At the moment, mobile operators globally are optimistic about selling a variety of new connectivity services to enterprise customers. How much incremental revenue can be generated is the issue, as always.
Telcos will have competent competitors in all the new lines of business. Consider SD-WAN, among the new varieties of WAN services offered. Carrier services compete with do-it-yourself approaches by enterprises as well as other SD-WAN specialists. As often is the case with new services, specialists have dominated much of the early activity.
And many of the new other services also will compete with DIY and specialized network providers. Internet of things connectivity, for example, can be handled by enterprises themselves using several private networks; public low power wide area networks and other internet service providers.
Private network services of several types also are envisioned. In some cases operators might engineer, build or operate such facilities as a managed service. In other cases the public networks might work. But enterprises also will be able to use DIY.
Edge networking, as opposed to edge computing services, also are seen as a growth area. But there remains much uncertainty about the roles telcos actually will be able to sustain. At the moment, few are contemplating offering their own edge computing services.
Most telcos are partnering with cloud computing firms, bundling real estate and connectivity, but staying out of the retail edge computing “as a service.”
So multi-access edge computing could affect public and private networking choices, at least when enterprises look at use cases requiring high-performance, low-latency, high-availability and high device density performance.
Traditionally, private networks have been preferred when enterprises want high isolation from public networks, plus full control and lower cost, higher-performance in-building networking. Some 50 years ago, the use case was support for personal computers and peripherals connected to servers and cabled networks were the platform.
These days, Wi-Fi tends to dominate for general purpose computing requirements supporting devices of all types. Mobile phone support remains a mix of public network access for voice and messaging, while data access can use either Wi-Fi or the public network.
5G plus multi-access edge computing allows new permutations. Some 66 percent of mobile operators polled by GSMA are looking to use their core assets to support private enterprise networks. Some 59 percent also believe they can use their public networks to do so, operating with service level agreements.
In all likelihood, quite a mix will emerge.
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