Harpreet and I wrapped up our visit to MWC 2023 in Barcelona. We want to thank our customers and ecosystem partners for spending their valuable time with us, and the overall event was highly productive on all fronts.

One of the MWC 2023 event themes was “5G Acceleration & Monetization”. The theme resonated well with Shabodi, our ecosystem partners, and customers, as the conference helped participants focus beyond Wi-Fi replacement and simple connectivity.  The conference included sessions and keynotes ranging from 5G economy to advanced applications like Metaverse, Digital Twins, Computer vision, AR/VR, etc.

In this blog, we share Shabodi’s perspective on the Operator and Customer journey toward 5G adoption.  

• Offer intelligent network assets, which are beyond connectivity, i.e., the network is more than a dumb pipe.
• Enable new monetization strategies.
• Focus on delivering business outcomes to customers via solutions.
• Enhance an ecosystem of network-aware applications with its partners and not miss the application ecosystem boat as in 4G.

From an enterprise customer perspective who is deploying private 5G:

• Leverage advanced network as an intelligent asset, and not just a pipe (WiFi) replacement.
• Deploy “network-aware” applications that interact with the network in real time.
• Leverage the network programmability aspects of advanced networks such as 5G, Wi-Fi 6, etc.

Operators have sold network capacity to their customers based on the pipe size. Today’s advanced networks expose many service capabilities through network APIs, which network-aware applications can consume. The network-aware applications, at run time, dynamically request modifications to network QoS, or set a deterministic path flow. Network-aware applications that use these services make the network an intelligent asset, allowing operators to create new monetization strategies, such as creating industry-specific offerings. 

The days of building a single vendor enterprise network are gone. Especially starting with 5G, with its service-based architecture, operators, and customers can choose a combination of Radio/5G Core/Access vendors to build their networks. Hence, we believe 5G is an ecosystem play. The network access, radio, 5G core, and application vendors must come together to deliver the business outcome to customers. Siloed approaches leave enterprise customers hanging, dealing with the complexities of managing private telecom networks and lowering the ROI.

During her keynote at MWC 2023, Telstra CEO Vicki Brady said, “Connectivity is absolutely the bedrock. But I think the real impact is how we work to enable things on top of our networks.” MWC 2023 also had announcements from GSMA Open Gateway Initiative, the CAMARA project, and others about the need to open advanced network functionalities/services to developers to accelerate innovation.

We at Shabodi are proud to be an early advocate for such initiatives. We have been on the journey to make developers’ tasks easy to build network-aware applications on Shabodi’s AEP leveraging advanced network services since 2020.

Shabodi’s patented Application Enablement Platform (AEP) is delivering value to our customers and partners who are deploying advanced networks on three fronts:

• Make the advanced network an intelligent asset rather than a “dumb connectivity pipe.”
• Enable new monetization strategies by exposing advanced network services to developers with simple APIs​
• Simplify the real-time application’s interaction with the network to leverage “network services.” And enable the development of “network-aware” applications that run independently of underlying vendor networks.

If you are one of the 5G ecosystem players trying to figure out how to accelerate and monetize from the advanced networks (Advanced LTE, 5G, Wi-Fi 6, 6E, etc.), talk to the Shabodi team.