5 Top Enterprise 5G Trends

5G wireless services and smartphones are being marketed relentlessly. The service offers more bandwidth and a broader feature set that will facilitate improved streaming and a host of other benefits. For companies in particular, enterprise 5G holds huge potential. 

Here are some of the top trends in the enterprise 5G market: 

See more: The Enterprise 5G Market

1. Rapid adoption 

The buzz has been growing around 5G for some time, as this new network standard promises faster speeds, greater bandwidth, and optimized mobility. 

The technology has quickly gone from concept to reality, as the demand for an enhanced digital experience, the increase in Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and workload transition to cloud have driven the need for 5G.

“While still a fairly new technology, adoption rates of 5G have increased significantly,” said Michael Wood, CMO, Versa Networks.

From a quarter of a billion subscribers currently, research by Omdia predicts three billion 5G subscribers by 2025. 

“5G networks are designed to support various use cases that will prove extremely important to organizations across the board, including video analytics, location services, IoT, augmented reality (AR), optimized local content distribution, and more,” Wood said. 

“It is well documented that 5G comes with promising advancements of greater speeds, higher bandwidth, improved connectivity, and lower latency, all while handling millions to billions of devices.” 

2. Edge computing boost  

For the enterprise, 5G is about speed and connectivity performance of remote workers, remote edge locations, and IoT. This will bring about a boost in productivity for businesses as well as profitability for telecom providers. 

But it also has implications for edge computing. While edge is all about putting more compute power and memory at the end in order to process data there, the value of edge servers escalates when there is also a fast connection of key edge data, alerts, and summaries to central hubs. 

“With more apps accessing and generating data at the edge, from remote workers, branch and edge locations as well as IoT, fast connectivity to core and cloud data centers is enabled with 5G,” said Greg Schulz, an analyst with StorageIO Group. 

“With the performance boost of 5G, more apps and devices can access and generate larger data sizes, such as video going from 1K to 4K to 8K and larger.” 

3. Bandwidth battles 

Recently, the FCC auctioned off to major 5G enterprise telecom providers the radio frequency range known as the C-band (3.7–3.98 GHz). This prompted a land grab for RF real estate, resulting in an $80.9 billion auctioned total. 

“This could be considered a new trend or indication that we are witnessing the early stages of a war for bandwidth,” said Douglas McKee, principal engineer and director of Vulnerability Research, Trellix. 

“With multiple large telecom providers setting up farther-reaching satellite clusters, 5G is going to be a primary contender in the attempt to bring high-speed internet to rural America (and likely the entire rural world), a historically under-serviced and financially attractive subset of the population.” 

This is a key advantage of 5G technology: the ability to service a broader market of customers across varying geographical circumstances, without the burden of implementing significant additional physical infrastructure.

See more: AT&T vs. Verizon: Enterprise Mobile Comparison

4. Business enablement

Dennis Hoffman, SVP and GM of Dell Technologies’ Telecom Systems Business, said 4G was all about the consumer, and 5G is all about business. 

Enterprises are not network operators, so telcos need to make private 5G, or cellular network operation, as easy as running Wi-Fi, with complete solutions that can be simply managed or rented. 

“Once we have those in place, the enterprise 5G applications that we’ve all been waiting for will come,” Hoffman said. 

“With 5G, we’re moving from people-centric to machine-centric connections, with everything from video cameras and factory equipment to thermostats and cars being connected to networks. Connections are exploding, and 5G use cases and apps will use a high number of connections that demand ultra-low latency, more security, and better economics for businesses.” 

5. Router and switch boom 

5G will give router and switch vendors a major boost. With so much performance potential available, enterprises are going to want to make sure that their routers and switches can match that performance. 

Hence, Dell’Oro Group predicts that the worldwide service provider router and switch market will generate $76 billion in cumulative revenue over the next five years. The adoption of new 400 Gbps routing technologies is expected to contribute significantly to the overall market growth.

“The deployments of 400 Gbps routers started last year, but that was just the start of a longer-term upgrade cycle that accelerates in 2022,” said Shin Umeda, VP, Dell’Oro Group. 

“400 Gbps-capable routers are addressing a wider range of applications, and the economic improvements offer a compelling investment storyline. Routers deployed in 5G mobile infrastructures are projected to drive consistent market growth over the next five years.” 

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