A 5G business modelling analysis for future 5G deployment, based on the technical features of the CHARISMA architecture. A sound business model will assist telecommunications operators in their decisions to invest in the creation of new infrastructure to support their customers’ needs and aspirations. In this context, CHARISMA proposes the evolution of the existing business models in both retail and wholesale offering, to create new 5G opportunities without a negative impact on existing network architecture. The business model analysis focuses on the three features in which CHARISMA was been specially designed to promote: Low Latency, Security and Open Access, which together will enable the emergence of new 5G business models and commercial opportunities.
The Open Access concept for infrastructure sharing allows infrastructure owners to dynamically share their resources (virtual and physical) in an isolated way, among several network operators to offer different services to their customers.
Low Latency improves both end-to-end connectivity performance as well caching download speed. Here, caching opens an entirely new space of 5G business opportunities for both operators and content and service providers.
Regarding Security, CHARISMA implements a holistic management platform, combining cloud, network slicing, SDN and NFV technologies while focusing on the delivering end-to-end security across all layers of the converged and virtualised open access network.
A quantitative assessment of the deployment of a 5G network such as CHARISMA, from a feasibility point of view was performed examining the following aspects:
- Highlights the results of the 5G market forecast
- Based on this forecast, makes estimates as to the expected revenues from 5G services
- Presents the dimensioning rules that were used to create the techno-economic model, and defines the association between user requirements and network deployment
- Shows the cost benefits that a 5G network based on the CHARISMA architecture can bring
- The sensitivity and risk analysis minimizes the uncertainty in the various factors
- Examines the cost savings in future Data Centres that will be used by telecom operatorsThe starting point for the economic analysis is that a telecom operator owns a 4G network in the beginning of the study period. This network has the necessary capacity to support most of the voice traffic through the study period. But the data traffic creates the challenge, and clearly dominates the capacity need, and drives the deployment of 5G networking.
The results reveal that there are viable business cases in areas with high user density and with operators experiencing high market share. Operators in highly competitive markets with a market share below 20% may experience problems in proposing a viable 5G business plan.
Another aspect that was examined was the cost savings that virtualisation and hardware acceleration can achieve in future Data Centres that operators will need to use in order to host that part of their IT equipment infrastructure running their virtualisation functions.
