There’s a school of thought around 5G that would suggest effective ROI and service monetization hinges on offering up new, differentiated applications to enterprise users. And to do that, operators need the full 5G feature set–enhanced mobile broadband, support for massive numbers of IoT devices and ultra reliable, low latency communications–served up automatically via a virtually partitioned network slice.
Right now most 5G networks use a non-standalone architecture linking an LTE core to new radios supporting 5G frequency bands. The next step is to replace that evolved packet core with a brand new cloud-native 5G core.
