Groundbreaking Efficiencies, New Revenue Models, and other 5G Standalone Upcoming Attractions

For casual observers of the telecom industry, it can seem like the 5G hype cycle has been going on for years. Subscribers may see a “5G” logo on their smartphone screens, and may even notice some improvements in data rates and reliability. However, the most transformative capabilities associated with 5G seem to always be discussed in future-focused terms. Inside the world’s leading telecom organizations, however, the future has officially arrived. And unless you’re personally involved with these efforts, you might not realize how much progress the industry has made. 

5G was always going to be a journey, with the biggest changes slated for the second phase, 5G Standalone (5G SA). This phased approach was necessary, given the enormous change that cloud-native 5G Core (5GC) networks bring to telecom infrastructures and operations. Moving from legacy telco environments to open multi-vendor architectures and agile software methodologies doesn’t happen overnight. 

Now though, leading operators have successfully deployed 5GC. And they’re already seeing concrete benefits, including 72% power savings, 20% latency improvements, and 60% faster deployment timelines. Even bigger gains will start accruing in the next 12-18 months as operators use 5GC capabilities to unleash a new generation of advanced, customized consumer and enterprise service offerings.

Where do leading service providers see the biggest opportunities in 5G SA? And how are they navigating the technical and operational changes necessary to capitalize on them? We recently published the eBook "Unleashing 5G: Guidance and Takeaways from Our 5G Standalone Engagements" to explore these questions. 

Scoping the Opportunity

To understand why service providers are investing so much time and effort into 5G SA, just peruse analyst forecasts. Bain & Company predicts the market for new 5G services will top $400 billion, thanks to the new use cases made possible by the higher throughput, lower latency, and cloud-native agility of 5GC. 

In the consumer market, the ability to assure high throughput and deterministic latencies under service-level agreements (SLAs) will enable a variety of new use cases. Early opportunities include fixed wireless access (FWA) for broadband services, enhanced video streaming, and mobile cloud gaming, which Bain & Company estimates will be a $12 billion market by 2026.

Figure 1. Latency Vs Throughput Graph to Assess Performance Requirements of Various 5G Consumer Services

The enterprise space holds even bigger opportunities, where 5GC enables new use cases for manufacturing, finance, transport, energy, and other industries. Applications like robotic automation, AI-assisted computer vision, and real-time fraud detection bring stringent latency and performance requirements—and significant value for service providers that can meet them. Bain & Company forecasts that manufacturing alone will generate $113 billion in 5G-related revenues by 2026, and the energy and utilities sector could add $86 billion by 2030.

Figure 2. Latency Vs Throughput Graph to Assess Performance Requirements of Various 5G Enterprise Services

Navigating Challenges 

Given these forecasts, it’s easy to see why service providers continue moving forward with 5G SA, despite the implementation challenges. And those challenges can be significant. 5GC’s disaggregated, service-based architecture enables service providers to develop high-value new offerings and quickly bring them to market. But it also introduces a far more complex and dynamic cloud-native software environment. Among the changes necessary to capitalize on 5G SA, service providers must navigate: 

• Disaggregated networks: Legacy core networks were monolithic, pre-integrated solutions. 5GC introduces thousands of multi-vendor cloud-native microservices across the network, all of which must work together seamlessly. This requires operators to test and manage the network as a statistical entity for the first time. And since the most transformative new services (and revenues) depend on meeting stringent SLAs, there is little margin for error. 
• Continuous software releases: Traditional network elements might receive updates two or three times a year. With 5G SA, multi-vendor virtualized and cloud-native network function (CNF) updates could come in monthly, weekly, or even daily. 
• New security threats: The openness and multi-vendor nature of 5G SA also magnifies security risks, as there are now many more moving parts to protect. 
• Imperfect cloud infrastructure: Unlike traditional deterministic telco networks, cloud-native architectures are inherently chaotic. Indeed, they’re designed with an expectation that individual components will fail all the time, but that the architecture will use fast recovery techniques to keep applications running. This only happens, however, when the application—in this case, a CNF—is truly cloud-native. If it’s not, then common impairments, like a workload not getting the memory it needs or the network timing out, can quickly degrade or bring down services. 

In a 2023 Omdia survey, 55% of service providers said that integrating with complex, multi-cloud hybrid networking environments was their biggest challenge. Operators also noted the difficulty of assuring multi-vendor NF interoperability and dealing with vendor components that don’t comply with 5G specifications.

Embracing Continuous Testing 

Underlying all these concerns, 5G SA demands a totally new approach to network testing and validation. Indeed, the large number of network elements, vendors, and software updates make 5GC testing roughly 150x more complex than 3G. Additionally, 5GC does not come pre-integrated from a vendor. It’s now the operator’s job (or a system integrator partner’s) to assemble all the pieces and validate that everything works as it should. 

The good news is that 5G leaders have made huge strides in these efforts, creating a template for others to follow. Based on engagements with service providers in multiple markets, here are five key steps in 5G SA implementation success:

• Validate standards compliance: 5G SA testing starts with the basics—ensuring that all nodes and interfaces comply with 3GPP specifications. This process begins with lab testing all devices and systems, both individually and in combination with adjacent devices and systems, to ensure that features work seamlessly across elements.
• Validate 5G capacity and performance: Service providers must test the capacity and performance of all 5G elements under diverse (emulated) conditions to observe how they can handle both expected and unexpected traffic loads. Here again, testing should include individual nodes and adjacent systems, as well as end-to-end testing across core, RAN, transport, and user devices.
• Validate security efficacy:  To protect the larger 5G SA threat surface, service providers must validate that all components respond appropriately to malicious or unauthorized behavior. 3GPP has released 120 test cases as part of its 5G Security Assurance Specifications (SCAS) to guide this testing.
• Validate 5G CNF resiliency: In dynamic 5G SA architectures, even minor errors can degrade performance—and violate SLAs. Operators must therefore conduct exhaustive testing to understand how different failure modes affect services.
• Test continuously across the lifecycle: Finally, since 5G SA environments constantly change, testing cannot be a one-and-done task. Service providers need to continually re-validate compliance, performance, and security for all elements. Ideally, this testing should be incorporated into continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) frameworks and automatically invoked after every network change.

These new requirements are significant, and service providers should not underestimate them. But neither should they underestimate the market opportunity once they can tap into new 5G SA capabilities. Best of all, we no longer have to debate when we’ll finally start seeing “real” 5G networks and services. The 5G SA revolution has begun.