Making 5G a winning experience for service providers

With a saturated consumer market and average revenue-per-user flat or declining, it’s clear that operators must target vertical markets to accelerate business growth.

However, when it comes to finding the right partner to deploy 5G-based services for these vertical markets – specifically the enterprise – we understand the challenges faced by service providers.

Part of the difficulty is that 5G isn’t just about download speeds. It’s about driving quality of experience and ultra-reliability. It’s also about improving application performance and supporting multiple use-cases, using techniques such as slicing.

It’s a complex task. But as a specialist end-to-end 5G partner, Cisco is ready to help you grow your business by monetising this opportunity.

With our expertise in cloud, virtualisation, networking, data centre, system integration and operations, we can help you deliver 5G solutions either from scratch or by upgrading existing architectures.

Our ultimate goal is to ensure a superb end-user experience for your customers. And we achieve this in three key ways: enterprise enablement, end-to-end orchestration and distributed edge computing.

Enterprise enablement simply means we provide end-to-end 5G network solutions, focusing on enterprise needs.

End-to-end orchestration means we automate key aspects of network provisioning and management. This reduces operational costs and delivers higher-quality services to end-users, faster.

Distributed edge computing enables flexible service placement. This means data can be processed closer to the end-user, reducing network latency and improving overall quality of experience.

Enterprise enablement: making 5G a reality for customers

Today’s enterprises want to offer their customers higher-quality, more connected, more personalised experiences, often including self-care options.

For their part, customers expect to stay in touch using whatever device and channel they choose, and wherever they may be. Increasingly, users also expect convenient, responsive access to their favourite apps and services.

But it’s not just about customer expectations. Enterprises also need their own workforces to be able to connect securely and reliably to applications, no matter where they are.

Cisco can support you in enabling all these experiences.

For example, with Cisco Unified Domain Center (UDC), you can upgrade enterprise networks and monetise 5G services such as mobile cloud platforms.

UDC can also help you drive revenue with, say, network as a service (NaaS), granting on-demand access to 5G-enabled end-customer devices.

Recently, we successfully partnered with major mobile network operator (MNO) Rakuten to build the world’s first end-to-end fully virtualised, cloud-native network. Our enterprise customer is delighted that its consumers now enjoy extremely low latency when accessing applications and rich content.

Now is the time to explore new win-win partnerships with your enterprise customers.

Orchestration: taking the stress off IT teams and reducing OpEx

Another way we can help you is by providing end-to-end virtualisation, automation and orchestration solutions. These help reduce deployment costs and, if you provide managed services, can also cut capital expenditure (CapEx) and operational expenditure (OpEx) for your enterprise customers.

We recently helped Telefónica International Wholesale Services review its operational and systems management processes. And as José Manuel De Arce, OSS Manager at Telefónica, said about Cisco’s automation solution:

Some aspects of network configuration used to take four hours, but now take only 20 minutes. Other new interfaces have gone from a 45-minute process to two minutes… Overall, we’ve had a 20% reduction in OpEx year-on-year in the last two years.

The advantages of orchestration can be illustrated by Cisco NSO 5. This solution takes the strain by offering automated, self-service, and on-demand provisioning of network functions. It can also manage devices, configuration audits and network policy compliance.

What’s more, you can deploy our powerful virtualisation and orchestration solutions rapidly. When Cisco partnered with India’s largest telecom service provider, Vodafone Idea Ltd, our automated cloud infrastructure was deployed in just 72 hours – a feat that used to take weeks or even months.

Distributed edge computing: improving the user-experience

At its heart, 5G is all about the quality of the end-user’s experience. So how can we help you improve it?

The answer: by bringing intelligence closer to the user, at the network’s edge.

To enable this, Cisco uses a smart technique called ‘control and user plane separation’ (CUPS). This allows data to be processed nearer to the end-user, rather than in a distant cloud. The result is greater proximity and lower latency – which in turn delivers a higher-quality experience to users.

Cisco Ultra Services Platform will support this technique. You can use it to transform enterprise customers’ centralised architecture into a distributed, scalable cloud. And if your customer’s an MNO, it can help them get new services to market faster and cut costs.

The Ultra Services Platform (using CUPS) helps enable a multi-access edge computing (MEC) architecture – a key way to add value for your enterprise customers. By reducing latency and improving the delivery of content and applications to end-users, you can also monetise 5G services.

Why not learn more about helping your enterprise customers to deliver high-quality 5G services?

Drive profitability with 5G >