It’s fair to say that deployments of standalone 5G (5G SA) technology have not been coming thick and fast, with studies such as the latest Ericsson Mobility Report in June estimating that only around 50 5G SA networks have been launched globally to date.
According to the recent update of the Telco Cloud Deployment Tracker from STL Partners for Q2 2024, because so many planned deployments have failed to materialize, “the window of opportunity for rolling out 5G SA may be closing before it has even got going.”
David Martin, senior analyst and telco cloud lead at STL Partners, told Fierce that although “lots of promises” were made about 5G SA deployments around 2021 and 2022, many of them have not yet been realized.
According to STL Partners, this is owing to a number of different factors. As explained by Martin, operators have potentially been deferring 5G SA deployments because of uncertainties about standalone itself combined with a lack of confidence about deploying 5G SA on the public cloud.
“There’s a kind of vicious circle going on, which is that standalone is, in a sense, a network function that is ideally suited for deployment on the public cloud, but operators have understandably been very unsure about all of the broader implications of doing that in terms of regulations, performance, security, resilience, and so on,” Martin said.
Martin noted that greater confidence about 5G SA use cases might lead more operators to deploy it on the public cloud, for instance. However, other than the potential of network slicing, “very few use cases have been developed and launched commercially,” he said.
In addition, operators are already struggling to make a return from existing investments in non-standalone 5G (5G NSA).
STL also highlighted changes at the public cloud providers themselves. For example, it noted that there are doubts about Microsoft’s commitment to telco cloud following the restructuring of its operator business, resulting in the discontinuation of mobile core products including the former Affirmed and Metaswitch product sets.
“I think that’s causing some more hesitancies now, because AWS is ideally placed to capitalize on that and establish a leadership and dominance in terms of public cloud supporting network functions, but operators obviously don’t want to give AWS that dominance, and they might have to wait until other players have scaled up and demonstrated the performance and resilience of their cloud infrastructure,” Martin said.
He noted that Google Cloud and Oracle are two providers that could “step into the breach” here.
Looking ahead to 5G Advanced, 6G
Another reason for the hesitancy over 5G SA is that some operators may now be looking toward newer technologies such as 5G Advanced and 6G.
Martin said 5G Advanced (also called 5.5G) use cases generally do not need standalone, although he noted that RedCap technology is one exception as it relies on the network slicing and massive machine type communications (or eMTC) capabilities of 5G SA. “So if RedCap is more broadly adopted, that could act as a catalyst,” he said.
Editor’s Note: After this article published, Fierce heard from Sue Rudd, managing director of BBand Communications, who said 5G Advanced always requires 5G SA as a pre-requisite and “RedCap is NOT just ‘one exception.’”
“All standard 3GPP 5G Advanced features leverage 5G service-based architecture,” she said.
Meanwhile, Martin observed that many operators are now at the end of their 5G investment cycle, “and they’ll be starting to look towards 6G.”
While noting Tier 1 operators that have rolled out 5G SA at scale “will now be looking to get a return on those investments” by developing network slicing use cases, Martin said that the “long tail of operators that are just not there yet are probably now going to wait and see, and maybe just explore 5.5G and indefinitely defer standalone.”
Virtual approaches
Meanwhile, the STL report suggests that the prospects for vRAN and open RAN, where vRAN is defined as Open RAN compliant but delivered generally by a single vendor, look more promising than those of 5G SA.
Here, Martin makes it clear that operators do not have to synchronize 5G SA and vRAN/open RAN investments, and that one does not necessarily predetermine the other.
At the same time, he said that operators have been unsure about which of those investments to prioritize, questioning whether or not they need 5G SA to “really leverage in full the benefits of open RAN, particularly in the programmability of the RAN around network slicing and spectrum management. So I think that has been another complicating factor as well.”
The STL report notes that significant open/vRAN projects from major operators including AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Orange and STC are set to go live commercially to some extent in 2024. The vRAN model “has the potential to establish itself as the successful model for 5G open RAN,” Martin added.
“A lot of factors still have to come together, in terms of performance, cost, energy efficiency, and the ability to demonstrate that it’s deployed in an open way. But I think the potential is very much there for vRAN,” he said.
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