the radio interface”, whereas the changes needed in the core network to support this are “really interesting”.

“To make 5G work, you need to build an access-agnostic core: we have to build a core network that copes with all the different access technologies that we use – fixed, fibre, DSL, all types of cellular, Wi-Fi –  where it’s fully integrated together. Enabling that to happen creates a totally different set of opportunities and experiences that we can offer to end users in the way we build applications,” the tech exec said.

In order to support planned launches toward the end of this decade, “over the next three years, we need to fully virtualise our infrastructure if we want to launch 5G,” Petty said.

But this, he acknowledged will mean a “tough time” for kit vendors used to the old ways of working. “We used to buy big boxes, lots of tin, millions of pounds, they would run the managed services around that, and that’s how we would run our network infrastructure,” he said.

Acknowledging that embracing cloud technologies “gives us an agility and speed that we simply wouldn’t be able to achieve with our normal infrastructure,” he continued: “If you want to play a role in the Vodafone architecture three years from now, you must be cloud native.”

Customer evolution
Continuing a key theme of the event, Petty described customer experience as “the only sustainable form of differentiation”.

“Any other differentiation – product features, capabilities, technology – can quite quickly be copied. And it is likely your competitors will go faster than you or a start-up will come on board and get there first,” he said.

But for an enterprise-focused business, the nature of relationships are changing rapidly, to shift to “creating an ecosystem working together”.

“We are successful in automotive, in IoT, not because we focused the Vodafone brand on the connected car – you wouldn’t even know if it was a car connected by Vodafone or by someone else. All our effort and work is on joint product development with BMW, with Daimler, with Ford, with General Motors, et cetera, to embed capabilities and functionality into their experience, with their end customer, leveraging our services behind that,” the executive said.

“That’s how you create opportunities for growth in the B2B space: by being flexible and agile in the development of those technologies,” Petty noted.